I have been called many things in my time, but a benchmark for human happiness is not one of them.
Still, that was the job on offer when Fiat invited me to climb into the new electric Grande Panda and have my face watched by a laptop. Not in the slightly troubling way that some modern cars now seem to monitor whether you’re paying attention, but in the name of science. Or, at the very least, in the name of finding out whether a small, brightly coloured Fiat could cheer up a middle-aged car journalist.
Fiat calls the idea smiles per hour, or SPH. The thinking is simple: car makers have spent years telling us about 0-62mph times, top speeds, power outputs and other pub-ammo numbers, but most people do not buy a car because it can shave a few tenths off a sprint time. Fiat reckons there is another number worth talking about: how often a car makes you smile.
The system has been developed with Dr Duncan Williams, a cognitive scientist who specialises in how people react to experiences, usually through sound, but increasingly through cars, too. Before my drive, he explained what was about to happen as we sat in the Grande Panda with a webcam, a laptop and – on my part – a reassuringly large pinch of salt.
“I’m a cognitive scientist and I’m interested in what happens in our brains and our bodies when we experience things,” said Williams. “Usually my work’s been about sound, but over the years, because cars make sound, it’s gradually ended up being, well, what happens in different types of engines, especially EVs, of course.
“We’re using some facial recognition software with the simplest possible hardware setup. We’ve got a webcam like you might use for your home office going into an unbranded computer and then there’s some proprietary software that I put together for this using a machine learning model.”
The software itself uses Google AI’s MediaPipe facial geometry framework, which maps hundreds of points across the face. In this case, it is looking for tiny movements around the mouth linked to smiling. The clever bit is trying to work out whether someone is genuinely smiling, rather than simply bouncing about over Britain’s less-than-silky roads.
“This facial mesh is a topograph of the map of your face in 3D,” said Williams. “The software to do this mapping is not mine; this was released in the public domain by Google about five years ago. So, it’s a machine learning model that adapts to various kinds of faces and different shapes – we’re all different. But what it does is map about 500 different points on the face and it’s tracking that in real time from you. We’re looking at the part of your mouth, which is the bit that [moves] when you have a micro smile.”
Before setting off, the system was calibrated to my neutral face, which, I should point out, has had many years of practice. The software then watched for changes during the drive and converted those into a Smiles Per Hour score. Each drive lasted around 15 minutes, with the results scaled up to an hourly rate.
Williams was keen to stress that the real world makes this harder than a laboratory. Heads move, cars shake, people talk, laugh, wince and, occasionally, try to work out how to turn the stereo off.
“It’s a bit more complicated taking this out of the laboratory into a car,” he said. “First of all, we’ve got all of the chaos of driving where your head moves around and you might lean forward and lean back and things like that. What we use to give this a grounding in reality is the distance between your eyes – we use that as a kind of north star to see whether this is just you leaning in towards the camera so your mouth looks wider or has he had a twitch there and so on.”
That’s all very clever, but what about the scourge of the modern motorists: potholes? They can bring about all sorts of facial expressions?
“Yes, we have a new problem in the car, which is that it bounces around and British roads are British roads,” said Williams. “It could be a wince – we’ve had to think about all those things.
“We kind of smooth it out a bit and we take away the rough edges using a moving average technique, so we’re more interested in the overall sense of what’s going on than the moment-by-moment sharp spikes.”
Fiat says the Grande Panda recorded an average of 258.1 Smiles Per Hour in its study. The electric version scored 259.5, while the hybrid version didn’t make drivers quite so happy but still scored a very respectable 257.
When it came to the battle of the sexes, the Grande Panda made female participants happier than their male counterparts. The girls registered 337.5 SPH versus 171.4 SPH for the guys.
The car’s colour didn’t make any discernible difference, which may be something of a surprise for anyone who’s seen a Grande Panda in one of its brighter shades – it is not a car that seems designed to blend into the supermarket car park, appearing as if sketched by someone with a ruler, a sense of humour and fond memories of the original Panda’s 1980s design.
Fiat is also using the study to make a wider point about how we talk about cars. It says previous research suggests Brits smile around 14 times a day on average, which works out at roughly 0.9 smiles per hour. Against that, even the lowest Grande Panda score of 46.1 smiles per hour in the study looks fairly upbeat.
And then there was me.
My result was 21.6 Smiles Per Hour. That is 24 times higher than the UK average, so we can safely say the new electric Grande Panda made me happier than standing in a queue or reading an energy bill.
However, it was also a long way below the average for the rest of the participants, who managed 268.8 Smiles Per Hour. The range for everyone else ran from 46.1 to 583.2, meaning I was not just below average; I was the official low-water mark.
Williams wasn’t surprised and had suspected that might be the case before we even set off. “I suppose you’ll be less easily impressed in a new car than the other participants,” he graciously said, before I suggested that what often cheers me up most in a car is seeing the reaction of other people. If someone smiles at a fun-looking car, that can be as enjoyable as driving the car itself.
So is this a new measurement we’ll all be adopting? Fiat UK managing director Kris Cholmondeley said: “We always try and give customers as much information as possible about our cars, but we don’t believe that speed alone is what makes driving enjoyable. Driving a Fiat has never been about chasing numbers; it’s about how you feel behind the wheel. Smiles Per Hour gives us a meaningful new way to talk about that feeling.”
Can Smiles Per Hour replace range, charging speed, performance and price in the serious business of choosing an electric car? Those things still really matter when people are spending their own money.
But as a light-hearted way of asking whether a car is actually enjoyable, it is hard not to warm to it – even from the bottom of the scoreboard. The Grande Panda may not have turned me into the happiest driver in Britain, but it did prove one thing: I enjoyed being behind the wheel and even a miserable bloke in a small electric Fiat can manage a few smiles.
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