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Electric cars were supposed to usher in a new era of automotive styling. The thought was that once finally freed from the age-old constraints dictated by the pipes and plumbing of internal combustion, EVs would offer a blank slate for designers to revolutionize the form and function of the automobile. Instead, the EV market today is dominated by an increasingly broad selection of battery-powered cars that all look more or less just like their gas-powered counterparts.
There are some fresh faces on the horizon, such as Honda’s 0 Series. And a couple of highlights are in production today, including the Hyundai Ioniq 6, which definitely pushes the envelope in terms of visual flair. But in an increasingly skeptical EV market, these cars need to perform efficiently and stand out in their own ways without rocking the boat when it comes to the tried and true standards of vehicle design.
So, what dictates good EV design, both functionally and aesthetically, and who are the winners and losers on the market today? Let’s dig in.
The Disproportionate Value of EV Aerodynamics
It’ll probably come as no surprise that aerodynamics is key in designing electric vehicles. After all, range is paramount to many EV buyers, and slippery cars go farther on a charge. But, not all of the energy produced by a car is used for fighting the wind.
Moni Islam, Audi’s head of aerodynamics and aeroacoustics, breaks it down like this: “Thirty-seven percent of the energy is needed to overcome the rolling resistance of the wheels. Thirty-four percent, approximately, is needed to accelerate the vehicle, and 29 percent to overcome the wind resistance.”
While that’s much the same story for any car, the relative efficiency of EVs means aerodynamics plays a much larger role than has traditionally been the case with gas-powered models.
“For a typical ICE vehicle in this vehicle segment, only 10 percent of the total energy that’s contained in the tank is actually used for propelling the vehicle against aerodynamic drag,” Islam said. “Now, for an EV, the powertrain is much, much more efficient. We’re talking about efficiencies well above 90 percent.”
That massive boost in efficiency effectively means that, at any given speed, a small aerodynamic improvement will have a more noticeable impact on the vehicle’s range than it would with internal combustion.
This has resulted in some impressive accomplishments. “We have SUVs with sub-0.3 drag coefficients, something that would have been unheard of 30 years ago,” Matteo Licata said. He’s a former automobile designer and current lecturer of design history at IAAD (Istituto di Arte Applicata e Design) in Turin.
Aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics, the science of simulating how well a given body flows through a material, are well-established disciplines, and all cars are honed to an extremely high degree. But, Licata says, EVs tend to get more attention to tweak the finer details: “It is indeed something that, on EV, you have to be a little more careful about.” In developing the new A6 E-Tron, Audi’s Islam said his team ran approximately 3,500 simulations and still spent 1,000 hours in the wind tunnel, helping that car score a 0.21 coefficient of drag, a hugely impressive number.
This extra attention to detail has boosted the prevalence of features like active grille shutters, which open and close to maximize cooling or minimize drag as needed. Active suspension is increasingly common, too. Lowering the car at speed helps to effectively reduce the vehicle’s frontal area. That refers to the portion of the car that has to push through the wind, an increasingly difficult engineering challenge.
Bigger Isn’t Better
The shapely Honda 0 Saloon may have Lamborghini Gallardo–aping looks, but with a stretched wheelbase and comfortable seating for four, it’s clearly a much larger and taller machine. A bigger car has a bigger frontal area, meaning it has to move more air when cruising down the highway. As the demand for larger vehicles increases, particularly SUVs, aerodynamicists have to work that much harder to catch up.
“Most EVs, also regular cars, have pretty low drag coefficients across the board,” Licata said. “We’re very good at that. Trouble is that the frontal cross-section of vehicles keeps increasing. I’ve got a very slippery, low-drag design, but I can’t beat what we’re doing with the sheer size of the vehicle.”
They may lack engines, but bigger EVs have their own packaging constraints, complicated further by a set of regulations dictating general vehicle shape. “If you have an EV, it doesn’t mean that you have no components to package,” Eduardo Ramirez said. He’s the chief designer at Hyundai Design Europe. “There are many regulations to fulfill, especially European regulations, which are very strict. So there are many, many aspects that currently define the layout.”
