Land Rover made a beautiful surfing video to show off an unnecessary tech feature
The automaker doesn't need to bolster its off-road cred, but evidently it does think that it has to up its technology game.
Recently, Land Rover made a video in which survival-celebrity Bear Grylls jumped out of an airplane and while free-falling before opening his parachute, used a smartphone to reconfigure the seats remotely in a Land Rover Discovery, making room for a few more people.
While this had to happen as Grylls plummeted toward the ground is an unresolved question, but it made for a cool video.
Now Land Rover has enlisted surfer Laird Hamilton to execute the same maneuver, but from the ocean rather than the sky, using a phone that must has been encased in waterproof protection. (What's next? An alpinist with a iPhone, to complete the air-sea-land hat trick?)
Again, you have to ask yourself why anyone would actually want to use this feature; the idea is that you show up someplace with your Discovery's three rows of seats configured one way, then meet some pals who want a ride and use the phone to do the onerous work of raising the third row, an operation that takes about two minutes using a button in the SUV.
Anyway, the video - showcasing the automaker's "Intelligent Seat Fold" - is just as cool as the last one. Land Rover is also revealing its "Dynamic Design Pack" in the US at the LA auto show this week.
"It combines unbeatable all-terrain capability with unrivaled versatility and a revolutionary new exterior design," the carmaker said in a statement.
Check it some Land Rovering surfers: