Coventry University brings designers together to discuss future mobility

Ahead of its annual undergraduate exhibition this year, the UK’s Coventry University invited a panel of guests to discuss the future of the car and its place in society.

Nicola Crea

Opening the debate, Coventry course director Nicola Crea observed that 25 percent of the global population is currently aged 17 or under, relatively few of whom will aspire to own a car. With increasing urbanisation, environmental concerns and the attractions of digital technology, car makers are struggling to fire the imagination of budding drivers.

At the same time, powertrain electrification and the move to fully autonomous vehicles is bringing a wave of disruption. “The car industry is not thinking out of the box because they’re so set in their ways,” said panellist Peter Birtwhistle, former chief designer at Mazda Europe and a Porsche and Audi alumnus. “A lot of the car companies are in for a massive shock if they don’t start looking at things differently.”

Peter Birtwhistle

The panellists discussed how tech-sector giants like Apple and Google might shake up the transport sector with new technology, smart marketing and strong lifestyle associations. But fresh thinking could also arrive from less expected angles. “Aldi is a clever company – I bet Aldi might get into autonomous driving,” suggested Birtwhistle, singling out the German discount supermarket chain.

Alan Yee, engineering director of automotive consultancy Contechs, agreed. Brands as diverse as Gucci and Tesco will increasingly be drawn into the automotive mix, he said. The associations will run much deeper than a dashboard clock or the special edition upholstery of today, he predicted.

BMW’s i3 is already part of various mobility schemes

Yee worked on BMW’s first Mini, which pioneered mass customisation. “BMW’s i3 is a very cleverly designed vehicle but it’s gone back in time to a body on chassis,” he noted. “You can imagine the larger companies separating that out.” Companies from Mont Blanc to Aldi could provide mix-and-match components, he said: “As a customer, you’ll go to an online configurator and say I want this battery, this software system, this body in that colour, and I want this interior themed around this brand.” In short, there’s a lot more customisation to come, according to Yee.

Simon Cox

Simon Cox, former design director for Infiniti, with a CV that includes Peugeot, Ford, Lotus, Isuzu and General Motors, noted that the competition to remain ‘premium’ will intensify. “We have Hyundai setting up its own premium range. How do the likes of Mercedes, Audi or Bentley really separate themselves and move up to another level? It’s about lifestyle.”

Cox predicted that the battle will shift to more holistic notions of quality and service. “I can see a brand like Audi allowing you to drive whatever vehicle you want on any particular day. If you want to drive to London in a Q7, they’ll give you that. Once you get there, you park it and get into a little Audi, whether that’s autonomous or not. That’s the way I see branding really growing into a whole lifestyle.”

Gary Hall, chief executive of Culture Coventry, the trust that manages Coventry Transport Museum, added that people throughout history have wanted to eat well, dress well and own nice things. “I can’t see those aspects of life changing dramatically,” he said. But Hall also argued that the expression of those desires tends to change more dramatically than we imagine. “I think in 100 years, people will look back and say the rate of change has been remarkable.”

Professor Andrew Parks, executive director of the Centre for Mobility and Transport at Coventry University, concurred. He noted that while today’s cars still meet demand for a “hedonistic, vibro-tactile, kinaesthetic experience”, priorities are changing to encompass things like connectivity and collision avoidance. “There are a whole set of metrics that have become important to me, that now surpass metrics that used to be very important to me, such as 0-60 acceleration figures.”

A fully connected driving environment has both strengths and weaknesses

Parks added that driving enjoyment is likely to be severely degraded by future infrastructure and legislation changes: “If we can no longer drive in the way that we used to, there’s no point having the type of car that gave us the reward that we used to get. And therefore I think we will get to a tipping point where the characteristics of cars will change absolutely fundamentally.”

He added that rising insurance costs could make driving an activity reserved for the rich, arguing that driving will cease to be fun once motorists are financially penalised, instantly and automatically, for bad behaviour. “We will price people out of it,” he predicted.

Yee foresaw a time when motorists might have to book road-space in advance: “We will get to a point where outside of the city, you will be able to drive what you like, but inside you won’t have any emotional connection to transport,” he said. As a result, car ownership will be pushed outside the city limits as car sharing and public transport dominate urban settings.

Could the EuroNCAP crash test become a thing of the past?

He added that vehicles fully adapted to megacities would have little in common with today’s cars: “If a vehicle is only able to travel at 20mph and has crash avoidance technology, we could make them so much lighter.”

Crea echoed that thought: “Millions of us are carrying around, every day, more than a ton of weight in metal and other materials, just to move around. This is unbelievable – it is against any kind of logic.”

Parks cautioned that deep-rooted changes are not as close as they may appear. “There’s more hyperbole and nonsense being talked about autonomous vehicles at the moment than any other subject,” he said. “To get to autonomous systems that are affordable and around which we can legislate is a long way off – at least 15 years. But we don’t know. Within some of these areas there are technological tipping points and there are cultural tipping points. Both are really difficult to predict.”

Volvo is already testing ‘platooning’ cars on Sweden’s highways

Birtwhistle, meanwhile, said driverless cars would arrive in stages, starting with long-distance capabilities on motorways and autobahns. “With autonomous cars, producing the hardware is easy compared to the logistics – the bag of worms connected to it as an issue,” he said. But he added that hurdles don’t mean the issues should not be tackled.

“It’s great to think about the old times,” Birtwhistle observed. “But it’s a designer’s duty to think about the future.”