HomeCar CultureWill electric-powered self-driving cars carry us back to the future?

Will electric-powered self-driving cars carry us back to the future?

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You might recall that when J Mays and his teams at the VW/Audi and then the Ford design studios were creating heritage-inspired cars and concepts — the new Beetle, the Audi Avus and TT, the new Mustang, a new Thunderbird, the Ford GT, and proposals for new Cobras and Broncos and even that amazing Ford 49 concept, the overarching theme was called Retrofuturism, a look to the future inspired by a look into the rear view mirror.

It was a welcome change from the jellybean shapes that were everywhere on the highways in the late decades of 20th Century, but government-imposed crash safety and fuel-economy requirements restricted the exuberance that car designers could incorporate into what we drove.

It seemed that the flamboyant days of French and Italian studios were long gone.

Or maybe not.

The Mercedes-Maybach 6 cabriolet is a long and large luxury vehicle

Among the hundreds of cars displayed in and around the Pebble Beach Lodge during the recent Monterey Car Week were three vehicles that make me think twe might be entering an automotive design renaissance. If so, it well may be electrically powered and autonomous vehicles that carry us into a world of style and elegance.

First, the vehicles, and then the implications of the self-driving and electrified vehicle and the future of automotive design and style.

The three vehicles that inspired this essay were the elegant Mercedes-Maybach 6 cabriolet, the racy Infiniti Prototype 9 and the surprisingly large Volkswagen I.D. Buzz.

The Buzz had debuted as a concept car at the Detroit auto show back in January. I first saw it early in the morning on 17 Mile Drive, where it was posing for photographs just before VW announced that the modern version of its famed VW Microbus – though this one might best be called the Maxibus – had been approved for production, and will be available for purchase in dealerships in 2022.

The Mercedes-Maybach 6 is a long, low two-seater, with what Mercedes-Benz calls a “luxurious ‘haute couture’ interior” and art deco exterior design cues and proportions. The car is 20 feet long and would look right at home whether it was delivering Clark Gable and Bette Davis or Casey Affleck and Emma Stone to the Academy Awards ceremony.

As with the ID Buzz, propulsion comes from electric batteries, enough to generate 750 horsepower to four in-wheel motors.

Infiniti proclaims its Prototype 9 to be “a journey back in time,” imagining what Nissan’s luxury car division would have built for Grand Prix racing had it been around in the 1940s.

Prototype 9 is what Infiniti might have built for the heyday of Grand Prix racing, had it been around at the time

The project started as an after-hours effort to sketch what might have been, but it became so popular within the design and engineering staffs that a full-fledged prototype was produced.

Again, like the Maybach 6 and Maxibus, the 9 is an electric vehicle.

Have you noticed the theme? All three of these retrofuturistic vehicles have electric powertrains. That’s important, because combine an absence of combustible fuel with self-driving cars designed not to crash into each other — or into anything else, for that matter — and there’s the possibility of a new day somewhere over the horizon in which government safety regulations will be rethought — do we need crumple zones in a collision-free road system? — and where fuel economy no longer is a factor because vehicles no longer burn fuel, instead they’ll run on electricity increasingly generated by renewal sources.

The result could be an unbinding of automotive designers, finally allowed to chase their imaginations just like Figoni et Falachi, Pinin Farina, Soutchik, Michelotti and other stylists were free to do.

Jaguar Future-Type concept

Of course, we’ll all be passengers, not drivers. Could it possibly be worth the trade off?

Or… Just yesterday,  Jaguar upped the ante among the automakers, unveiling not only a classic but electric-powered E-type roadster, but its Future-Type, an electric-powered, on-demand autonomous concept vehicle that can drive itself or offer the driver the option of taking control.

But get this: While the three-seat vehicle would be shared, individuals would be able to buy their own “intelligent” and removable steering wheel, which would work at home as sort of an Amazon Alexa, except you could ask it summon a shared vehicle.

Electric-powered concepts draw a crowd at Pebble Beach

 

Larry Edsall
Larry Edsall
A former daily newspaper sports editor, Larry Edsall spent a dozen years as an editor at AutoWeek magazine before making the transition to writing for the web and becoming the author of more than 15 automotive books. In addition to being founding editor at ClassicCars.com, Larry has written for The New York Times and The Detroit News and was an adjunct honors professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Wonder if they’ll engineer a nice throaty rumble sound for that Mercedes-Maybach 6? Or will people eventually get on board with the quiet hum of the electrics!

  2. In spite of all the buzz, I believe that larger long range (read expensive) full electric vehicles will remain a specialty car for the wealthy for many years to come. Less expensive smaller electric cars are either short range city cars, or when equipped with longer range batteries, end up costing double the price of similar small compact cars. Long charging times and a current lack of a convenient charging network will put off many potential customers who are used to 5 minute fill ups at gas stations. In spite of my negative predictions, I love “Driving”, not auto-piloting, Teslas and my own Volt, even without the vroom, vroom from the rapidly disappearing tail pipes.

  3. In spite of all the buzz, I believe that larger long range (read expensive) full electric vehicles will remain a specialty car for the wealthy for many years to come. Less expensive smaller electric cars are either short range city cars, or when equipped with longer range batteries, end up costing double the price of similar small compact cars. Long charging times and a current lack of a convenient charging network will put off many potential customers who are used to 5 minute fill ups at gas stations. In spite of my negative predictions, I love “Driving”, not auto-piloting, Teslas and my own Volt, even without the vroom, vroom from the rapidly disappearing tail pipes.

  4. Ahhh the utopia that dreamers like to imagine is to come. A progressive future where there will never be a tractor trailer that may hit a car and wipe out a collective commune on their commute to worship Xocotzin, their Goddess….

  5. The prevailing belief is that a system of self-driving cars will solve several environmental and social problems without us needing to worry about messy stuff like politics, activism or changing our travel habits.

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