BMW has unveiled a slew of concept vehicles to mark its 100th birthday, but its fourth and last example might be the most daring. Its new Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept motorcycle would supposedly be so smart that you wouldn’t need a helmet, or even a padded suit. The key would be a self-balancing system that keeps the bike upright whether or not you’re moving — newcomers wouldn’t have to worry about toppling over, and veterans could push limits further than usual.
Also, notice the absence of the usual space for an instrument cluster? That’s because you wouldn’t need it. Most information would instead display through a smart visor that shows data as it becomes relevant. All told, you’d spend more time enjoying open air driving and less time worrying about your speed or range (BMW will only say that this is a "zero-emission" bike, but it’d likely be electric).
Like the other Vision Next 100 concepts, you’re not going to see this exact motorcycle on the road any time soon. However, it might not just be due to the grand technological ambitions. While a self-balancing system could prevent you from crashing the bike yourself, it wouldn’t protect you in many serious collisions. What if you’re forcefully ejected from your vehicle? Regulators would likely require some kind of helmet, even if it’s not as cumbersome as what you wear today.
It’s been a full century since BMW got into the transportation business, and it’s using its year-long celebration of itself to prove it’s got another 100 left in the tank—or battery pack, or cold fusion reactor, or whatever. After showing wild concepts imagining the future for its Rolls Royce, BMW, and Mini brands, it debuted the Motorrad Vision Next100 yesterday in Los Angeles.
In a future where cars drive themselves, BMW sees two-wheeled transport as a bastion of emotion. “Riding a motorcycle is the ultimate sensual and analog experience in a more and more digital world,†says Edgar Heinrich, BMW Motorrad’s head of design. “The wind in your hair, the centrifugal forces, the indescribable feeling in pit of your stomach.†His retro-futuristic concept is a swoop of black carbon fiber. It will never wipe out, but it still demands a human rider. Because without someone to enthrall, it’s useless.
The driver’s physical interaction with the bike will change.
The BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100 is built from a single “flexframe,†a carbon fiber shell that extends from the front to the rear wheel. The designers call its shape a dynamic sweep, and it does away with old fashioned things like bearings and joints. Turning the handlebars moves the whole frame to change direction, and it can relax and stiffen to change steering effort. “It will allow us to introduce new steering movements that are very far removed from today’s geometries,†says Heinrich.
Credit: BMW
The BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100 is built from a single "flexframe," a carbon fiber shell that extends from the front to the rear wheel. The designers call its shape a dynamic sweep, and it does away with old fashioned things like bearings and joints. Turning the handlebars moves the whole frame to change direction, and it can relax and stiffen to change steering effort. "It will allow us to introduce new steering movements that are very far removed from today’s geometries," says Heinrich.
New powertrain in an old design.
The classic BMW boxer engine shape remains, although this bike will have a zero emissions drivetrain, which currently comes with zero further details like horsepower, top speed, or acceleration. And actually, that boxer shape is subject to change. Compact when the bike is stationary, it will extend outwards to enhance aerodynamics and help protect the rider from the elements as she piles on speed.
Credit: BMW
The classic BMW boxer engine shape remains, although this bike will have a zero emissions drivetrain, which currently comes with zero further details like horsepower, top speed, or acceleration. And actually, that boxer shape is subject to change. Compact when the bike is stationary, it will extend outwards to enhance aerodynamics and help protect the rider from the elements as she piles on speed.
A call back to the 20th century.
BMW Motorrad is keeping some other classic design elements. The black triangular shape of the frame is a reference to the R32, BMW’s first ever motorcycle in 1923 (it got its start building airplane engines). The white stripe is a throwback too. The company’s logo remains, but glows blue at night.
Credit: BMW
BMW Motorrad is keeping some other classic design elements. The black triangular shape of the frame is a reference to the R32, BMW’s first ever motorcycle in 1923 (it got its start building airplane engines). The white stripe is a throwback too. The company’s logo remains, but glows blue at night.
Look Mutter, nein helmut!
“The vision vehicle will act with foresight and is able to protect the rider at any time,†says Heinrich. Driver assistance features will continually monitor the environment, the route, the speed, the angle of lean, and myriad other factors, intervening to ensure the rider can’t crash. Gyroscopes keep the bike upright when stationary, so you can’t even fall when stopped. BMW’s roughly an eternity from actually telling riders to ditch traditional safety gear, but things like traction control, hill start assist, and antilock brakes are already making it harder to kill yourself on two wheels.
Credit: BMW
"The vision vehicle will act with foresight and is able to protect the rider at any time," says Heinrich. Driver assistance features will continually monitor the environment, the route, the speed, the angle of lean, and myriad other factors, intervening to ensure the rider can’t crash. Gyroscopes keep the bike upright when stationary, so you can’t even fall when stopped. BMW’s roughly an eternity from actually telling riders to ditch traditional safety gear, but things like traction control, hill start assist, and antilock brakes are already making it harder to kill yourself on two wheels.
