How many times have you been frustrated by road rage? Do you feel uncomfortable in your car after using it for hours? Do you feel safe inside it? Did you know that on average, drivers spend around 3 hours per day inside their vehicles? It therefore becomes important to think of vehicles as not only a device that can take you from one place to the next, but as space in which we spend a lot of time – and a space which should make us comfortable and help improve our lives. The car of the future will not only be zero emissions in operation, it will be zero-emissions during its creation, as well as healthy, comfortable and toxin-free.

BEYOND ENERGY & EMISSIONS

With all the current focus on gas prices and emissions, other elements of vehicle design are perhaps going a bit unnoticed. That new car smell, which some claim to absolutely love (there is actually a new car smell vehicle perfume) is actually a deadly combination of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds (or VOCs). And while great strides have been made in minimizing those toxic chemicals in vehicle interiors, their use haven’t been fully eliminated in the materials that go into your car. The majority of the materials that go into building your car come from non-renewable resources; and almost all of these materials will end up in the scrap heap at the end of your car’s lifespan – never to be recovered again. Every element of contemporary car design is a holdover from an industrial era of the past.  After all, with all the advances in aerospace technology – with lightweight high strength materials like carbon fiber – why are vehicles still so clunky and heavy?

FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE

In the design world, there is an expression know as ‘Cradle to Grave’, which refers to the idea that the design of a product must involve thinking about it from the beginning of the life of the vehicle to its end. The idea is that rather than just looking at a particular aspect of a vehicle, you look at the entire production, use and disposal of a product, and try and reduce the environmental impact throughout a design’s ENTIRE lifecycle.  What would a Cradle to Grave approach mean for a vehicle of the future?  To start off, car designers would want to reduce or even eliminate the amount of heavy metals in car engine and car batteries. Future-forward vehicles would need to be extremely lightweight, to ensure that the amount of materials and energy needed are as minimal as possible.  The car of the future would be also be better designed for reuse – minimizing the amount of glues, and using modular parts that can be reused over and over again. 

FROM CRADLE TO CRADLE?

Following this logic, there is really no reason why we shouldn’t be able to take a more holistic and long-term approach to the design of private vehicles, and even design for cradle-to-cradle reuse. Throw a liter of paint into your garden and you will kill everything there. But, what if instead of painting a vehicle with traditional acrylic paints, we could use natural organic paints that would simply decompose? What if instead of developing a paint that kills a garden, we develop one that works as a natural fertilizer when decomposed – thus the end of lifecycle for the paint becomes the beginning of a new lifecycle for a plant. What if instead of creating a car that decomposes into a heap of rust, you could recover every single item for reuse in another vehicle, once this model has become obsolete?

Thinking about the car of the future, one can veer wildly into the realm of science fiction. Ideas such as lightweight ’soft’ vehicles, cars that drive themselves and cars that can be completely recycled into new vehicles might seem like far fetched ideas, but private transportation isn’t the only industry where these innovations are applicable. All of these concepts dealing with interior materials and health, lifecycle and reuse are regularly applied in some way in new buildings designed all over the world. And there is no good reason why cars should be trailing behind in race towards environmental sustainability.