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Americans have long loved Made in Americaor at least have professed to. But the data tells a trickier story. In 2022, 60% of U.S. consumers said they would be more likely to purchase a product they knew was American made. Today, according to a recently released study from the Conference Board, that number is closer to 50%. Thats a drop of around 18%. One reason may be that whatever Made in America signals about quality or about economic patriotism, it also very likely signals a higher price. And after years of inflation worries, that might be a more salient issue to many. As price concerns intensify, many U.S. consumers appear to associate made in labels with elevated prices due to generally higher domestic production costs as well as tariffs on foreign-made goods, the reports author, Denise Dahlhoff, director of marketing and communications research at the Conference Board, said in a statement. Increasingly, consumers prioritize value and affordability over emotional affinity for certain countries, including their own. Despite the decrease, the U.S. remains the most popular product country of origin among surveyed American consumers. (Canada is second, according to the Conference Board.) And thats not unusual: Despite decades of trade liberalization creating increasingly globalized markets, shoppers around the world remain most positive about domestic-made goods, a phenomenon known as consumer ethnocentrism, or home bias. Moreover, the Conference Board study found the influence of made in labels on U.S. consumer purchasing decisions has decreased for all countries included in its survey, with professed preference for U.S.-made products falling the least in percentage terms. Do as I say, not as I do There has always been at least a partial disconnect between what consumers say and how they actually behave. The say-do gap when it comes to buying American has been around since at least the 1970s. After all, it was a preference for cheaper goods made elsewhere that contributed to the trade imbalance that the Trump tariff regime seeks to address. So far, there doesnt seem to be evidence of the intended actual spike in demand for American-made goods. A separate survey, in fact, found only 17% of consumers are willing to pay more than 10% extra for U.S. goods than foreign-made alternatives, and about a third say theyre not willing to pay any extra costs for U.S.-made products. The current iteration of the buy American idea, taking a form bolstered by extreme policy measures, is unfolding against a deeply divided American political backdrop. The Conference Board survey found 66% of Republican-leaning U.S. consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product they knew was American, compared to 42% of Democratic-leaning shoppers. Naturally, marketers can still come up with nonpartisan Made in the USA pitches, but its hard not to conclude that politics has become a factor. (Notably, while American enthusiasm for American-made goods may have slipped, both Canada and Mexico have launched initiatives to spur domestic consumption.) Still, the Conference Board report notes, Companies seem to see marketing value in a Made in USA claim and a surge in U.S.-made claims is expected. Given the evidence to the contrary, why is that? Plenty of American consumers still have a home bias, report author Dahlhoff told Fast Company, and would prefer buying domestically manufactured goods. However, she added, most U.S. consumers are not willing to pay significantly more for a U.S.-made product than for a comparable alternative. Its similar to buying sustainable products: People like the idea of sustainability and made in the U.S., but dont want to pay a premium. Thats been the case for decades. But a surprising side effect of the tariff era may be that consumer sentiment is more accurately reflecting consumer behavior: Its made the choice between prices and country of origin more prominent, and many shoppers are concluding that cost is what they care about.
