The first thing you notice about Google's new self-driving car is how friendly it looks: Its face has ovoid eyes and baby-blue retinas, a shiny button nose, and a straight-line mouth–like a put-upon Pixar character who rallies to save the film's hero. Awwwww!

This design strategy of cuddly familiarity was a concession to one glaring fact about driverless cars: To a public raised on taking the wheel, the very concept of ceding control is terrifying. So the industrial design itself had to be cuddly, approachable, and, in a word, nice. But by the same token, this isn't enough of an aim for the product. People have to want it. Friendliness is just part of an equation that must include variables for the real experience of living with such a new piece of technology.

There is a lot of precedent for friendliness in design: From the Chumby to canes for the elderly. But perhaps the most successful example is the first iMac: the initial mainstream triumph of Apple's current design honcho, Jony Ive. That computer was meant to be dead-simple to use from the very first touch. It even had a handle on the top, to make it easy to pull out of the box and onto your desk. That was a design detail that would maybe be used a half dozen times in the computer's life–but it made an all-important first impression, telegraphing ease of use.

The first iMac. Image: Apple

The iMac's design was meant to teach you to expect almost no friction in set-up, no hurdles to learning how to use such a potentially daunting device. If you're having trouble remembering how daunting computers used to be, compare the iMac with the IBM PCs of the time. Designed by Richard Sapper, they looked like the obelisk from 2001, but meaner.

The Google Car does well by that standard: You almost want to hug the thing and protect it from this cruel, cruel world. But it's also only a blunt solution to some deeper problems with which a driverless car must wrestle. Is this kind of cuteness appropriate for such a break-through vehicle? After all, this isn't just one out of a line of similar but more daunting competitors: It is the very first of its kind, and as such, it has to solve problems unseen by anyone before.

Autonomy or Control? Both, Please

The great design thinker Don Norman told WIRED in 2012 that the experience of driverless cars should be rooted in our intuitions about how the objects in our lives already behave. He argued that a driverless car's experience should begin with the four-legged vehicle that preceded it: the horse.

Norman thought that horses offered an almost magical blend of control and autonomy: You could urge it in a certain direction, or you could encourage it to go faster, or you could loose the reins and let the horse take over. But the path taken was a blend of the animal's discretion and human guidance. Thanks to its own instincts, you couldn't urge a horse over a cliff. "Even when you’re in control," he said, "the horse is still doing the low-level guidance, stepping safely to avoid holes and obstacles.”

>A driverless car's experience should begin with the four-legged vehicle that preceded it: the horse.

What should the experience of the car be like on the inside? What should it demand of the drivers? How much control of the driving experience should it cede? For now, these questions get only the barest answers. Watch the video, and you'll see people squealing with delight at the magical experience of being driven while in the driver's seat. They don't need a steering wheel, so there isn't one. Its very absence prepares them for a different kind of experience. But for now, that's it for the experience: The car is merely a box on wheels.

Delighting people during a demo is great for a PR video, but the true test of design isn't how it's received by a hand-picked audience. The real test is in the reactions of regular people, stressed during the day, bored or hungry, grouchy during a long commute. And those same stresses prime other reactions: When someone is feeling low, how do they react when the car does something weird? When it lurches in traffic or when the occupant simply gets impatient and frustrated with traffic?

And, if you want to get really concrete, how will you tell the car where to go? Will it be voice-powered? Will you have a say in route or speed or driving style? What controls will dictate that, and will they be usable in real time? An engineer would probably just make the whole thing computer controlled, and make the experience akin to driving around inside a mobile GPS device. But real people will probably loathe giving over so many decisions to a computer.

Armed with Don Norman's insight about horses, you could argue that some kind of control is actually key to the driverless experience. To be fair, this car is only a rough prototype. A consumer product is still years off. But Google doesn't seem to be far along in thinking about the driving experience. Recently, during a call with reporters, project director Chris Urmson punted when asked what the in-car controls are like: He just didn't know. As to what people want from the car itself, he said, "We won't understand that until people actually get to try it out." Sort of!

Getting the mixture of control and autonomy right won't be a simple matter of throwing in a few dials. The control scheme will have to communicate what a driver can and can't do. It will have to lend the car a kind of personality tuned to subtle issues of what we, as consumers, expect from a car.

Too Cute by Half

The cartoonish looks of the car already represent a bet about consumer expectations: The friendliness of the design seems geared to making the car non-threatening, above all. That's a worthy goal. As Alex Davies rightly points out, the video of the car predominantly shows old people, the blind, and children. These seem to be the demographics that Google has identified as needing a driverless vehicle most: people, who, for various reasons, aren't able to drive themselves–or at least would rather not do it. But to assume that making the car friendly to them means making something that's straight-up cute is more than a little condescending: It's the equivalent of coloring every product for women pink.

With such a blunt, obvious design strategy, the Google driverless car may miss a larger opportunity: to show a new generation what driving could become once you let go of the assumption that people should be driving. What would you do with the time in your car if you weren't driving? How would you occupy the minutes? How could a car help you with that? These are the reasons why many of us find driverless cars so exciting, and these are the very issues being worked out in confidential projects at the major design firms like Smart and IDEO.

>With such a blunt design strategy, the Google driverless car may miss a larger opportunity.

Google is doing hard work here on the technology, but it could be doing the harder work of experience design. As a first of its kind, this is a car that has to succeed in our imaginations–and in the hairy chaos of the real world. It has to know when to calm us down, and when to defer to our whims. It has to anticipate what we'll want to know, while not telling us about the mammoth complexity involved in getting us from the grocery store to the dry cleaner across the street. (So far, if Google is thinking through any of these issues, they're certainly not sharing any sort of viewpoint on them, which isn't a great sign.)

Once you size up these many challenges, a car that looks fit for kids falls short. After all, Google is not just contending with the problem of introducing a new technology, but with changing car culture. Cars, in America, are inextricably tied to the idea that your vehicle is part of who you are. And for the many many millions of people weened on that reality, a car that looks like an anthropomorphized golf cart won't do. After all, the real lesson of a design classic like the iMac isn't that its design was merely friendly, but rather that it was friendly and cool.

Marc Newson's Ford 021C concept: Friendly but cool. Image: Ford

It was a product filled with one overriding insights into consumer psychology: When an object is truly well designed, it communicates something about what we need (an easier-to-use computer) and about how we'd like to be seen (cool, but not so cool as to be intimidating). Why make people look silly while they're riding inside, when they just want to look good?

Satisfying competing and sometimes conflicting demands is where the best designers excel. Take, for example, Marc Newson's concept car for Ford, the 021C. Created in 1999, it stands up today: Both friendly and cool, in way that's remains fresh.

Google admits that it still has a long way to go, but the real design thinking has to start now if the car is to be credible. It can't rest upon the assumptions and achievements of products before it. A driverless car has to be filled with cues in the knobs and interfaces that teach the user even while its enticing and acclimating the audience of potential users. For evidence of how poorly that can go in areas of personal style and cultural mores, look no further than the backlash against Google Glass.

With the design of this car, Google isn't just realizing its own dreams, but paving the way for countless innovations that follow. It's incumbent upon them to do this right, because driverless cars could benefit us all so much. Without some deep and subtle solutions to these issues, the Google car can't hope to become anything other than a toy.