So CES week is in full swing and my Twitter feed is basically wall-to-wall press releases about TVs that are somehow thinner than the ones from last year that were already thinner than they needed to be. I'm not going to do the whole "here's every gadget from the show floor" post, because if you've read literally any other tech blog this week you've already gotten forty versions of that. Instead I want to talk about the one moment from CES week that actually made me laugh out loud at my desk: the Faraday Future unveiling.
If you missed it, Faraday Future is the well-funded, LeEco-backed electric car startup that's been teasing a "Tesla killer" for a couple years now, mostly through concept cars and a lot of very confident language. On the night before CES officially opened, they finally rolled out their production car, the FF91, in front of a packed room in Vegas. Big numbers got thrown around: 0-60 in 2.39 seconds, a 130 kWh battery, more than 700 horsepower depending on which measurement you believe. Reservations opened at $5,000 a pop.
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, they tried to demo the self-parking feature live on stage and the car just... didn't. It rolled forward a few feet and stopped. The exec on stage kept talking like nothing was wrong, said something about how the car was "aware" of a stray car nearby that wasn't supposed to be there, and eventually they cut away to a pre-recorded video instead. The internet did what the internet does, and by the next morning "FF91 fails to park itself" was its own little news cycle.
I don't say this to be mean about it, exactly. Live demos fail. I've sat through enough conference talks where someone's laptop refused to connect to the projector to have some sympathy for anyone standing on a stage with a live product and a room full of reporters. But there's something almost perfect about a company that's spent two years talking about disrupting the auto industry getting humbled by a parking sensor in front of every tech journalist in the country. It's the kind of thing that sticks with people way longer than the spec sheet does, and I'd bet more people remember "the car that couldn't park itself" than remember the actual horsepower number.
It also feels like a pretty good encapsulation of where a lot of CES has been heading the last few years. Every booth this week has some version of "smart" bolted onto a normal object, and the confidence of the pitch rarely matches the reliability of the actual hardware. My own house has a "smart" thermostat that decides, roughly once a month, that it no longer recognizes my WiFi network and needs to be walked through setup again like it's never seen my router before in its life. I don't need my thermostat to be smart. I need it to hold 68 degrees and mind its business.
None of this is me saying Faraday Future is doomed, or that self-parking cars are a scam, because plenty of companies have shipped genuinely good versions of that feature already. Tesla's had a working summon feature for a while now. It's more that watching a heavily hyped, heavily funded reveal stumble on the most basic possible task is a nice reminder that stage demos are theater first and engineering second, and it's worth remembering that the next time some exec walks out holding a phone or a car key and promises the future is already here.
Anyway, CES runs through Sunday, so I'm sure there's more of this coming. If something actually interesting shows up in the flood I'll write about it properly instead of just pointing and laughing. But honestly, pointing and laughing was the highlight of my week so far, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to sound more serious than I am about a trade show in Las Vegas.