A closer look at the Callum Skye’s interior design
It has been over a year since Callum revealed the Skye concept, but now Ian Callum’s design and engineering consultancy has revealed the interior
The Skye is the first model to wear the Callum brand name and it’s an exciting adventure toy, designed for weekend play, for being transported on your luxury yacht or as something to get you around an exotic island. It’s not the sports car we might have expected, but it is sporty and besides, a sports car is currently in the planning.
“Ian and I first put pen to paper four years ago when we’d been trying to work out what our first car was going to be,” says Aleck Jones, head of design at Callum. “I think everyone looked at us and thought, Ian’s a prolific sports car designer who has done some brilliant cars in the past so there’s going to be a sports car. Now, a sports car will happen at some point, but the Skye just felt really appropriate, something bold and out there. For our first vehicle, this screamed everything we wanted to do.”
Fully electric, the Skye has all-wheel drive, a predicted range of 170 miles and will sprint to 62mph in a time that will match many a sports car, even a few supercars. You can read all about the team’s thinking behind Skye and its design here, but let’s get into the interior.
Skye has a lot of glass, intentionally giving a good view of the interior from outside the car. This also meant providing a strong visual connection between the dynamic lines of the exterior with those inside the car. There’s a bold graphic that wraps around the interior, across the IP and into the doors. It’s a graphic that is unmistakably Ian Callum and one that has been really well applied to Skye.
Given Callum’s recent announcement that it predicts Aqua Mist to be the Colour of the Year for 2025, you might expect the Skye’s interior to feature it extensively. It doesn’t. Instead it’s a calm but sporty mixture of Arctic Pearl leather from Bridge of Weir and Vitamin C orange accents, all very modern and very fashionable.
“We also wanted it to feel premium, luxurious and a stark contrast to its competitors, including the Aerial Nomad and Can-Am Maverick,” says Jones. “They’re very plastic, very matter of fact, and that is appropriate for those products, but we wanted to approach this from a bit more of a holistic design ethos, which is why we’ve ended up with this quite cosseting, cozy interior.”
The Skye looks like it should be a tech tour de force, but the team are of the view that there is too much tech in the cabin these days. Instead there is only one small CarPlay screen, with the instrumentation being analogue through a number of rotary dials and buttons.
“We’re seeing a push back away from screens in the automotive world,” says Jones. “People want something to touch, something to push and rotaries they can rotate. With that in mind, the analogue dials complement the overall design. We’ve tried to keep it simple without being too simplistic.”
Tactility is most evident in the drive buttons and HVAC controls. These sit atop a central blade that has been 3D printed by supplier, Stratasys. Most of the IP is 3D printed, in fact, allowing the team to produce bespoke components cost effectively and at the same time reducing the weight of the vehicle.
Not that everything is bespoke. Callum does not have the budgets of a large OEM to run extensive component development programmes. One example of this is the air vents, which come from the Volvo XC40. “As a designer, you’d love the luxury of being able to design an air vent from scratch, but they’re very complicated things to design with a lot of inner workings,” says Jones. “So we try to find bits off the shelf without making it feel like a parts bin exercise.
“There’s some lovely detailing there and Volvo is doing a great job with its interiors,” he adds. It’s hard to argue with that, and the silver finish of the vents matches perfectly with metallic coated inserts on the doors that echo the style in the C-X75.
Rubberised footwells add a contrasting rugged touch to the luxurious interior, but this first glimpse is of the ‘Dynamic’ variant of Skye, a version more suited to road use. Another more rugged interior is set to be revealed for the more off-road focused ‘Capable’ derivative in 2025.
Naturally there are still a few elements to finalise, not least of all beneath the skin in terms of the powertrain, but the Skye is very nearly production-ready and the order books are now open. It’s been an exciting project for the team and as the first model to wear the Callum name, it’s one of which they are very proud.