富士通テン ECLIPSE（イクリプス） | Father's Drive | 2017
An Experiment: Can You Recognize Your Father's Driving, Even Blindfolded? / FUJITSU TEN ECLIPSE "Father's Drive"
I stumbled on this while looking into something else, and ended up watching the whole thing without meaning to. It's an experiment where blindfolded kids try to pick out their father's driving from among three different drivers. The way the question is set up is great — it sits right on that line of "hmm, could they actually do it?"
The problem
This is a movie built around a wish from ECLIPSE, Fujitsu Ten's brand of car navigation systems and dash cams: that everyone who rides in a car should feel a sense of security. The team figured that driving takes up a fair chunk of the time parents and kids spend together, and started wondering whether some invisible bond or love between parent and child might show up even during an ordinary car ride.
The insight
To make visible the sense of security kids feel during a drive specifically because it's their parent behind the wheel, they ran an experiment. In a survey done beforehand, more than half the kids — 54 of them — said they weren't confident they could identify their father's driving. That question of "could they really tell?" is what pulls viewers into watching.
The idea
The experiment involved 100 parent-and-child pairs, with the children ranging from 6 to 76 years old. Each child wore a blindfold and rode in the passenger seat through three drives: one driven by their father, one by a taxi driver, and one by a beginner driver. Each driver took them on a roughly two-minute drive along a specially designed course meant to bring out differences in acceleration, stopping, and steering. After getting out, the child had to guess which of the three drives had been their father's. All three drivers used deodorant spray before getting in, and talking or making any noise in the car was forbidden, so the kids couldn't rely on smell or voice. When asked afterward, the kids said they'd picked up on things like how the accelerator was pressed, how the brakes were used, how the steering wheel was handled, and how the car was parked.
What happened
In the end, 70 out of the 100 pairs guessed correctly — proving Fujitsu Ten's hypothesis that a parent's warmth comes through in their driving. The movie was released on March 21, 2017.
Afterthought
The letter near the end is just devastating. I think this is a case of the concept winning on its own. Though honestly, watching it again, I had to remind myself what it was even an ad for — it's for a car navigation system. That part didn't come through at all, but as an approach it's really interesting. Turning an appeal for a piece of hardware into something emotional is a common trick, but the question here is framed so well, right on that "could they really tell?" line. It made me want to think back on memories with my own father too.
