It’s Electric. Should It Look Electrifying?

A CENTURY ago, when electric cars were popular — especially in cities and among women drivers — they looked discernibly different from gasoline-powered automobiles. In the age of the horseless carriage, the transportation historian James Flink wrote, electric cars looked even more like carriages.
Those early electric cars were upright and boxy, just the look that today’s designers are trying to avoid.

The electric cars on display this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit are adopting one of two overriding design philosophies: make it exciting, or make it familiar.

Joel Piaskowski, Ford’s director of exterior design for the Americas, says both approaches are valid. “Some people want to stand out and make that an expression,” he said. “Others want to be discreet.”

While the electric design studies of the recent past were often futuristic pods, the designs of the latest production models are dictated largely by one mundane factor: where the batteries go. The most common solution, in the vehicles’ floor, usually establishes what designers call the small-tall format.

Fitting the elements of electric drive into a conventional body can limit range or passenger space, and the small-tall configuration isn’t inherently stylish.

The challenge, said Adrian van Hooydonk, head of design of BMW, is to present the small-tall configuration in an attractive way. Many designers have resorted to visual tricks to keep electrics from looking gawky or humpy.

In an effort to reduce the car’s apparent height, the designers of the Chevrolet Volt, a General Motors team lead by Robert Boniface, worked to fool the viewer’s eye. They artificially lowered the beltline — essentially, the baseline of the car’s windows — by putting shiny black trim under the greenhouse. They added dark glass beneath the spoiler to make the rear seem less high-set.

Nissan designers kept the Leaf from looking goggle-eyed by reducing the headlights to blisters that swell above the hood. The designers also rolled the tail of the car backward and downward in an effort, not wholly successful, to hide its awkwardness.

But even within the small-tall genre, the cars’ shapes vary a great deal. The small electric car that Mitsubishi calls the “i” (adapted from the Japan-market i-MiEV) uses the same beanlike body as a gas model.