All hail the electric car, our saviour apparent.
There will not be a revolution, no obvious turning point, but many auto makers foresee electric cars making up a significant chunk of sales in the next decade.
What will electric cars look like? How far will they go on a charge? How much will they cost? These are questions which, until recently, had no answers.
Now that the first big cohort of electric cars is emerging, the picture is becoming clearer.
Range and cost will be intimately linked. The more you pay, the less you’ll need to recharge. The Chevrolet Bolt and Tesla Model 3 have ranges of 380 and 350 kilometres respectively, as measured on the U.S. EPA test. The Bolt will start at $42,795. In Ontario, it will cost $31,434 after government rebates, and will be in showrooms early this year. The Jaguar I-Pace will do 350 kilometres and arrive in 2018. The Faraday Future FF 91, if it ever arrives, will do 600 kilometres, and sprint from 0 to 100 km/h faster than a LaFerrari or McLaren P1. No price has been announced, but that kind of performance will likely cost around $100,000. Like any new technology, prices will drop and specs will improve as it matures.
What will electric cars look like? This is where it gets interesting. Style sells cars. When price, performance and features are roughly equal between competitive models, design is the differentiator. We’re shallow when it comes to automobiles.
“Our job is to create something that drives customers into new technologies,” said Klaus Bischoff, head of Volkswagen design, speaking at the Detroit auto show. “You have to be aware of your responsibilities as a designer.”
Good design could help reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions.
There are two camps emerging when it comes to EV design, said Paul Snyder, head of the transportation design department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, one of the largest such departments in the world.
The first includes new companies that were created to make electric cars. The second includes most major auto makers that, in some cases, have more than a century of experience making internal-combustion-engine cars and are now slowly shifting to EVs.
The newcomers
“They’re not grappling with history or a tradition in terms of what their brand meant,” Snyder said. “Newer entries like Faraday and Lucid, they aren’t encumbered with any sort of history, so they are more exploratory.”
These companies are creating radical designs, for better and for worse. Examples include the Faraday Future FF 91 unveiled at CES, the Lucid Motors Air, the LeEco LeSee and the Tesla Model 3. Snyder said the only major auto maker to have a car in this design camp is BMW with the i3. It was designed by Richard Kim, who is now at Faraday Future, where he penned the FF 91.
Tesla’s latest cars don’t have a front grille, a feature that has historically distinguished one car from another. Electric cars don’t need gaping holes in the front to let air cool the engine.
“The Model X is a really innovative architecture in proportion and it’s odd for some people, especially the fact it doesn’t have a grille,” said Snyder. “They’ve strived to create a brand identity just in the way they are shaping the surfaces.”
An electric motor is miniscule compared to even a four-cylinder gas engine with gearbox. Ditching clunky internal-combustion technology frees up space at the front of a vehicle.
Lucid Motors, a California-based start-up, boasts, “free from space constraints of a conventional gasoline vehicle … we realized the interior length of a large luxury sedan in a mid-size footprint.” The company’s spectacular sedan, dubbed Air, was designed by Derek Jenkins, who joined Lucid from Mazda where he penned, among others, the 2016 MX-5.
The Faraday is a love-it or hate-it design, as is the i3. The Model X is either a potato bug on wheels or the coolest SUV on sale, depending on who’s looking.
“It’s easy to do something different. It’s very difficult to do something different that is beautiful and appealing,” said Snyder.
The old guard
The Chevy Bolt looks much like any other sub-compact hatchback. The Hyundai Ioniq EV is even more normcore. Volkswagen’s next-gene