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E-Commerce
If you ever wished you owned James Bond’s Aston Martin so you could activate its frontal machine guns whenever someone cut you off on the road, XPeng has the next best thing. The Chinese car manufacturer has developed an augmented reality game that lets you fire all kinds of emojis at the offenderfrom angry faces to flip-flops to Nintendo-style bombswhich are projected over the entire windshield in 3D space, giving the illusion of actually hitting the cars. While tossing a digital shoe may not be as satisfying as throwing an actual flip-flop, it may actually be beneficial for your mental state. Road rage has become a dangerous epidemic in the U.S., with approximately 92% of Americans reporting having witnessed road rage at least once in the past year. The statistics are sobering: Road rage incidents led to 481 shootings and 777 deaths from 2014 to 2023. Gun violence related to road rage incidents has increased annually since 2018that year, at least 58 road rage shooting deaths occurred in the United States; by 2023, the number had doubled to 118. On average in 2022, a person was shot and either injured or killed in a road rage incident every 16 hours. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luxurious (@luxuriousbymm) The crazy shootings dont happen in Chinawhere gun access is restrictedbut the rage remains. This is why XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng introduced Road Rage Reliever during last weeks presentation of his new 2025 XPeng P7, a futuristic sedan with a design that gives me serious 1980s Citroën DS vibes. He says the game represents “technology-driven emotion. We used to prioritize technology first, but starting this year we will prioritize experience first, Xiaopeng said on stage, adding that the game is a way to be civilized and experience ‘civilized frustration’ rather than engaging in dangerous behaviors. How it works Road Rage Reliever transforms your windshield into a virtual battleground. But to understand how it works and why it may be so effective at letting you blow off steam on the road, you need to understand the real technological leap here, one that fully changes the driving experience. The car features an 87-inch-wide augmented reality heads-up display (AR-HUD) that covers the drivers entire field of vision and then some. According to its developersXPeng and Chinese electronics manufacturer Huaweithis is “the world’s first HUD solution to integrate AI smart driving.” Its also the first and only HUD of its kind, period. The AR-HUD works thanks to Huaweis self-developed LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) imaging modules, tiny projectors no bigger than your thumb, which generate streams of light that produce pixels with 12,000 nits of brightness. This is crucial for you to see under the outdoor lighting of a road. For comparison, the latest iPhone 16 Pro Max has a peak outdoor brightness of 2,000 nits. The P7s AR-HUD also covers 85% of the NTSC color gamut developed by the National Television Standards Committee. Thats much lower than the screen of a computer, but more than enough to give you full-color graphics. According to Huawei and XPeng, the system has advanced optics, and algorithms precisely calibrate each beam before it hits the windshield. They also calculate the distortion needed for your eyes to believe that things are not displayed on the windshield, but instead that the 3D objects are floating in real physical space 33 feet (10 meters) ahead of the car. Its an optical illusion so convincing that the brain interprets digital content as real, the companies claim. [Image: XPeng] The 3D imageswhich are primarily used to display car, road, and GPS informationare generated by XPengs three self-developed Turing AI chips, with a combined 2,250 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of computing power to process data from radar sensors and cameras placed all around the car. These chips understand the positions and trajectories of the vehicles and objects around you, predicting car movements 0.3 seconds ahead to give you a precious perception buffer in case of potential collision. If the car can predict in advance, its computers or driver can take action with enough lead time to avoid or minimize an accident. As the car moves, the system also uses XPengs 3D technology to map every surface and movement, reducing virtual-real mismatch by more than 80%, with distortion held to less than 1%. This means that when the car is indicating which exit to take by overlaying a big path over the road, the path will appear as it is painted on the road. The system, the company says, paints navigation light carpets onto the road surface, creates colorful lane guidance overlays that match actual road markings, and displays floating traffic light countdowns in attention-grabbing colors over reality itself. This is all crucial to make Road Rage Reliever work. Playing it is very simple: The steering wheel has a customizable button that serves as your firing mechanism. The system identifies your target vehicle through its camera array, and every time you press the trigger it fires full-color, animated emojis that appear to detonatein a cartoonish way akin to a family-friendly Nintendo Wii gameagainst the real car ahead while remaining invisible to others. The display adjusts in real time with a latency of just 100 milliseconds, following your target as it changes lanes, speeds up, or slows down. Advanced image stabilization prevents motion sickness and eye strain, while slope compensation algorithms ensure your emoji bombs dont go flying off into space when you crest a hill. Clever! [Image: XPeng] Safe steam valve? The big question is safety. Studies show that heads-up display systems can significantly improve drivers’ attention to risky areas during night driving situations. The key difference lies in where drivers look: While traditional displays that sit in the center of the dashboard force drivers to glance away from the road, HUD placement keeps eyes in the driver’s forward field of view. Some research revealed that drivers were more likely to glance at HUDs during normal driving (11% eyes-off-road time versus 5.8% for traditional displays), which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says can make them “potentially distracting. . . . Because the HUD is in the drivers field of view, drivers ma fixate on it and fail to perceive events in the environment. However, that study referred to traditional car HUDslike those in high-end cars by BMW and Mercedeswhich are basically small dashboards in your field of view. The XPeng windshield overlays real augmented reality elements onto the road, making them part of the landscape. A carefully designed augmented reality environment will not cause interference; instead it could potentially increase attention and improve response time. It could also reduce the difficulty of processing information in dangerous scenarios, thus reducing cognitive load. While overlaying useful driving information right on the road might have positive impacts on driving, pulling a trigger to fire a torrent of emojis at the car in front of you is potentially quite distracting. You could argue that firing silly augmented reality emojis could be as safe as hitting the hornthe action is the same in XPeng’s carand definitely safer than aggressively chasing someone down a street or a highway. XPeng hasn’t published any information about safety testing for the AR-HUD or Road Rage Reliever. To me, the AR-HUD looks like a promising improvement in the driving experience. And Road Rage Reliever is a clever and cute attempt to gamify anger management at 70 mph. Whether firing emoji bombs at inconsiderate drivers will actually reduce real-world road rage remains to be seen, but XPeng has certainly come up with the most creative approach yet to one of driving’s most dangerous emotions.
