When car executives travel to China, they’re often shocked by the number of EVs on the roads, their sophistication, and their newfound ability to compete with the rest of the world. But when veteran car designer Anthony Lo travels to the world’s largest car market, he notices something else.
“There are so many new cars everywhere, but I couldn’t figure out which brands they belong to,” he said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design event in Macau on Thursday.
It’s part of a broader, homogenizing trend in China’s car market. Companies large and small are rapidly releasing new electric car models to keep ahead of the competition, at times desigining cars twice as quickly as those producing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.
But Lo thinks there’s a downside to this rapid release schedule: Every car begins to look the same. “The development time of a new product is really fast … and because of that, you don’t really have a lot of time to actually come up with all-new ideas,” he said. Designers, instead, think: “Let’s go fast, and let’s choose something that’s a little bit safer.”
Lo is a decades-long veteran of car design, starting his career at U.K. luxury car manufacturer Lotus Cars in the 1980s. That was followed by careers at Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and General Motors, before serving as Renault’s vice president of exterior design, and then Ford’s chief design officer.
In October, BAIC Group, a Chinese state-owned carmaker, hired Lo to be its chief design officer. On Thursday, Lo explained that he wanted to bring his “global experience” to BAIC, helping the company bring its brands to markets outside of China. In his new role, Lo didn’t share any updates on what might be coming. But he admitted that the “pace in developing a new car is a lot faster than what I’m used to.”
‘The iPhone era’ of cars
EVs—and arguably Chinese EVs—are on the cutting edge of contemporary vehicle design, offering stylings, features, and software not yet seen in cars sold in North America and Europe. One recent convert is Lo’s former boss, Ford CEO Jim Farley, who admitted earlier this year that he’d been driving the SU7, the new EV from Xiaomi, the Chinese company better known for making smartphones.
Frank Wu, chief design officer at Jidu Auto, compared the current transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles to the earlier shift from feature phones to smartphones.
“We used to look at the Nokia 8800 and the Motorola V70,” he said, only for these “very cool, stylized phones” to be replaced by smartphones. “We’re aiming to try to deliver the iPhone era of the automobile, in terms of intelligent experience,” Wu said.
Jidu is a joint venture between tech company Baidu and carmaker Geely, which focuses on vehicle design, software development, and intelligent driving for EVs. Baidu is also one of China’s major providers of robotaxi services, offering 8 million rides to Chinese users as of the end of October.
Jidu’s designers are trying to pursue “the most pure design,” Wu said, including removing traditional door handles or “almost all” the plastic buttons inside the car. Jidu is also trying to implement voice recognition, allowing drivers to easily issue voice commands to their car.
A simpler design
Broadly, the shift to electric vehicles is still changing what cars look like. For example, EVs often ditch the front grille, as they don’t have the same cooling requirement as an ICE car. The battery is often placed between the wheels, giving EVs a profile that’s closer to a luxury car than a mass-market model.
“Cars have become a lot simpler, in terms of styling,” Lo said. “Every designer was dreaming of trying to make all the details more integrated, something quite difficult to do in the earlier era of manufacturing.”
Wu noted that “for car design, to be simple is actually much harder.”
Lo pointed to the emergence of a new “China car culture,” where the interior of the vehicle becomes “a place where you can work [and] you can play.”
“You have zero gravity seats. You can even do yoga.”
