After many years of talking to mums and dads ...
Cool, they built this. But apparently, no plans to produce it.
You know how sometimes if you have a little baby, and she won’t go down, and the only way to calm her and get her to stop crying and fall asleep is to put her in her car seat and take her for a ride?
Then, while you’re out riding around the block, you ask yourself:
“Why doesn’t anyone invent a device that simulates riding in a car without actually having to drive around your neighborhood like a crazy person in the middle of the night?”
Well, look at that! Ford Motor Company has done it! (Bad news! They apparently did this eight years ago and have never had any plans to produce it.)
My grandparents are gone, but my parents still tell the story of how they were babysitting me one weekend (like, a really long time ago), and had to drive me around the block to get me to fall asleep.
It worked, except that every time they’d pull into the driveway and carry me into the house, I’d wake up again.
Decades later, we went through something similar when my daughter was that age.
So I totally think there would be a lot of demand for a Ford prototype called the Max Motor Dreams. The story is universal, apparently, given that Ford’s promo video for the prototype isn’t even in English.
Its Spanish division came up with the product, apparently.
Andrew Krok, writing for CNET’s Road Show, described how it worked:
It brings the car to the cot. A phone app records a nighttime drive, and once everybody’s back home, it tries to reproduce the experience of the drive using the cot.
There’s a small speaker underneath the cot that’s meant to provide the muffled sound of an engine. Mechanicals underneath the cot produce gentle movement, simulating a car trip. The whole thing is capped off with a set of LED lights that provide the same warm glow that street lights do. It’s all in the hopes of getting the little one to sleep faster.
“After many years of talking to mums and dads, we know that parents of newborns are often desperate for just one good night’s sleep,” said Alejandro López Bravo, the cot’s designer. “But while a quick drive in the family car can work wonders in getting baby off to sleep, the poor old parents still have to be awake and alert at the wheel.”
It all sounds pretty cool.
Honestly, when my daughter was four months old and wasn’t sleeping, we would have paid just about anything for this. There’s nothing you want more as a new parent than for your new baby to get some sleep (so you can too!).
So with all that, is there any chance of the Max Motor Dreams ever coming to a store or a Ford dealership near you?
Well, to paraphrase a favorite New Yorker cartoon: How about never? Is never good for you?
As Ford put it: “The Max Motor Dreams is a one-off pilot. But following numerous enquiries, the company is considering putting the unique cot into full scale production.”
But, given that eight years have now gone by, I’m going to assume that was just a tease. Manufacturers are always coming up with prototypes of products that will never see the marketplace; perhaps car companies are the best-known for the practice.
There’s also the issue, sometimes, of companies developing patentable technology that would upend their business models, specifically to stop any other company from creating and selling it.
Not nice. Although sometimes I wish that was what had happened with AI and crypto. Maybe even smartphones, although how would most of you be reading this in that case?
Anyway, I’ve got to go. Same daughter; different stage of life, and like most of my waking hours now, she needs me to drive her somewhere.
7 other things worth knowing today
A New Jersey congresswoman is being charged with assault after a skirmish with federal officers outside an immigration detention center. Interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba wrote on social media that U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver is facing a charge of assaulting, impeding or interfering with law enforcement. The prosecution of McIver is a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress for allegations other than fraud or corruption. (AP)
Lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online. (Wired)
Meanwhile, Musk said on Tuesday that he plans to spend "a lot less" on political donations moving forward after funneling millions into Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign: "I think I've done enough." (Axios)
Spain, grappling with a housing affordability crisis that has spurred government action against short-term rental companies, has ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 holiday listings on its platform for having violated rules like not including license numbers or specifying whether the owner was an individual or a company. “Enough already with protecting those who make a business out of the right to housing,” Consumer Minister Pablo Bustinduy told reporters on Monday. (AP)
Google is going to let Chrome’s password manager automatically change your password when it detects one that is weak, the company announced at its Google I/O conference. "If we tell you your password is weak, it’s really annoying to actually have to change your password,” said Parisa Tabriz, VP and GM of Chrome. "And we know that if something is annoying, people are not going to actually do it." (The Verge)
Nebraska became the first state approved to ban soda purchases with food stamps. Anti-hunger advocates criticize the move as punitive; the governor says taxpayers shouldn't subsidize 'junk.' (Fox News)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Ayla Verschueren on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
Thankfully, my first born slept like the dead. The every two hour routine was over in just a few weeks so was always a champion sleeper. His brother though was anything but that. He had the habit of waking up around 1 or 2 AM and refusing to drop back off. Since I didn’t want him to wake his brother who was in school or his dad who was expected to be at work, he had to make do with a mom in a rocking chair singing a lullaby. Never heard of the term “slippery sleeper” though.
One of our two was a slippery sleeper. Before we scored a battery operated, vibrating hammock (chair?), I'd put her infant seat on the running dryer. But we were broke, and running the dryer was costly, so instead I *recorded* the sound of it and put the tape player in the crib with her. Worked like a charm! Apparently, for her, it was the noise more than the motion.
By the way, she's still a slippery sleeper, and at nearly 30 years old, and hates white noise now.