The Aesthete
We’re agreed that the aesthetics of electric cars are disappointing. On the present evidence, if the EV is the future, I’d say that the great age of car design is in the past. An Australian correspondent tells me that EVs are known as ‘Covid cars’ because they all appear to be wearing masks. Not to protect occupants from airborne pathogens, but, paradoxically, to disguise the identity they so forlornly lack. Actually faceless.
Polestar is an exception but Maximilian Missoni has designed something surprising. And that’s rare. Significantly, he has not taken inspiration from the new propulsion systems, but from mirrors and cameras. Missoni has reckoned that cameras are now so efficient that rear-view mirrors are redundant. He has done something quite radical and reckoned that a back window is redundant too.
So the latest Polestar has none. This allows the rear-seat occupants to sit in a smoochy aedicule, rather as children enjoy sitting under tables. To seek this sense of pacific enclosure is a fundamental of behavioural psychology insofar as it affects architecture and interior design. People love booths in restaurants and the upper deck of a 747.
So, mildly sedated Polestar passengers can sip small-batch lingonberry low-alcohol liquor in emotionally protective comfort, shielded from the harsh Northern light, as they fret about where the driver might find charging points beyond the Arctic Circle. Or in England. As the emphasis on the car experience moves away from get-out-of-my-way dynamics to how most agreeably to occupy a vehicle’s interior, this is the first sign in the real world that car design is off the Glasgow Coma Scale.
Technology has always influenced design. In the Age of Combustion, heat engines required cooling. Mostly by water, occasionally by air. Water-cooling required a radiator placed in the snout of the car, to receive the chilling effects of passing wind. In the first cars, these radiators were rudely exposed, all loops and coils, but soon water radiators became opportunities for shrouding with meaningful decoration so that a ‘radiator grille’ became one of the chief determinants of a car’s character.
The astonishing variety of radiator grilles is evidence of man’s restless ingenuity
