Design Review: Ford Airstream Concept
Car Design News reviews the Ford Airstream Concept
The Airstream Concept is a futuristic crossover, supposedly capturing the sense of optimism and adventure conveyed in American aircraft, spacecraft and the streamlined shape of Airstream trailers. In some ways it follows a similar path to the Microbus concept that VW showed in 2001 but the styling and context here is purely American and less formal than the VW.
The Airstream Concept is not merely an exercise in styling: it also demonstrates how Ford might expand its lineup of crossovers in future and showcases a new HySeries Drive fuel cell drivetrain that operates under electric power at all times to deliver the equivalent fuel economy of 41miles per gallon.
One recurring theme on this design is the clever use of graphics to communicate functions in new ways. The exterior is a simple monovolume finished in a mirrored silver-blue paint that doesn’t slavishily copy the ‘silver bullets’ fuselage form but merely hints at it in such areas as the rounded roof profile, thick framing to the windows and the polished aluminium appearance. The deceptively-simple shape is given a solid stance with strong sculpting in the lower bodyside, dark wheelarches that appear to protrude through the silver body and big 22” polished alloy rims.
The front end has a single-surface grille with a mirrored finish that appears in outside light as a single graphic, like aviator shades. LED headlamps are embedded in the top corners and illuminate through the mirror surface, punctuated only by a big Ford oval in the center and translucent lighting around the perimeter to complete the face. There’s no actual grille opening - with the fuel cell powertrain there’s no need.
The use of asymmetric graphics features in both the orange-finished DLO shapes and the door openings. On the passenger side, the whole bodyside opens up, with the lower part dropping down to form a red carpeted step and the powered upper part forming a vast canopy, as on an RV. On the driver’s side there’s a single ‘capsule’ door and here the DLO graphic is reversed, with the smaller window being towards the front.
Those distinctive orange DLO frames also maintain the asymmetry at night. Interestingly, the designers spent a lot of time and effort looking at ways to illuminate this framing, but found in the end that simple fluorescent paint did the trick just fine. At the Detroit Auto Show, it was hard to believe the DLO frames weren’t backlit, as the effect worked just as well in the near-darkness of Cobo Hall as under the bright lights on the show stand.
The rear end has the strongest feeling of an Airstream trailer, with its unbroken surfaces and no visible taillamps, nor other decoration. Instead, the eye is drawn to the unusual shutlines that reveal a three-piece hatch opening, comprising a tee-shaped upper tailgate and barn-style lower doors. The taillamps are actually located at the top edge of the barn doors and illuminate though the paint finish and one senses an underlying sense of humor from the designers here that’s more charming and less severe than some other Ford concepts.
Coincidentally, Nissan also showed the Bevel concept at the Detroit Auto Show, which covers some of the same themes covered here such as asymmetric design, 1970s design cues, an open plan cabin, large side access doors and targeting an older customer demographic, but the Ford appeared to have a greater depth to it as a design.
