The motivation for electric vehicles: Appearance and design
Appearance and design
Due to the high cost of the first generation of electric vehicle traction batteries, energy conservation became the core issue of the design process: saving energy using all available methods remains still an important consideration today. Among all methods, the tires and the shape of the automobile have become two important research areas not previously paid much attention to in the pre-EV era.
Tires
The main directions of innovation for the tires are reduction of weight and reduction of friction. BMW experimented with a "carriage tire" (see here for an image that explains what that means), as decreasing surface area in contact with the ground tends to reduce friction.
EVs have allowed for many innovations in tire design. For example, the heavy battery leads to a lower center of gravity (and therefore higher stability), which leads to a relaxed active and passive control of the vehicle's balance. Still, as mentioned above, the suspension system should consider strengthening actions, which also requires higher load-bearing requirements on the tires. The best option would be a balance between these two factors, likely further supplemented through innovations of materials.
This 2012 Nissan LEAF has a thin, light tire design made of a harder rubber. While its efforts to maintain tire width and improve load-bearing are laudable, it has problems with significantly accelerated tire wear, greater damage possibilities, insufficient repair strength, and negatively affected mileage. Over the 10 years that this car has been in use, the tires have been twice completely replaced and three out of the four tires have twice been completely replaced. Each time, accidents or age wearing the tires away were the culprits, but they all happened when the mileage was far less than the tire warranty's mileage limit of 70,000 miles. Still, this issue does need some more research.
General appearance
The foremost importance of realism and functional aesthetics in the EV field remains true to this day. Many years ago, it was proposed that no car that was not blown through a wind tunnel could be called an electric car, emphasizing the importance of energy saving in passenger car design. This still has not changed.
The 2012 Nissan LEAF specifically has these implementations in mind, and for the most part, the wider traditional passenger car design community dislikes this. To maintain traditional fields of view from the driver's perspective, the headlights were designed to be upward, convex, and streamlined. Additionally, to reach a more compact design, the curved surface of the trunk door and the integration of a rearward spoiler have led to great inconveniences and complaints for users.
On the other hand, the 2nd Gen Tesla Model S took a different approach: they retained the original headlight shape, but chose to significantly reduce the angles of the front and rear windshield gradients by extending the front and back of the passenger compartment (that is, lengthening the car to decrease the slope of the surface). They also chose to retain the rear hatchback design but removed the rear spoiler. The design community, despite mentioning several problems with the rear door, was mostly happy with these changes.
Both of these different directions of design deserve full recognition. While the customer experience is the starting point for most manufacturers, energy saving requires transcending these problems and as the latter is the starting point for the very existence of these autos, it should be something strongly adhered to.
Still, it is likely that reality will go in a different direction. As the cost of the traction battery falls and supply increases, the language of appearance will be the most important part of future ICEs. This position reflects not only a adaptation of manufacturers to the forces of the market, but also the renewal of cultural and aesthetic ideas in line with the needs and wishes of technological development—the latter tends to adapt to the former.
The 2012 Nissan LEAF was replaced several years later, with these very unique design factors removed, returning to the original and traditional design mode of appearance. Still, this made this original model important in its very unique milestone in the history of the development of EVs.