Engineering news
The Nissan Leaf, the Japanese carmaker’s first foray into electric vehicles, was launched in 2010 and has sold more than 300,000 units worldwide. So following it up was always going to be a challenge. Professional Engineering spoke to Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan’s global head of design, about the challenges of creating electric, autonomous-ready vehicles before a recent keynote speech he made at London’s V&A Museum.
It takes about four years from putting pen to paper on a car to it actually rolling off a production line, so there’s always a degree of reaching into the unknown. “Luckily when we were doing the second one we had 300,000 customers who have purchased. In the car world those early adopters are very vocal so it does make the second one a bit easier,” he says.
But technology moves at such a pace there’s always a degree of speculation, particularly when it comes to electric. “You’re doing this dance which you don’t do with regular cars. When you’re designing internal combustion cars you know what’s happening. With EVs, connectivity and autonomy there are breakthroughs every day.”
While the first Leaf was designed to stand out from the company’s portfolio of around 60 different models, the second one was tweaked to bring it more in line with the others – to make it look more like a Nissan. “We brought it into our design language,” explains Albaisa.
Battery evolution
One of the biggest challenges and opportunities for the designers of electric vehicles is the battery. “Every engineer in every company is looking where to put batteries,” says Albaisa. “Right now that part is evolutionary in a sense. It’s like the gas tank was under people, and now the batteries have grown under people. But that’s not necessarily the best place. Motors are smaller and they can move around, so engineers are getting close to moving the motors into the wheels. That will free up more space for batteries.”
Many people are predicting a world of limited car ownership, where transport is dominated by autonomous fleets of vehicles designed for different purposes. “In that sense the designer’s job is to make sure that the whole portfolio has a message, but that the cars are different,” says Albaisa. He disagrees that the era of car ownership is coming to an end, and says autonomous vehicles will complement ownership, just as services like Uber and Lyft do now. “I don’t think life is so subtractive.”
One challenge is maximising range – which means minimising weight, and also means that aerodynamics become much more important again. Albaisa says this is a “black art” because changes at one end of the car can have a negative impact on something else so it’s a constant back and forth.
A world of possibilities
Cars have looked largely the same for a century, but in the future they could be completely different. Electric vehicles offer much to designers in the way of simplicity – with smaller engines and a lack of transmission, for example, freeing up space. “You’re free to design more around the human experience, which is fantastic,” says Albaisa. “But on the other hand, cars are getting safer and autonomous cars have sensors everywhere. So we need to be careful when we’re designing surfaces where the various radar or sonar or laser can go.”
The importance of sensors plays a role from early on in the design process. ‘From the very beginning when we’re starting a project the debrief is what level of autonomy we have,” says Albaisa. “Even three years ago when I worked on the first car with autonomous drive I remember seeing a drawing from engineering and it showed all these surfaces and corners that I had to keep in a certain section.”
In the future, other considerations could come into play. There will be some – such as the placement of sensors – that introduce new constraints. Others, however, will allow designers to free their imagination and create cars with no steering wheel, or ones that look nothing like what we think of as a car today. “Cities are getting smarter,” says Albaisa. “If you imagine a car that has sensors and cameras everywhere and arguably you don’t even need windows any more. It can park itself and it can tell where everything is.”