[Coeur]

This seems to be part of a type of brand marketing where a brand claims it has invented something, but the only thing that ever exists of significant economic value is the attention raised by the promo video / article. Not the thing/service.

Examples:

- Samsung safety truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNGfse9ZK8

- Citroën motion sickness glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco63dlq_WE

- Amazon Prime Air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AVVTBmtDdo

- IBM Smart Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEMVdzXiCY (implies they created lots of ad posters, but they only made 3 posters for this video)

- Lexus Hoverboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFf7Meqkim8

I wonder if there is a term for this. "Vaporware marketing"?

[allenu]

I love these types of videos because they create this fiction of how design happens, where people sit around a table with drawings and or come up with beautiful mock-ups (the motion sickness glasses is a good example). Often, a lot of design decisions are super obvious and don't require a lot of sweat and collaboration to come up with, but in videos they're made to appear very difficult as it presents better. And other things are super messy, but you're not going to show that as it's hard to communicate.

[npunt]

Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well.

However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if not, but this issue is my particular hill to die on, it's 100% the single biggest gap in understanding that I see between those that regularly engage in original creative work vs those who do not.

People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!" But that's all hindsight, like saying "I could have bought bitcoin in 2010!" It's not even wrong, it's answering an entirely different question of capability, not probability.

The question is would you have come up with that, were you tasked with the problem and put in the same context? I'd estimate for most great-but-simple inventions, it's not many people who could plausibly say that, because so much of what we bring to bear on problems comes from our own histories and unique perspectives & influences, not to mention talents and predilections.

This distinction between could vs would is core to understanding creative output, especially the ideas that are the simplest to use or understand. The delta between understanding vs coming up with there is often vast; simple things are often the hardest things of all to conceive.

[allenu]

I'm in total agreement regarding some designs that seem obvious later but really took several iterations to reach. There's definitely hindsight bias when a design works so well that it feels obvious.

My point was more that I've seen product demos where parts of a product were presented as having been pored over painstakingly when in reality it was decided on day one that it would work that way. However, because it's a prominent feature, it feels cheap to show the reality, so I get that for demos there's a bit of storytelling that goes into it so the audience feels like it was a revelation.

For UX that I've designed myself, I have definitely found that a lot of the great ones required a ton of iteration and almost "courage" to go against my initial bright ideas and look at things from a different perspective. It often required taking away elements that I thought were absolutely required at first but later realized made more sense to go without. If someone were to look at the final result, they would definitely think "Well, obviously that's how it should work." But more likely they'd have go through a similar journey that I did to come up with it if they hadn't seen the solution.

In a way it's like finding out how a magic trick worked. It's only obvious in retrospect.

[npunt]

A magic trick is a good way to put it, especially for laypeople. I see your point and agree, it's always hard to know going in which ideas you're going to one-shot (and be slightly embarrassed about having one-shotted) and which only come from the courage to kill early darlings and continue down the road of uncertainty.

We're fortunate if we even get that latter opportunity, given most want to take the easy path and cargo cult someone else's idea. The thing I've noticed is that the hard path to continue the exploration often gives the cargo cult answer but with a nuance or two for one's context that make all the difference. I'm curious if you have experienced that as well.

[downthefoxhole]

> People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!"

That's the problem with user interface design as a career. It takes a lot of effort to create simple to understand and simple to use design, and then when users see them, they see it is simple and think it must have been easy to do. Most programmers tend to make programs for themselves and other technical people and has horrible design. The classic corollary example I like is when Apple came up with MP3 players and marketed as 'It can hold 1000 songs' instead of the current marketing at the time 'It has has 1GB of storage'. Technical folks would not be satisfied with 1000 songs becuase they would be doing back of the math calculations on how low of a bitrate you have to get, in order to fit 1k songs in a given space... while the other 95% of the population doesn't want to do any math, and if even if they did, they don't know.. or at least back then, didn't know what a GB was, or how many megabytes an MP3 consumed....

[npunt]

Indeed. UI/UX is actually a pretty shitty career unless you are good enough to regularly pull rabbits out of your hat. At the low end it's just drawing boxes and using someone else's tricks in a system that isn't even the codebase. At the mid end you get the codebase and might occasionally solve interesting problems, but you'll rarely get the recognition and influence equal to its value. Only at the high end do you start getting the rewards, but they tend not to last very long because people quickly adapt to seeing your solutions as obvious.

