How Art Is Driving Waymo’s Feel-Good Branding

By Jori Finkel, The New York Times

Excerpt from The New York Times

A tech giant has teamed up with local artists, adding vibrant colors and quirky characters in an effort to humanize its futuristic ride.

… Of course, corporate-artist collaborations are not new. And there’s a rich history of artists painting and wrapping cars, especially in Los Angeles — an early nexus for hot-rod antics, lowrider culture and a wide variety of street art. Even today, to drive through the streets of L.A. is to spot, along with building walls punched up by Kenny Scharf, various cars that he painted called “karbombz.”

But Waymos are robots as much as they are cars. Far from just a blank canvas for self-expression, the self-driving car is the ultimate product and symbol of Silicon Valley’s immense financial resources and techno-utopian ambitions. The white electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs that make up Waymo’s current fleet are outfitted with a complex system of A.I.-assisted software and sensors, including radar, lidar and cameras. Originally a team within Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, Waymo was spun off into a separate company in 2016 under Alphabet, the holding company. It has since raised about $11 billion in venture capital, which helps make the current prices of rides competitive with Ubers in some markets…

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who runs the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, compared the art wrapping to the big pink mustache that Lyft cars used to wear on their grilles. “It signals this sort of quirky humanity,” she said. “It helps disrupt the narrative that these gigantic soulless companies are just scaling a standardized product,” and “bulldozing over everything.”

Read the full article on The New York Times.