Rinspeed has found a way to stand out in the driverless car market that is supposedly the wave of the future for the automobile industry.
Google, Tesla, and even Apple are making names (or rumors) for themselves in their development of the first autonomous vehicles while even traditional kingpins like Toyota and Honda aim to keep their big leads by doing the same as their high-tech competitors. Who, then, is Rinspeed?
Headed by a man who presents himself as both a visionary and a magician, Frank M. Rinderknecht is taking his Swiss company over to Las Vegas to show off Rinspeed's Etos hybrid concept car to the rest of the world at CES 2016.
"The disruptive innovations in future automotive engineering will come from the digital realm. That is why all major manufacturers and suppliers are now present at the CES Consumer Electronic Show," the forward-thinking executive claims.
While most prototype self-driving cars teased to the public so far look to be designed for comfort and safety, Rinspeed's Etos is built for performance and looks fierce too as a self-driving sports car.
Rinspeed, in fact, is quite used to being on the edge of vehicle design and purpose. The company's XchangE model is equipped with a 32-inch 4K monitor, reclining seats, an espresso machine and a watch winder. It also drives itself.
The sQuba concept, on the other hand, functions exactly as it sounds because it's a fully submersible car that also drives itself.
The Etos, by Rinspeed's standards, keeps things pretty, well, standard. The car does have a steering wheel for those still fearful of a speeding self-driving car. In auto-mode, however, the steering wheel retracts into the dashboard while two curved widescreens inch closer to the passengers. The computers then take over from there.
The car, however, still pushes vehicle design and function just a little bit more. The design of the car allows for a small helipad over where the trunk would be to make way for a drone.
The purpose of the drone, according to Rinspeed, could be to "fetch a bouquet of flowers the driver ordered online and even deliver it directly to the lucky recipient." More realistically, the drone could be used to tail the Etos as it speeds through streets all on its own and stream the footage live to a friend (or to the smart driver who decided not to get into a speeding self-driving car).