Goggles are a must.
Instead of a traditional instrument cluster, the bike communicates key data like speed and navigation through a head-up display. That’s why you need the goggles. Most of the time, they display minimal information, just a triangle and two horizontal lines showing banking angle and ideal cornering lines. There’s no reason to interrupt your emotional journey.
Credit: BMW
Instead of a traditional instrument cluster, the bike communicates key data like speed and navigation through a head-up display. That’s why you need the goggles. Most of the time, they display minimal information, just a triangle and two horizontal lines showing banking angle and ideal cornering lines. There’s no reason to interrupt your emotional journey.
Look down for more.
If you do need more info, just glance down to call up a menu of options, then point a finger to make your selection. Glance down further still, and a map pops into view, glowing in blue, positioned where the riders of yore once clipped paper maps onto their tank bags.
Credit: BMW
If you do need more info, just glance down to call up a menu of options, then point a finger to make your selection. Glance down further still, and a map pops into view, glowing in blue, positioned where the riders of yore once clipped paper maps onto their tank bags.
Safe doesn’t mean boring.
Unlike other conceptual motorcycles that ferry the rider around with zero input, here the human remains in charge. BMW says driver assistance will enhance the experience for novices, keeping them safe and building their confidence. Experienced riders can push their limits and pick up new skills. “It will allow all riders to get an experience independent of their skills, and lift the ride to a whole new level,†says Heinrich.
Credit: BMW
Unlike other conceptual motorcycles that ferry the rider around with zero input, here the human remains in charge. BMW says driver assistance will enhance the experience for novices, keeping them safe and building their confidence. Experienced riders can push their limits and pick up new skills. "It will allow all riders to get an experience independent of their skills, and lift the ride to a whole new level," says Heinrich.
Certainly not when it comes to what you wear.
Killing the need for heavy leather and kevlar doesn’t mean you can’t dress like a boss. BMW has also designed a lightweight, flexible suit that cools or heats the rider, while enhancing comfort and posture with banded and strengthened areas. If it senses danger, it can vibrate against its wearer’s skin as an alert. The idea is to blend the best parts of the digital and analog worlds. Sure, you could get most of the experience at home, with VR goggles on, sitting in front of a fan—but only if you don’t have anywhere to go.
Credit: BMW
Killing the need for heavy leather and kevlar doesn’t mean you can’t dress like a boss. BMW has also designed a lightweight, flexible suit that cools or heats the rider, while enhancing comfort and posture with banded and strengthened areas. If it senses danger, it can vibrate against its wearer’s skin as an alert. The idea is to blend the best parts of the digital and analog worlds. Sure, you could get most of the experience at home, with VR goggles on, sitting in front of a fan—but only if you don’t have anywhere to go.
Amazon has already infiltrated the grocery business with its Fresh delivery program, and the company now has its sights set on physical stores. A report from The Wall Street Journal claims Amazon is planning to open grocery stores where people can buy items like produce, milk, meat, and more perishable items. Some of those locations are also rumored to have curbside pickup programs where employees will deliver orders directly to consumers’ cars.
According to the report, these stores will primarily sell perishable items, letting customers pick their own produce—or at least allowing employees to pick things fresh for orders. There are also plans to let customers order other grocery items, like peanut butter and cereal, from a mobile app or devices in the store, for same-day delivery. The project, known internally as Project Como, will first be available to current Amazon Fresh members. Amazon Fresh used to cost $299 per year, but the company recently lowered the price to a $15 per month fee that Prime members can pay in addition to their annual $99 membership fee if they want to take advantage of the grocery delivery program.
If and when Project Como gets off the ground, Amazon would be directly competing with numerous grocery chains across the country, not to mention brick-and-mortar behemoth Walmart, which has expanded its curbside pickup efforts recently. Walmart plans to bring that service to a quarter of its stores nationwide by the end of 2017. Amazon would also be competing with startups that specialize in grocery delivery like FreshDirect, Instacart, and Delivery.com.
This news comes on the heels of Amazon reportedly trying to amp up its shipping and delivery network, to potentially compete with FedEx and UPS. The two services will be undoubtably linked: Amazon already has to deliver Fresh orders, and it would need an even greater delivery network if it hopes to deliver groceries from brick-and-mortar stores to local customers.
But as crucial as groceries are to every household in the country, it’s a costly industry for providers. According to The Wall Street Journal report, Americans spend about $107 per week on groceries. That amounts of about $5,500 per year, which is much more than roughly $2,500 Amazon Prime members spend per year using the service. This could mean big bucks for Amazon if it can compete with established grocers and get Prime members to convert, but it would take a solid network of stores and a reliable delivery system to do so. Unlike regular packages, groceries have to be delivered in a narrow window of time, customers typically have to be home to accept the delivery, and the issue of keeping food cold is crucial.