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E-Commerce
Google Search is about to look a lot more personal. Google recently began implementing a new search feature called Preferred Sources. With this add-on, users can select the news sources they want to see more of when they browse the web. After a new preference is set, displayed news items will be filtered by the users preferred organizations. This new feature, alongside Googles recent AI updates to its search engine, are beginning to change what it actually means to Google something. In many cases, the changes are making it faster, easier, and more personalized. In the process, though, searching is also trending toward a more siloed experienceone thats less connected to an earlier ethos of exploration and discovery. [Image: Google] A new browsing experience To try out Preferred Sources, users can start by searching a topic thats in the news, navigating to the Top Stories section of the results, and clicking the small icon to the right of the section name. There, a dedicated search menu will present the option to select an unlimited number of publications or websites. Once these sources are selected, they’ll appear more frequently in Top Stories or in a separate “From your sources” section on the search results page. Users will still be able to see content from other sites, and can change their source selections through the same process at any time. Google first tested Preferred Sources with a small group of users back in Junea trial that received overwhelmingly positive feedback, according to a Google spokesperson. [Users] really loved the ability to customize their experience in this way on Search, the spokesperson said. Labs users also really valued being able to select a range of sourceswith over half of users choosing four or more. Essentially, Preferred Sources means that users can have a lot more control over their top search results, rather than leaving those first picks up to Googles algorithm. While it remains to be seen how this feature will be used more broadly, it seems likely that it will make the Google experience quicker and more enjoyable for some users, while also removing some of the exploration that was once inherent in the Googling process. When users are immediately served the sources theyve already elected to seewritten from a perspective that, most likely, they already agree withthey may not feel the need to browse any further and discover a source they wouldnt have searched for themselves. [Image: Google] The trade-off of personalized search and AI Overviews Preferred Sources comes as Googles search function is already undergoing a significant transformation. Over the past few years, the company has been focused on building out its AI Overviews feature, a tool that creates AI-generated summaries (powered by Googles Gemini model) that appear above traditional hyperlinks. While AI Overviews include outbound links that help users follow its sourcing themselves, the tool primarily collates a succinct answer to users search questions. A July study by the Pew Research Center showed that these AI summaries actually make users less likely to click on links to other websites: Based on the research, which analyzed 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their browsing history, Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits). Further, the study found, users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. The potential impact of AI Overviews on traffic to independent publishers is one main topic of an ongoing antitrust complaint thats been filed against Google in the EU. And while the accuracy of AI Overviews summaries has improved since they first debuted (and told users to put glue on their pizza, among other absurd suggestions), some experts warn that its answers are still prone to mistakes. In a blog post published on August 6, Liz Reid, Googles VP and head of search, claimed that total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year, though she did add that user trends are shifting traffic to different sites, resulting in decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others. Yet based on the Pew Research Centers data, it appears that at least for some users AI Overviews are cutting short a process that used to involve a more purposeful browsing effortthe familiar cycle of clicking on a few links, falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and learning something entirely new. With the addition of Preferred Sources, that browsing process may become even qicker for the users who choose to implement it. To be fair, Google has rolled out new features that make AI searching a more exploratory process for topics like recipes and restaurants, travel, and shopping. We know users love to browse and theres a joy in discovery. . . . Its not always about that instant answer, Rhiannon Bell, VP of UX at Google, told Fast Company in October 2024. Still, as the company works out the balance between discovery and instant answers, Google may be shifting toward more of a one-stop-shop search model rather than one that operates as a gateway to independent exploration.
Category:
E-Commerce
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