Car Interiors

Car interiors suck. They are designed by someone with 'passion' and a loose pencil hand, and the resulting swoopy, 'organic', 'wraparound' interiors are ill equipped to deal with the realities of life: they are hard to clean and hoover, as crumbs collect in tiny crevices; storage spaces are arbitrary in size and shape, and difficult to fit anything useful into; sitting in anything but the prescribed manner is a painful experience; and controls lend themselves to the overall shapes of the interior, and not to the human form.

As we have learned from gaming controllers and OXO Good Grips, 'ergonomic' does not necessarily mean smooth, bulbous and arbitrary. I propose the 'Car interior for selfish people' :

A selfish person in this case is a consumer who demands that the interior works for themselves and not to fulfil other auxiliary functions.

The interior attempts to maximise interior space by reducing on the space usually conceded to some injection moulded plastic form. Rectangular, hinged storage spaces can be taken out for clearing and lend themselves to tablets, magazines and wallets. The multimedia control system would be a blend of Tesla's system and Doko by Andrew Kim. Rectangular modules make up most of the functional components of the interior, and therefore provide a wide scope for add-on options, without the blank button problem that the carefully detailed interiors of today suffer from.

Color is a extremely important aspect. On any kind of sunny day, I find car interiors to be sickeningly warm, as the black interiors that come as standard (it's almost impossible to find a light-coloured basic cloth interior) absorb so much heat when parked. Therefore almost all of the passive surfaces in the interior are a light and clear color. Surfaces at risk of becoming soiled by mud or spilled drinks are either dark or wipe clean.

Is this kind of interior feasible? Probably not when used in conjunction with the distraction that is contemporary exterior design. Kei cars in Japan are very good at maximising interior space, but aren't available in the west, and cars like the Nissan Cube end up being sold as 'design' cars, having no real impact on the mass-market.

Delivering a competent, totally-designed package to the car market however, would be far from impossible. What it would require, however, would be a total abandonment of the principles of car design that are deeply embedded in the current corporations, media outlets and educational establishments.