It's why designers, and creatives more generally, try to cultivate a mystique around themselves, even(/especially?) when they're only mid. The truth is creative work is a lot more playful than it is mysterious, but play is not valued, only mystery is. This leaves many creatives stuck in tension between their internal and external identities.

[npilk]

To be fair, I think Prime Air is real, but I've only heard about it when they've had drone crashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGdOpR-Mv-E

AFAIK it's only available in a few very specific places (seemingly for good reason).

[keane]

Their dealers already sell a bike bell, eg. in NZ at https://store.skoda.co.nz/products/bicycle-bell

and in IE at https://www.skoda-accessories.ie/ie/en/p/bicycle-bell/SK-000...

There is a Czech shop listing for the old bell at https://eshop.skoda-auto.cz/en_CZ/bicycle-bell/p/000050305C

Presumably the new bell will eventually appear among the other items at https://eshop.skoda-auto.cz/en_CZ/cycling-accessories/c/cycl... and in their bike order catalog PDF at https://www.skoda-auto.com/services/bikes-cycling

[Chilko]

Thanks for the NZ link - just bought that bell as that's a pretty reasonable price & includes free shipping :)

[abyssin]

Any innovation benefiting cyclists and coming from the auto industry is a way to move attention away from the fact that cars are the most dangerous thing on the road.

[lucumo]

Well, obviously. What else did you expect to be the most dangerous thing on roads? Sharks?

[cucumber3732842]

Statistically the answer is probably cop cars or motorcycles.

[xxs]

trucks? Or they still considered cars?

[charcircuit]

A tank.

[sporkland]

Or a Ford f150: https://www.jalopnik.com/youre-not-wrong-american-trucks-and...

[hofo]

I thought the use case would be for cyclists to alert runners with NC headphones that the cyclist is about to pass them

[mkesper]

There's at least a paper to download: https://cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-DuoBell-Resea...

[port11]

Jokes on them for the wasted resources. If they don’t intend to market, I hope someone will. Where I live cyclists use ANC headphones all the time, and I’m tired of the near misses.

Student cyclists that ignore the rules and wear ANC (or even large headphones) should be fined more often.

[jrg]

You seem to have misunderstood the invention. It’s not about cyclists wearing headphones.

[port11]

I haven’t. It breaches through ANC, pedestrian or otherwise, which would help with cyclists as well.

[CorrectHorseBat]

Bicycle bells can be used to warn other cyclists

[port11]

Not if they wear thick or noise-cancelling headphones.

[MoonWalk]

I think you nailed it. You can't even buy this bike bell, as far as I can see.

[keane]

It may get added to https://eshop.skoda-auto.cz/en_CZ/cycling-accessories/c/cycl...

[rorychatt]

Why is significant economic value the metric for success?

Skoda publishes the research and design openly (no patent, no product for sale), to solve a real problem (increase in bike-related accidents from noise cancelling headphones), to ensure that the safety outcome can be spread as quickly and easily as possible.

We should be celebrating companies that open source material findings related to safety, not lambasting them for not exploiting it for maximum value.

it feels disingenuous to lump this in with most of the other items you listed.

[mynameisvlad]

I'm not sure IBM Smart Ads were ever an actual product/invention, and Prime Air is a live service (albeit geographically limited): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Prime_Air

[botzi2001]

I think the Citroen ones are just a bit different, as in, there are actually products available to buy apparently: https://www.amazon.com/seetroen/s?k=seetroen

[mikepurvis]

The original Boosted Boards Kickstarter video has a lot of this energy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWV8irg64oM

[notatoad]

i think the slightly less cynical interpretation of this is that it's not marketing, it's an employee morale booster.

some skoda employees got to have fun with this. just like the amazon engineers got to have fun building drones for a while. letting the engineers out to play every now and then is cheaper than just giving raises. the shiny marketing videos gives the people who worked on the project something to show off to their friends.

i can't imagine the actual marketing value here really does anything for the company.

[ale42]

I first thought it was a 1st April joke. But the date is wrong.

[jameshart]

Innovationwashing, maybe?