Machines of the future put clever, fun ideas into gear

Rusted on car enthusiasts often ask me how I can possibly get excited about electric vehicles, but the fact is, they are the future, and that, increasingly, they’re where the really cool stuff is to be found.

Tesla Model 3 interior dash

Aside from Elon Musk, a man whose brain may well be from Mars, which would explain why he’s so desperate to go there, who would have thought that building a car that makes fart sounds when you indicate would be so amusing?

Obviously Musk, the man behind Tesla’s weirder and wilder ideas, has a slightly puerile sense of humour – he’s named his cars the S, 3, X and Y so that they will spell “SEXY” and called one of his rockets the “Falcon Heavy” – but his salacious silliness really does seem to have found a market, beyond just my children.

Stephen Corby

The fart sounds that a Tesla makes are optional, but also optimisable, which means your kids can set them up to come out of random areas of the car every time you use the indicator, and for each one to sound disturbingly different as well. No, you might not need functionality like that in your life – nor Tesla’s Caraoke Mode, Dog Mode or even Bioweapon Defence Mode (I’m not making these up, I swear) – but the fact is that some of the innovations the automotive world’s great disruptor has invented are ingenious, and being copied by competitors.

‘it’s quite noticeable of late how much of the really clever stuff is turning up in electric vehicles’

Tesla was the first car company to offer “over-the-air” updates, which can make your car better to drive, safer, or more amusing, without the need to visit a dealer. This also makes your vehicle more like your smart phone, which, theoretically, continues to get better after you’ve paid for it.

My personal favourite, though, is the Auto Raising Air Suspension, which you will remember if you’ve had to lift the nose of your Tesla to get up a steep kerb or entrance and will prepare itself, using the satnav, should you ever approach that address again.

I remember explaining this feature to a Ferrari engineer and him looking horrified that he hadn’t thought of it first (one of the banes of your privileged existence as a Ferrari owner is constantly worrying about scraping your nose).

Beyond Tesla, innovation is always happening, and often at remarkable speed, in the car world, but it’s quite noticeable of late how much of the really clever stuff is turning up in electric vehicles. Audi’s Grand Sphere concept, launched last year, revealed the company’s grand plans for self-driving cars by showcasing a vast, living-room-like interior that featured no visible steering wheel of any kind (there is a snazzy one you can summon, hidden under the dash).

The interior of the Audi Grand Sphere will feature a dashboard rather than a steering wheel.

Part of what made that capacious cabin possible is the way EVs – and the Grand Sphere is fully electric, as will be Audi’s first fully autonomous road car, set to arrive in 2025 – are made.

An electric vehicle can have its motors tucked away inside its wheels, while the power source – a giant rechargeable battery – sits under the floor, in what’s often sexily referred to as a “skateboard” layout. This means that there is no big, heavy lump of metal under the bonnet, allowing designers to push the passenger cabin further forward, creating more space.

It makes sense that EVs is where the latest tech is turning up, of course, as many companies, including Jaguar, Volvo and Audi, have committed to stop building cars with internal-combustion engines this decade, but the pace of change really seems to be stepping up.

Just recently I’ve seen new EVs arriving in Australia equipped with what’s called Vehicle-to-Load, or V2L, technology. This means they have the kind of wall socket you have in your house, which you’ll find under the rear seats, or in the boot, and the ability to plug in and run domestic appliances, using the electricity stored in the car’s battery (and there’s plenty in there; enough to run your house for two or three days, using another nifty technology called Vehicle-to-Grid and bidirectional charging).

The possibilities are as endless as they are amusing, but the first thing that came to mind for me was installing a champagne fridge in something like the V2L-equipped Hyundai Ioniq 5, and pointing out to a Rolls-Royce owner that his chiller is no longer so killer.

Rusted on car enthusiasts often ask me how I can possibly get excited about electric vehicles, but the fact is, they are the future, and that, increasingly, they’re where the really cool stuff is to be found.