The Consumer Electronics Show is where a lot of companies roll out their visions of the future, and the future they’re banking on is zero emission.
A solid segment of CES is now devoted to electric vehicles and EV tech, so we had to go have a look. Our team walking the show floor didn’t have any trouble finding shiny new EV toys on display, and not just from the players you’d normally expect.
Here are a few things that really caught our attention:
At a CES where the curtain lifted on a lot of new EVs—your keynote started to stick out a bit if you didn’t show off a new concept car—the LG Alphable still made us stop and look… and not just because LG’s making cars now?
It’s a sleek-looking beast, to be sure, but it also represents a fully autonomous vision where the driver and passenger seats actually rotate 180 degrees to create a nice conversation space with the people in back. The steering wheel retracts completely into the center column when not in use (it’s not physically connected to the front dash at all). And because LG has to be LG, it’s also got a pair of curved widescreen monitors that almost replace the front windshield
So, LG isn’t actually making cars now… the Alphable is purely a concept with no plans to ever go into production. But it’s still an interesting peek into an autonomous-driving future, and a few of our other favorites are coming to the real world soon.
As an easy example, EV is also finding its way into industrial work. We happened on HD Hyundai (no relation to the Korean carmaker) and their fleet of autonomous industrial EV construction vehicles. Their Future Xite excavator looks straight out of a sci-fi flick, which is probably why we like it so much.
And Bobcat’s also throwing in, too, with the world’s first all-electric compact loaders, the T7X and S7X. It’s not just a simple engine swap, either... the EV power architecture lets drivers power all the loaders’ lift/tilt/drive functions without lag or tradeoffs, a step up from traditional loaders.
But because nobody likes parallel parking—nobody—we took a special interest in Hyundai’s (the actual Korean carmaker) newly unveiled Mobion EV. Which, sure, has some nice battery-centric tech under the hood, but the headline feature is its lidar-assisted e-Corner System. All four wheels individually rotate to change the car’s direction when turning or changing lanes.
Oh, but that’s not all. It does donuts. It goes diagonally. And yep, that lateral movement looks like an absolute necessity for anyone trying to park downtown. Any downtown. But especially New York or L.A.
No word yet on when Hyundai plans to ship Mobion, but e-Cornering seems like the biggest new must-have since four-wheel drive.
And that’s just a fraction of what we saw out in Las Vegas this last week. While a lot of it is still blue sky or not even practical for commercial production, it’s pretty clear that everyone's thinking in the same direction. The entire tech industry is planning for a future where fossil fuels go the way of the dinosaur.
