The advent of electric cars is changing everything. The shape of the car will no longer be so strictly defined by bulky engines, exhaust manifolds or drive axles. At the same time, digital technology promises to replace everything from mirrors to the human guide. The car industry has never had to deal with so many changes at once. All of these changes will take place in the coming years, says Adrian van Hooydonk, head of design at the BMW Group. The main concerns of carmakers will be electricity and the integration of rapidly evolving digital technology – all while improving environmental sustainability. “It will be a reinvention,” he says. Here are some of the most striking changes we can expect to see.
‘The skateboard’
A General Motors Hummer EV chassis in Lansing, Michigan. Photo: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images The lack of an internal combustion engine has already had an impact. Look at the front of a Tesla and one thing is clear: you do not need grilles to supply air to the engine. Rival manufacturers (in catchup mode with Tesla, the world’s most valuable carmaker) use the new design freedom to provide models such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Honda e that use smaller but stronger lights in a retro futuristic package that will may have appeared in a science fiction movie of the 1980s. Hyundai Ioniq 5 Wins World Car of the Year 2022 Award. Photo: Andrew Kelly / Reuters But the changes will go far beyond superficial styling. The electric cars are made with a “skateboard” design, with a flat bed of batteries and wheels and motors at each end. Electric motors are also smaller than bulky internal combustion engines, which means there is no need for a bonnet area in front of the driver. The American startup Canoo is one of the most notable examples of this. Its “lifestyle vehicle”, which may be delayed until early next year due to supply chain problems, will have a particularly flat front, giving it a box-shaped shape unlike most modern cars. A “skateboard” EV that contains batteries and engines in almost flat configuration. Photo: Hyundai / Canoo However, aerodynamic considerations still prevail to some extent. Startup company Arrival in the UK originally designed a vertical windshield, but eventually opted for a more traditional rake design because wind resistance reduced vehicle autonomy.
More interior space
The Hyundai Seven concept. Photo: David Swanson / EPA Skateboarding means that electric cars tend to be a few inches taller and many car manufacturers first started with bulky sports vehicles (SUVs) to fit more batteries. But there is even more space for passengers. In internal combustion engine cars, “engineers took up a lot of space in the overall footprint,” says Mark Adams, design director at Vauxhall-Opel. The reason why this space is redefined in an EV depends “really on the individual vehicle and what you are trying to do as a brand”. Citroën, one of Vauxhall’s stalls in the Stellantis group, has already shown a choice: the Ami is a tiny two-seater with no trim for city points. It will be released later this summer in the UK for less than .000 8,000. Citroën electric Ami. Photo: Ed Alcock / The Guardian In France, the Ami can be driven by anyone over the age of 14, without the need for a driving license. Adams believes the electrical revolution could eventually stop the drive for larger SUVs. “The days of growing cars are gone forever,” he says. “We no longer need to have huge cars with tracks.”
Fewer car parts
The BMW Vision Circular on display in Munich in September 2021. Photo: Sascha Steinbach / EPA Zero emissions are not the only major change in the look and feel of cars. Reducing waste at the end of life is considered increasingly important for the automotive industry, and this means using fewer spare parts with less complex mixtures of materials where possible. For example, the front grille of a car may contain 10 to 15 pieces, so discarding it reduces complications when it comes to mounting or recycling. BMW’s i Vision Circular showed how a car could be built with just seven materials – all recyclable. However, achieving this on a scale will be another matter. Subscribe to Business Today’s daily email or follow the Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk
Forget the steering wheel
The most obvious absence in future cars will eventually be the steering wheel. Driverless cars already travel millions of miles on the road and it seems inevitable that most or all autonomous cars (known as Level 4 and Level 5 in industrial terminology) will eventually hit the market. “If you then change it to fully autonomous, you do not necessarily have to stay in the same position,” says Adams of Vauxhall. “We all look at this place.” Changing “one big thing changes 100 smaller things,” he adds. Less driving means less need for easily accessible controls, so cars will change the cockpit of the plane, full of buttons and switches, for a clearer look that is more about leisure. Overall, digitization will have an even greater impact on car design than even electric propulsion, says van Hooydonk.
Wheelchair
Hyundai chief designer SangYup Lee sits inside the Seven Concept at Automobility LA in California in November 2021. Photo: David Swanson / EPA Canoo calls its US-targeted model a “wheelchair”, while the Korean carmaker Hyundai’s prototype Seven has swivel sunbeds and dining chairs, which it describes as a “living space on wheels”. It is clear that some cars will be treated more as extensions of the house that happen to move as drivers are left free to do other things. All this free time on the go can give people more time for other activities. Movie-style projectors or virtual reality entertainment are two options in the works. Car tips and tech companies from Apple and Alphabet to Spotify and WeChat believe the car will be the next place they can sell a huge variety of services such as movies, games and music. Eventually, the interiors could be moved from the “living room” to the “bedroom”, although the placement of beds instead of seats in cars creates difficult security problems. However, the idea of going to bed at home and waking up at work, or even in another country, is no longer a Jetsons-type dream.
