Car Maker Renault Acquires . . . a Magazine Company?
We’ve spent our fair share of time looking into the future of autonomous vehicles — the technology behind them, the players that are making it happen and the implications this new technology could have on everything from the car manufacturers to parking systems to rental car companies.
One comment, in particular, stands out from our special podcast with Brad Stertz of Audi USA when he mentioned that one of the regular comments he hears from those that have ridden in their autonomous test vehicles is that after the first few minutes, it’s well, kind of boring. The full podcast can be played on the bottom of this post.
All of this brings us to the news out of France:
Renault SA is buying a stake in a media company as Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn plans to stretch the carmaker’s suite of products to entertaining passengers in future driverless vehicles.The French automaker will purchase a 40 percent stake in Challenges Group, that publisher of the namesake weekly economic magazine as well as four monthly science and history journals, it said in a statement Wednesday. Renault and French media group will work on new content specially designed for autonomous vehicles.
Read Full Article Here: Renault Strikes Magazine Deal to Entertain Robo-Car Riders | Media – AdAge
For most, this move by Renault probably seems crazy. But for us and our thematic lens, it makes more than a fair bit of sense. If a company is going to spend enormous sums of money and effort to remove the task of driving from drivers, well then don’t you want to own a piece of the businesses that will thrive will all this new-found time on drivers’ hands? We could argue that a magazine company might not be the place to start — we’d probably look more at streaming video content as it’s such a key part of our Connected Society investment theme right now. But we applaud Renault’s foresight and a focus on what we call the Content is King investment theme.
