Remember mood rings – the 1970s jewellery gimmick which changed colour according to your emotions (or maybe just your temperature). Later, there was mood lipstick, mood nail varnish, hypercolour t-shirts. Oh the 1990s nostalia.
Now luxury UK car brand Bentley has taken the concept one step further, coming up with an app that allows you to design your car according to your emotions. You watch an interactive film, the app reads your facial cues, and bingo, a car to suit you.
Actually, it’s a lot less exciting than it sounds. No James Bond-style built-for-purpose cars are created here. Instead, starting with a relatively ugly car, the Bentayga (or maybe that’s just my subjective emotional response), the Inspirator emotion-reading app can only customise your car from Bentley’s normal range of exterior paint colours, wheels, leather hides and wood veneers. OK, so apparently there are “billions of possible combinations”, but still, this is more gimmick than revolution.