Panel: Styling Still Matters When Self-Drivers Hit in 2025-2030

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – In a future where cars will be able to drive themselves, many wonder whether exterior styling will take a backseat along with the passengers.

Unlikely, say connected-car panelists here at the 2015 Management Briefing Seminars.

The way the car looks “is still part of who you are,” theorizes Doug Patton, chief technology officer for Denso.

“There’s emotion in that (purchase),” he adds, and automakers won’t “get away with just having a box.”

“Styling always matters,” concurs Brian Murray, director-global safety and security excellence for ZF-TRW’s Active and Passive Safety Systems.

Continental’s Steffen Linkenbach says the design direction will depend on the consumer. Some may want to “sit in the car, like on a (budget) Spirit flight from Detroit to Vegas,” he says.

Then there’s the Mercedes autonomous F 015 show car, he notes, which presents a dramatic departure from a budget vehicle interior with its four swiveling bucket seats and airy cabin.

The three men have three different ideas about when a fully autonomous car will reach the market.

Patton says such a thing won’t arrive until 2030. “Sleeping in the backseat? I just don’t see that happening in the near term,” he says of a 100%-automated, Level 5 vehicle.

Continental, Linkenbach says, is focused on 2025 as an introduction date, but mainly for autonomous highway driving.

Murray doesn’t provide a date for the introduction of a 100% autonomous vehicle, noting it is “impossible to verify against,” and such a vehicle must be proved no less safe than existing vehicles. That process will take years, he presumes.

Using Sunday afternoon’s rain and windstorms here as an example, Patton notes an autonomous vehicle of today or the near future would not have made it through the treacherous weather conditions: “If your autonomous vehicle decides it’s not good now and pulls over, are you going to accept that? Is that OK with you?”

Vehicles with today’s level of autonomous technology also might stop at a malfunctioning train crossing, he says, leaving their drivers stranded because the car can’t tell there is no danger of a collision.

Given these examples, Patton and other panelists predict a kill switch will be needed.

“You have to be able to turn (the autonomous mode) off. The consumer has to have the ultimate decision. That’s who’s going to pay for this,” Patton says.

But in the bold new world of self-driving vehicles, a kill switch could cause more harm than good, Murray notes.

“That is also a threat, to remotely kill the car,” he says, inferring hackers could wreak havoc on unsuspecting autonomous-vehicle passengers.

Patton also predicts driving skills will go by the wayside in a future world of 100% fully autonomous vehicles. “Eventually we (won’t) need them.”

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