Inside the future: no buttons, or cows
Virtual butlers, touchscreen dashboards and animal-free materials are all pegged for tomorrow's cars
Designers have been talking for years about how things will eventually go completely button-free in car interiors, with touchscreen surfaces instead.
Stephan Janin, Renault's head of concept car design, reckoned that we’d see completely touchscreen interfaces within a couple of years. “The touchscreen systems are almost there already. Also, with autonomous system, suddenly the interface needs to be very versatile – you need to be able to watch a movie or do your emails, as well as use it to control the car’s systems.
Curved screens will come, too. All the manufacturers are working on it. I think even the next smartphones could be curved screens.”
The Tesla Model S already has an almost exclusively touchscreen interface, but expect screens and switches to become more integrated into the dashboard architecture in coming years
It’s not just touchscreens that’ll be taking over. Stefan Sielaff, director of design for Bentley, said that “the focus on screens will go away sooner or later. There will be the next step, which I think will be an augmented reality – so, the ability to have a virtual butler or assistant in our cars, which will be a self-learning system.”
Sielaff also went on to say that “vegan interiors could be a new trend, particularly with the demand from California, India – where of course they don’t want holy hide - and similar markets. We will show something in this direction fairly soon. We wouldn’t go with synthetic leather – we want it to look different.”
The Range Rover Velar will offer vegan interior finishes. This one has materials developed by Kvadrat - a leading textile manufacturer
Porsche’s head of design, Michael Mauer, also stated that vegan interiors were a definite trend in the future, and that we’d “see more and more textiles in Porsches.”
Range Rover has already revealed a vegan interior for the new Velar (pictured above), and Tesla successfully rolled out an animal-free leather in its Model X.
So there you go. Expect to see less leather and more fabric and touchscreen surfaces in the cars of the not-too-distant future. Let’s just hope that velour doesn’t make a come back.
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Comments (5)
What's wrong with velour? Very hard wearing and comes in great colours. Gold, for example.
It's a timeless classic! And comfortable! If I'm in an accident, I'd rather have my head softly meet the luxurious velour covered dashboard than stinky pleather.
Other than that it gives you electric shocks, stains horrifically when you drop coffee on it, and feels kind of weird, nothing. There is some kind of retro appeal to a velour interior in a suitably cool old car, I'll give you that.
I am from India and i can guarantee nobody cares about cow hide in cars.