Savour International

Luxury cars, with their leather upholstery, wood interiors, and powerful engines are often terribly predictable and old-fashioned. Do they really need to be this way? Young auto designers are coming up with radical ideas for the luxury cars of the future.

What is luxury anyway? Well, for one thing, it’s a tough terminological nut to crack – unless, of course, you happen to be an automaker that’s been relying for decades on the same old troika of leather, powerful engines, and real wood. Wherever you look – whether it be a Rolls-Royce, Lexus, Jaguar, Cadillac, Maybach Bentley, Mercedes, Audi, or BMW – the basic concept of a luxury car is only ever varied within only the narrowest of confines. And so it’s no wonder that conventional luxury cars tend to look pretty old-fashioned – an impression not altered by the occasional decorative carbon or stainless steel element.

Automakers that figure on still finding customers for their luxury cars in the coming years need to begin weaning themselves from these staid conventions. For in the final analysis, even customers in the market for luxury cars take fuel consumption into consideration, as well as whether the car was sustainably manufactured and can be operated in an eco-friendly manner.

But how can a car set itself apart from the crowd, if not through use of the finest interior materials, and by providing customers with powerful engines?

This issue was addressed in a design project by students in the Transportation Design programme at Germany’s Pforzheim Technical University. The project, titled BMW - The next level, was the students’ final-semester project, and was done at the urging of the BMW design department. During the programme’s first semester, the students focused on exterior design, and in the second semester dreamed up interior design concepts for the luxury cars of tomorrow.

Why passengers in the cars of tomorrow may be riding backward

The design concepts advanced by the Pforzheim project have two salient aspects. First, while the exteriors are highly varied and creative, neither the drawings nor the concept descriptions provide the slightest hint as to why the luxury cars of tomorrow should, in fact, look this way. The interior designs eschew classic natural-wood cladding of course, but otherwise constitute rather cramped cabins that have little to do with what you’d want in an actual car.

Likewise peculiar is the fact that many of the front passenger seats face backward. Would people really want to be seated this way, in cases where the only vehicle occupants are the driver and a front-seat passenger? And wouldn’t it be odd for passengers to be facing backward the whole time? Apart from the fact that many passengers would get motion sickness seated this way, the question arises as to whether you’d really want to have the pleasure of riding in a car spoiled by watching people and the landscape receding the whole time. The answer, of course, is no: people like forward motion.

For an automaker like BMW, which provided the impetus for the project, the important thing is not so much to garner specific ideas concerning the contours of the instrument panels of tomorrow, or exactly which equipment a luxury stretch limo should have. The main interest of such a project for an outfit such as BMW is to try to determine the preferences of customers who are knowledgeable about cars and have a keen sense of aesthetics. And, of course, the transportation design students at a German technical university fit this profile to a “T”.

The most important feature of a luxury car is roominess

The take on mobility and luxury of these students differs “considerably from that of regular customers in this market segment”, the project report states, and then goes on to say that the sole criterion that both current luxury auto customers and the design students feel is of overriding importance is roominess, i.e. a luxury car should be roomy. “Everything else is contingency”, the report then notes, without, unfortunately, elaborating further on this suggestive notion; for it would have been interesting had the students theorised as to what the luxury cars of the future might potentially look like.

But instead, the Pforzheim project students tended to base their luxury-car design concepts for the future on current designs, and in so doing only defined a handful of basic criteria for the models they came up with. For example, the sight lines of the driver and passengers should be harmonised, and the prescribed distances must be maintained. Apart from this, everything else was called into question, as a design drawing showing a luxury pedal car for the affluent customers of the future demonstrates. But at least such vehicles obviate the need to discuss sustainability.

1 | James Burgess came up with this spatial concept for the luxury car of the future, where the driver is seated in the back seat and can see the entire vehicle from his slightly elevated position, while the passengers are seated in front of the driver and somewhat below him in an elegantly sumptuous interior.
2 | Philip Allen’s rendering of a four-seat interior, where the driver is in the conventional position and the three passengers are elevated. However, a classic front passenger seat has been dispensed with, since this seat is now rotated 180 degrees, thus enabling the passenger to look at his fellow passengers, as on a train.
3 | The contours of Matthew Baggley’s design are reminiscent of the early Corvettes; but instead of a souped up sports car, we have here an elegantly luxurious pedal car, which has been meticulously designed right down to the pedals themselves.