Future car designs: sleeker, safer and more efficient

Kia’s Gregory Guillaume, chief designer for Europe, agrees that car design will shift to offer a more premium feel in every model. He says: “Europe leads the way in this area as European customers are the most demanding in the world. This includes the look of a car, but also the feel of the controls and the seating position. Seat design is another area where we will see considerable effort.”

This was clearly evident in Volvo’s Concept Estate, where the front seats were built to reflect Swedish furniture design and minimise weight.

Robin Page, design director for interiors at Volvo, says: “There is only so much metal you can remove from a car’s structure and often it means replacing this strength elsewhere, so we have to look at other areas of the car where we can save weight. Seats can be incredibly heavy, so they are a prime target for weight reduction.”

Another area likely to change radically is wheel sizes. Every designer we spoke to mentioned wheels as hugely important for the look of a car and for their impact on economy and emissions.

The consensus is that customers want large wheels for the look, so scaling back on diameter is not an option. Ward thinks small cars could sit on smaller wheels if customers choose lighter colours for the wheels that trick the eye into thinking the wheels are larger, but he agrees that narrower wheel and tyre widths is the best path to success.

By moving toward tyres with a narrower tread width, rolling resistance is reduced without any visible clue from the side profile. BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen, among others, are already moving in this direction with electric vehicles, but we can expect to see this adopted across a broader range of cars as tyre technology permits the same levels of adhesion and braking while lowering the amount of rolling resistance.