Amusing Ourselves to Death

Have you ever seen a promotional story in the news and felt a sense of unease that you can’t quite put your finger on?

While we typically have that feeling about greenwashing stories, something very different caught our eye last year when Mercedes launched its new ‘Hyperscreen’, a 56-inch display that will feature in some of its new cars.

There is a growing trend of automotive manufacturers incorporating futuristic screens which span the whole length of the dash, especially in their EV models. And yet this comes during a supposed push for increased sustainability and against the backdrop of a global chip shortage.

Is this progress or a gimmick? And, importantly, does this make the car less sustainable?

These are the questions that we’ll be exploring in today’s article.

Let Me Infotain You

The title of this article is taken from Neil Postman’s 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, which proposes that our addiction to amusement and entertainment is more oppressive than the state control found in George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eight-Four”.

This might seem like a strange tangent to take this article on, but it raises the important question – do we really need a 56-inch display in our cars?

The growing use of screens in cars, especially large ones like this, is increasing the amount of energy that we need on a daily basis, at a time when we are on the brink of both an energy and a climate crisis.

Consumption, Consumption, Consumption

Like many of their competitors, Mercedes’ ‘Hyperscreen’ utilises touch-sensitive glass so that it can be used without the need for physical buttons. In their case, the two layers of glass will also be supplemented by aluminium silicate to make it scratch-resistant.

This puts such devices in direct competition for resources with the renewable energy industry, who require the same materials to produce essential products such as solar cells, which will be crucial to solving the climate crisis.

To find out more, we spoke to Dr Jenny Baker who is an Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Swansea University: “With increasing awareness of the climate crisis many organisations are making plans to reduce the green-house gas emissions of their manufacturing and their products.  However a move to a renewable energy (and associated energy storage) requires an increase in metal usage compared with burning fossil fuels.”

“Scientists and engineers are working to reduce the materials impacts of renewable energy (eg removing cobalt from lithium ion batteries) and to make products more recyclable, however to have a fighting chance this must also be done within an environment of mindful consumption, where we choose carefully the applications for which we use the earths limited resources.”

As more nations commit to a zero-emissions future, there will be an increased strain on the availability of key resources to produce solar panels – with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure reporting in 2018 that the demand for some key materials could grow by more than a dozen times by 2050.

As such we should be aware that promoting cars on gimmicky technology also leaves them open to changing fashions and tastes, where consumers are told to upgrade their whole car to keep up to date with the latest innovations – in the same way that millions of smartphones are thrown away each year to keep pace with current trends.

And, much like phone screens, will poor durability and cracked screens mean that there will be a need for a constant cycle of replacements?

Once again, we must remember that the average car has a lifespan of just nine years from its first sale through to the time it is typically scrapped.

Is that long enough to justify the energy and material consumption required to produce them, when they will just end up on the scrapheap in under a decade – and when we have even less time than that to avert the climate crisis­?

The climate crisis clock is ticking.

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