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Written by Paul Horrell
"Could car design disappear, like design has disappeared on phones?" As a rhetorical question for a car designer to ask, it"s a bit of an existential one. Especially a designer who"s designed one of the very things he fears might be responsible for the death-blow: an autonomous electric pod-lounge. This is Samuel Chuffart, head of design at Icona. We"ll come to them in a moment. First, his history: he did a lot of work at Nissan"s studios in Europe, then Jaguar, then Bertone. So why"s he so exercised that design needs to defend itself from obsolescence? He points out that the shape of a phone has been reduced to a featureless rectangle with as much of its area as possible devoted to screen. So autonomous people-carriers could be just too-similar boxes. And people might not care because the cars will be commodities, like public transport. "We will consume cars in different ways shared, taxis. Maybe people will buy a package of solar panels, batteries and car. The car is almost the disposable part, a commodity. It could kill design."
Date written: 1 Mar 2019
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 14997
"Could car design disappear, like design has disappeared on phones?" As a rhetorical question for a car designer to ask, it"s a bit of an existential one. Especially a designer who"s designed one of the very things he fears might be responsible for the death-blow: an autonomous electric pod-lounge. This is Samuel Chuffart, head of design at Icona. We"ll come to them in a moment. First, his history: he did a lot of work at Nissan"s studios in Europe, then Jaguar, then Bertone. So why"s he so exercised that design needs to defend itself from obsolescence? He points out that the shape of a phone has been reduced to a featureless rectangle with as much of its area as possible devoted to screen. So autonomous people-carriers could be just too-similar boxes. And people might not care because the cars will be commodities, like public transport. "We will consume cars in different ways shared, taxis. Maybe people will buy a package of solar panels, batteries and car. The car is almost the disposable part, a commodity. It could kill design."
Date written: 1 Mar 2019
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 14997