Radical new car interiors are on the way
As manufacturers look for more ways to cram tech into our cars, editor Paul Barker thinks a new age of interiors is on the horizon
The next-generation Peugeot 208 could be set for a radically redesigned interior when it arrives a couple of years from now.
Our image (above), created using inside information from Peugeot, depicts the radical direction the brand is heading with the 208’s cabin – and the firm is unlikely to be alone in having a bit of a rethink about how it delivers the increasingly advanced set of controls and technology necessary in modern cars.
We’ll see if the Peugeot concept proves to be a better way of doing things, but at the moment the industry is heading unsuccessfully down a path of fitting modern cars with increasing amounts of tech and safety systems that need to be operable on the move – while the driver concentrates fully on actually driving.
I’ve recently driven more than one car that chastised me for taking my eyes off the road when I tried to alter the climate control or audio settings. To my mind, that means we’ve genuinely reached the point where auto makers know it’s a problem but still want a cleaner, cheaper-to-produce cabin with fewer buttons, so they put everything on a screen that they acknowledge is distracting to use.
Last week we were musing in the office about the original BMW iDrive system from the early noughties, and the youngest person in the room was shocked that it didn’t have a touchscreen. It instead employed a rotary dial so you could move between menus and settings on the screen without any more than a glance, instead of a touchscreen where you have to take your eyes
off the road long enough to focus on a specific part of the interface. I’m not rewriting history: yes, the first-generation iDrive was pretty awful to operate, but it quickly evolved into something that was a better user experience than the touchscreen-only arrangements we’ve now reached. And it wasn’t only BMW – Audi’s MMI with the dial controller was great, for example, as were the solutions from many other brands.
As tech has developed, however, interior designers have been desperate to minimise physical buttons. Voice control isn’t a solution yet, if it ever will be, so we’re going to see car makers needing to look at new ways of doing things.
Do you think car interiors are too tech focused? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section...
