Your Next Car May Be a Living Room on Wheels
Your Next Car May Be a Living Room on Wheels
A driverless future may transform automotive interiors.
In fact, some of that future is already here.
By Chester Dawson Updated June 19, 2017 10:19 a.m. ET
Imagine rearranging the seats in your car to watch a
movie on a big screen in the dashboard. Or controlling functions like air
conditioning by touching the window. Or replacing rearview mirrors with cameras
that give you a live-action look at the surrounding traffic.
Those are just some of the ideas car makers and designers
are kicking around as they imagine a driverless future. When cars can largely
navigate roads on their own, there’s no need for the interior design to rigidly
follow the model established in the early days of automobiles. The inside of
driverless cars might look more like living rooms or meeting places on wheels,
with a focus on flexibility and entertainment.
Industry officials say fully autonomous and
shared-mobility vehicles may be a decade or more away, but increasingly
high-tech interiors will start showing up in the next few model years. On the
latest luxury-car models, information has begun to move from digital
instruments behind the wheel to head-up displays projected on the windshield,
so drivers can monitor things like speed and turn-signal indicators without
looking down. And other amenities are in the works, such as seats that fully
recline or rotate 180 degrees, dashboard ice chests and ambient lighting.
“Sci-fi is really not fiction anymore—it’s really here,”
Ralph Gilles, head of design at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, said recently at
an industry conference. Mr. Giles talked up the idea of cars becoming more of a
“third space” outside the work and home.
The idea is showcased in his company’s Portal concept
vehicle, featuring removable seats and a retractable steering wheel, which made
its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year in Las Vegas.
Closer than they appear
One of the biggest changes on the way is in
visual-display technology, which will transform vehicles inside and out, says
Carter Cannon, a product manager for electronic integration at International
Automotive Components Group.
External side-view mirrors will disappear as digital
camera images migrate to interior screens, similar to those that rearview
cameras use now. And back-seat buttons and switches will move from arm rests to
touchscreen-like side windows to control functions such as back-seat air
conditioning.
“Information will move above the belt line and become
displayed on the glass,” Mr. Cannon told attendees at an industry conference in
May. All this will free up the cabin for further design changes.
Another design change that promises to radically reshape
the driving experience: movable seats. This change may be anything from giving
people more-flexible storage options, all the way up to completely remaking the
interior of the car to suit different purposes.
For an idea of what’s possible, consider a concept car
from auto supplier Yanfeng Automotive Interiors, which made its debut at the
Detroit auto show earlier this year. The XiM17 (short for “Experience in Motion
2017”) showcased several different seating configurations depending on the mode
selected: driving, family, lounge and meeting.
The driving mode is fairly standard, but in the other
setups, the car retracts the steering wheel and radically reconfigures the
cabin. The family mode creates a home-theater experience: The front seats
rotate inward and the rear seats slide together into a bench, so that everyone
can watch an elongated screen at the center of the dashboard. The screen, about
10 by 36 inches, would be used for instrument displays when not showing movies.
“It’s a living room on wheels,” says David Muyres, an
executive director in the North American unit of Yanfeng, in which Chinese auto
maker Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. owns a 70% stake through subsidiaries.
The XiM17’s meeting mode envisions the car as an extended
office. To create space, it collapses the rear seats, rotates the passenger
seat 180 degrees and slides the driver’s seat back to the rear. Stowaway trays
in a center console provide perches for laptops and can be combined into a
single center table.
Lounge mode offers an LCD-like screen on the ceiling that
can show images while music plays on a multispeaker audio system and LED lights
on the floor pulsate and flash to the beat.
Other companies are coming up with ways to make sure that
passengers will have plenty of snacks for their new home theater or meeting
space on wheels. Sweden-based Dometic Group AB, which already supplies
center-console mini-refrigerators to luxury brands such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz
and Porsche, has sketched out concepts for door-mounted bottle coolers,
dashboard-embedded ice chests and compact microwave ovens for truck cabins.
Cleaning up
Of course, there’s a downside to turning cars into
entertainment centers or other multiuse spaces: lots of dirt and other messes.
Those could be an even bigger problem for one group of self-driving vehicles in
particular—those used by shared-mobility services like Uber, which will carry
multiple passengers and for more hours of the day.
So auto makers will need to come up with carpets and seat
cushions that can hold up to greater added wear and tear, and cope with messy
one-time riders who have little or no ownership of a particular car. Possible
solutions include more-resilient fabrics that can be cleaned easily.
“The interiors of these vehicles are going to have to be
puke-proof,” says Ralph Gilles, head of design at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.
Already, auto makers are looking to service industries
such as airlines and hotels to learn how to better maintain shared spaces. At a
recent industry conference, Tim Boundy, an interior-engineering technical
fellow at General Motors Co., highlighted the need for “odor management” and
other solutions. Among his intriguing suggestions: “self-cleaning cup holders.”
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