The Expert Podcast

In addition to being revolutionary in terms of the mechanics and technology of how the vehicles drive electric vehicles also have a much greater evolution in terms of design the shape and style and appearance of cars for the last 100 years has been determined by building around a drivetrain the engine the transmission the um rear axle all of these items have to be the primary designer of the vehicle shape so when you have a big metal engine in the front of a vehicle you have to have a large hood or a higher hood when you have a drive line that has a drive shaft that goes from the front to the back of the car you have to have a tunnel inside the vehicle.

When you now shift to a new drive mechanism in electric vehicles none of those large objects need to be built around in a vehicle so an electric vehicle you have small electric motors that are in between the wheels they don't stick up you do not have a drive shaft that goes down the center of the vehicle where you have a hump in the middle of the car so you can actually build a vehicle in a shape that doesn't have to conform to these objects being within the structure of a motor vehicle so electric vehicles offer a blank canvas of how to structure a car and you can see this this stylized example of a vehicle really low slung front hood and and lines of the car.

The one object in an electric vehicle that has to be taken into account is the battery but a battery is very thin it may only be six to eight inches tall it can be flat it can sit in the floor of the vehicle so it really doesn't obstruct any design intentions that a vehicle manufacturer would have to build a car as it talks about curtains going up on electric vehicles meaning that they're going to become more ubiquitous most of their mechanical components don't sit where fossil fuel engines once performed no drive shaft is needed no tunnel rear seat doesn't have to be positioned to provide room for a fuel tank that's one thing with rear seats of a vehicle that couldn't be too far back because you have a gas tank in the bottom of the vehicle.

To make a profit automakers must sell a lot of evs and maintaining two vehicle categories would appear financially unsound what that means is you don't want to have a division for evs and division for gasoline so conventional vehicles will still be in production for the next five to ten years but they're not really going to keep producing them much longer than that so there won't be any really new designs for gas vehicles in the next few years really ever any designs that are currently in place for gasoline vehicles are probably the final version of internal combustion engine vehicle design there may be some upgrades and maybe tweaks to the existing design but no one's going to put billions of dollars into a new tooling for sheet metal and frames for vehicles that are going to be out of production in 10 years.

One has to think about ev design in a different way it's more efficient so there's an expectation in styling that affects that you don't need a grill you don't need a hole in the front of the car to get cooling air to cool off an engine that's why a lot of ev vehicles that's kind of redundant wasn't ev vehicles electric vehicles have a block off where the grill would be because you don't need air coming into the car electrification as an opportunity for designers you can start from scratch and make a vehicle however you want it to be viable from a visual standpoint is it appealing to look at but also from the standpoint of usability where do you put the seats do they all face forward do some face sideways maybe front and back without having to build around a large metal engine in the front or even in the back of the vehicle the cabin space in the outward shell is completely a wide open territory for designers to make cars look and be usable at the whim of buyers and automotive designers not because of you have to build around an engine.