How the EV boom made modern car design bigger and uglier
From the end of Australian-made cars to the supersize-me trend, plug-in versus pump and the sad shift to increasingly minimalist interiors.
They say a week is a long time in politics, and in the car world a year would be a fair comparison because every single time we spin around the sun, the world’s automotive brands update or facelift as many models in their showrooms as possible, as well as adding all the new ones they can afford.
The pace of change – not just new cars launched but entirely new brands, plus incredible new ways to provide motive force and rapidly accelerating technologies such as autonomous driving – is dizzying in any 12-month period. So looking back at the 20 years since WISH made its debut causes a mild case of motion sickness.
Grab some random motoring enthusiast walking around Australia two decades ago and time jump them forward to a modern car park and you would find their gob entirely smacked. Yes, we all know that things change, tastes move and businesses fail, but for them to see a world in which an alarming number of cars on the road have no exhaust pipes, make no noise and need plugging in rather than filling up would be almost as discombobulating as not being able to spot a Holden Commodore, Ford Falcon or any Australian-made vehicle.
Back in 2005, Australians mostly drove sedans or small cars, with the Commodore and Falcon family cars fighting over top spot (and costing about $30,000), followed by two cars that are still surprisingly popular today, Toyota’s Corolla and Camry.
What’s hard to picture now is just how many tiddlers were on the road then, and how many families seemed capable of living with their limited space. The Holden Astra, Nissan Pulsar, Hyundai Getz and Mazda 3 were all top-sellers.
Based on car-buying trends since then, it would be fair to assume that Australians all grew substantially, taller and wider, and thus were forced to demand embiggened vehicles. It would also seem that a huge number of us became tradies.
Our top-selling vehicles today are either big, ugly, American-style pick-up trucks that we insist on calling “utes” – the Ford Ranger, Toyota HiLux, BYD Shark 6 and Isuzu D-Max – or SUVs (Toyota Prado, Ford Everest, Mazda CX-5).
I’ll grant you that vehicle design is a matter of personal taste, but I’d say that cars – unlike other consumer items such as televisions and telephones – have gotten bigger and uglier during the past two decades.
There are exceptions, of course, such as the Porsche 911, which looks just as good as it did in 2005, despite being, like most cars, significantly bigger. And that includes cost: back then you could get into one for about $100K compared with a minimum of $277,800 today.
Ferrari, which was selling the still attractive but now quite plain looking F430 in 2005, has been on an absolute tear in terms of design since then, producing the beautiful 458, which morphed into the 488 and the sensational-looking Ferrari 296 GTB that haunts my fever dreams today (you could have an F430 manual coupé back then for $389,000; a 296 today starts at $604,000).
Aston Martin, Lamborghini and McLaren, similarly, have only become more impressive over that period as well, in both design and performance terms.
You could argue that car design in general has become more pleasantly rounded and less arrestingly angular in the past 20 years, but that shift has been largely led by safety concerns and the theory that softer curves are better in the case of an accident.
During those 20 years, the pace of technological change has been impressive, not just in terms of EVs but the rollout of various hybrid set-ups – those you plug in and those you don’t, all of which are designed to combine both electric and combustion power plants to reduce fuel use as much as possible.
So why hasn’t the design of cars made similar leaps and bounds? The shift to electric vehicles cops a lot of flack for ruining everything, but I’m afraid it must take some of the blame here for the fact that an increasing number of new cars look like eggs popped out of the same carton.
As Pete Allen, Polestar’s deputy chief technical officer, explains, our obsession with increasing EV range in order to reduce anxiety in drivers is the problem.
“If you want maximum range, then you have to have a very bulbous kind of front end because most of the aero drag is coming from the front of the car,” says Allen. “So if you have very low drag, then you end up with a big, plain shape.” If you’re thinking of a Tesla at this point, you’re not alone.
Mercedes-Benz and BMW would argue they have attempted to make their EVs look more interesting and edgy, but not always with great results. Mercedes design boss Gorden Wagener has complained that EVs “all look alike”.
“Even I, as an expert in design, when we put them in our [design] presentations, I cannot tell the difference,” he said scathingly. “They are all fastback, they have similar faces, whatever. I think that we will make a difference with our Iconic [design] and that will set us apart from that sea of sameness.” (The company’s latest electric concept car, the Vision Iconic, pictured opposite, definitely delivers on that promise with an Art Deco design theme, solar-power cells and, apparently, AI functionality that’s designed to replicate the human brain.)
What is disappointing is that I was promised it wouldn’t go this way, that the arrival of EVs would not only save the planet, they’d make it a prettier place.
Back in 2018, when Jaguar became the first mass-market brand to launch an electric car with its interesting I-Pace, its designer, the legendary Ian Callum, told me that the space freed up by not having an engine in the front of the car was going to be “revolutionary”.
He went on to promise we’d see “more exciting things in the world of car design over the next decade than we had in the past 100 years”, and that his effort to push the cabin space forward into the bonnet, thus lowering the roof and creating a kind of coupé SUV with the I-Pace, was just the first radical leap.
“It surprises me how some designers do not see this opportunity that has opened up to them and still see electric cars as looking like internal-combustion cars, which are driven by other parameters,” Callum enthused. “I can’t for the life of me see why that happens.”
Many years later I got the chance to ask Callum what went wrong.
“I see I-Paces on the road now and they still stand out, so I’m very pleased with it,” he said. “The other brands, sadly, haven’t gone so forthright; they’ve been quite conventional.”
It’s fair to say that the biggest changes to car design have been on the inside and that they’ve been driven largely by one brand and one man, Tesla’s Elon Musk.
We take it for granted today that every car will have a large touch screen as its beating heart, and it was Tesla that did it first with the Model S, back in 2012.
Step into almost any modern Chinese EV and you get the sense that the designers got together, probably around a photocopier, and said, “Hmm, it sure seems like everyone loves these Tesla cars. Why don’t we build something that’s as close to that as possible?”.
Across large swathes of the market, you’ll find car interiors that are spare and sparse, with stupidly large screens at their centre, which you must now use for everything from opening the glove box to adjusting your steering wheel.
The one thing I blame Tesla for even more than fiddly touch screens, however, is the idea that minimalism is the raison d’être of car design. Musk and co seem to have convinced the world that having as few features in your car’s cabin is somehow the height of premium, when I personally think it feels cheap, and a little nasty.
I’ve previously described the interior of the Tesla Models Y and 3 – and the many vehicles that copy them – as feeling like the inside of an Ikea that was recently robbed, and I stand by that.
Now look, I’m not saying all modern cars are ugly and that the past 20 years has seen vehicle design devolve into a dull sameness, because there are still plenty of attractive choices on the market (as long as we’re not talking about utes, or hulking SUVs).
What I am saying is I hope, and pray, the next 20 years are a little more exciting.
This story is from the December issue of WISH.
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