- April Fool’s Day is the bane of our existence, but Hyundai had an AI fever dream that largely flew under the radar.
- The automaker used AI to help create images and marketing material for autonomous dog pods.
- The vehicles were designed to take your dogs on a ‘walk.’
Automakers are rushing to add artificial intelligence into their vehicles, but Hyundai went in a very different direction a few weeks ago. Instead of installing ChatGPT, they decided to have a dog-focused AI fever dream.
Known as Dogbility, the April Fool’s Day campaign gained about as much traction as a self-immolating Ioniq 5. However, it’s still worth taking a look at as it’s pretty out there.
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As the name suggests, the campaign was focused on dog mobility as some owners are too tired to walk their pets after a long day at work. To address this, Hyundai used artificial intelligence to whip up some autonomous dog pods that turned a “walk into a smooth drive.”
The release, which was written and edited with the assistance of AI, said the pint-sized autonomous vehicles were designed to transport your pets “to and from the park, their friend’s house, and even around the city without human assistance.” It doubled down on this by saying there would be Dogbility Pup, Dogbility Classic, and Dogbility Senior models, which would all come in three sizes ranging from “compact to sedan.”
Despite being autonomous, the vehicles were said to have a “rotary steering wheel designed to ensure reliable steering by paws.” Other highlights included a rubber ball horn, a canine-compatible color head-up display, and nose print recognition to start the engine. AI also dreamed up a dryer mode for rainy days and an aromatherapy system with cheese, jerky, and peanut butter scents.
While you get the gist, some of the effort was complete nonsense as the release said “To ensure that Dogbility provides our faithful partners with the very best in mobility solutions, diverse teams came together to collaborate on this project, including Autonomous Driving R&D Teams 1 and 2, Ergonomics R&D Team, Advanced Mobile Solutions Team, and Advanced Robotics Team 1 and 3 – just to name a few.” That makes adding glue to pizza sound like a good idea.