Amazon is close to opening its first drive-in grocery store in Seattle. But like many of Amazon’s recent big projects, it could take years before we see Amazon grocery stores around the country.
Florance Eloi works the omelet station at Hilton’s Conrad Miami. By the time Eloi gave birth, a new company policy guaranteed her 10 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
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Florance Eloi works the omelet station at Hilton’s Conrad Miami. By the time Eloi gave birth, a new company policy guaranteed her 10 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
Jennifer Ludden/NPR
In the two-story breakfast room on the 25th floor of Hilton’s Conrad Miami, Florance Eloi mans the omelet stand in front of a panoramic view of the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. The bubbly Miami native laughs that guests routinely tell her, “Stop making the omelets, you need to turn around and look!”
When Eloi, 31, found out she was pregnant late last year, she wondered how she would balance her job with a baby. She was lucky to have a few weeks of paid vacation, since about half of lower-wage workers do not.
Still, it would be hard to come back to work so soon. And if she stayed home longer without a paycheck, Eloi says she and her husband would have to dip into savings.
Then Eloi’s manager told her some good news: By the time Eloi gave birth, a new policy would guarantee her 10 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
“It was right on time!” she says.
Recent years have seen a boom in paid parental leave in parts of corporate America. Silicon Valley, especially, is in a benefits war to diversify and attract female workers, with companies announcing new leave policies or expanding existing ones.
By contrast, this year Hilton Hotels and Resorts began offering paid parental leave to all of its 40,000 U.S. “team members,” from top managers to those who clean guest rooms or serve them breakfast, like Eloi.
“There was absolutely no peer pressure in this regard,” says Matt Schuyler, the chief human resources officer for Hilton Worldwide. “In our industry we are first and now quite out in front with respect to this.”
He says the new policy was driven by employee demand. Millennials — adults younger than 35 — are nearly half of Hilton’s workforce and will soon be three-quarters. Research, including Hilton’s own surveys, shows that both millennial women and men care a lot about paid leave.
Schuyler says the paid parental leave policy was not about a “cost-benefit analysis” as much as “being able to attract and retain the workforce of today and the workforce of tomorrow.”
But while advocates give Hilton props, they say the policy is a little stuck in the past. Men get only two weeks of leave, far less than women. And the leave can only be used to care for a new child. (Adoptive parents get two weeks.)
Schuyler says he doesn’t rule out changes at some point. Meanwhile, he says Hilton has also introduced a 10-day advance scheduling policy, and — starting next year — will reimburse employees for adoption expenses, up to $10,000 per child.
Schuyler says another push for Hilton was that it operates globally, and saw the disparity in policies. The company provides paid parental leave in most countries it does business in, so “it wasn’t an unnatural thing to administer,” he says. With the growing push for paid leave in the U.S., the company decided “let’s not wait for the mandate, let’s do the right thing.”
One possible hitch: Hilton has not budgeted extra money for this. If there were, say, a baby-boom in housekeeping at a particular hotel, Schuyler says the manager there would have to cut back elsewhere to pay for temp workers. That’s probably far more feasible for a multi-national company than it would be for a small business.
In Eloi’s case, her boss, chef Virgile Brandel, says filling in for her was easy. He cross-trained the rest of the staff that work the morning shift.
“They all know the [omelet] station and they can rotate every day,” he says.
Eloi says she intended to work until her due date last March.
“But of course,” she says, “I didn’t know, first-time mom, how tired and fatigued I’d be.”
She says it became hard to stand all day, so she stopped working one week before the birth. She also wrapped in vacation time, taking a total of 13 weeks off, and says it was a lifesaver.
Her husband is a chef at a local restaurant and has no paternity leave. She is grateful for the time to bond with her son, Caleb, getting “to know him, what makes him cry, what makes him calm.”
Florance Eloi preps a dish at Hilton’s Conrad Miami. Eloi received 10 weeks paid leave when she had her baby. The Labor Department says only 13 percent of workers in the private sector — and even fewer among hourly workers — have paid parental leave.
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Florance Eloi preps a dish at Hilton’s Conrad Miami. Eloi received 10 weeks paid leave when she had her baby. The Labor Department says only 13 percent of workers in the private sector — and even fewer among hourly workers — have paid parental leave.
Donald Trump calls for six weeks for women, paid through unemployment insurance. Hillary Clinton wants 12 weeks, for both men and women, funded by a tax increase.
“The conversation has really shifted,” says Vicki Shabo, vice president at the National Partnership for Women and Families. She has seen it change over the past half dozen years, as several states and a string of cities have passed their own paid parental or family leave policies.
“I think the private sector’s anticipating that policy changes may be coming,” she says, “and trying to get ahead of that curve.”