One of those components that impacts the frontal area is, surprisingly, the battery pack. Most modern EVs use a so-called skateboard design, arranging a sandwich of cells along the floor of the car. This keeps the weight of the battery low for better handling, but it effectively increases the overall height of the car thanks to the thickness of said battery pack.
“The taller the vehicle gets, the bigger the frontal cross section gets,” Licata said.
“We’ve got the big battery in the outdoor floor, we’ve got big wheels, we’ve got a very compact thermal management system,” Islam said. “And some of these things are advantageous to us. Others are a big challenge.”
One challenge? Finding a way to make all of that look good.
Finding New Faces
All modern cars generate some amount of heat, which needs to be offloaded through something like a radiator. Keeping internal combustion cars cool is a well-understood science. “For ICE cars it’s very straightforward,” Hyundai’s Ramirez said. “For the EVs, it’s the same but on a different scale.”
EVs generally require less cooling, opening the door to more daring front-end designs. “Since you don’t need a big grille on the front, you have a blank sheet to think of a different front-end design,” Ramirez said.
This freedom hasn’t always worked out well in the end. Licata derided the scourge of “superfluous lighting effects” on the noses of many modern EVs, LEDs festooned there “just to fill up the space.”
But, Licata says, it’s something of a misnomer that traditional, ICE-powered machines need big grilles in the first place. “Batteries and motors still need some cooling, but you need a little less area than with a combustion car. But grilles are phony on most combustion cars anyway. The vast majority of cars are bumper-breathers.” Licata says the Jeep Renegade is a great example of that: “That big seven-slot grille, most of it is completely phony and is just creating drag.”
Frunks Aren’t Free
And what do you put behind those grilles or all those superfluous lighting effects? Many EV manufacturers have used that space to create generous front trunks, or frunks. But just because there’s no engine up there doesn’t mean that a frunk comes for free. “It needs to be balanced with other results,” Ramirez said. “If we want to increase the volume of the front just to offer a frunk, it would have a negative impact on air flow, drag, less range.”
Finding the right balance is a big part of a designer’s job, and while the dramatically different powertrain and packaging in EVs does create opportunities for fresh designs, some have done better than others at capitalizing on those opportunities.
Winners and Losers
Launching an EV right now is a complex game, dealing with a global marketplace made wildly more complicated thanks to an ever-shifting matrix of tariffs, not to mention a perplexing amount of consumer hostility. There are, then, many factors that play into the success or failure of a given EV. Despite that, Licata is happy to place the lack of interest for Mercedes-Benz’s first global salvo of EV machines, the EQE and the EQS, squarely on the designers.
“Those vehicles are also held back by their design, by their aesthetic appeal,” he said.
Licata said that the designs of those cars and SUVs, in which aerodynamics was a huge priority, resulted in shapes that simply didn’t look premium enough. “They don’t look like the luxury items that they are, and it’s hard to convince someone to fork over more than $100K for something that doesn’t look like $100K.”
Thankfully, Mercedes seems to have taken that feedback to heart, and its upcoming CLA looks far, far shapelier.
Who’s doing it better, then? “By far and away, Hyundai and Kia,” Licata said. He praised the EV designs being brought to market by Hyundai Group for being compelling and attractive, punching above their relatively budget-friendly weight. Licata also has kind words for the Lucid Air: “It’s not a new car anymore, but it’s still a great piece of design and the way they resolve the front end is brilliant.”
But, Licata says there’s room for far more bold designs than even Hyundai is dropping: “In general, I believe that the industry and designers should be braver,” he said. “They’re deliberately holding back, giving products the same old appearance as always for a number of reasons. I wish that would stop very soon so we can start to see proper, interesting, cleverly designed electric cars.”
Honda’s daring 0 concepts show that there’s certainly a will out there to produce more adventurous designs in the future. Hopefully the production versions coming next year don’t lose their edge.
