Simultaneously, the driver’s seat slid backward and turned slightly toward the center so Muyres could look at his passengers. He extended a small table top from the center console for his iPad.
The only thing Muyres couldn’t do was actually drive somewhere. He was sitting in a mockup of a self-driving car that doesn’t yet exist.
But his company, YanfengAutomotive Interiors, isn’t waiting for the future to arrive. The world’s top designer of auto interior components like instrument panels and floor consoles is already imagining what drivers will do if they don’t have to drive.
“Right now, 98 percent of the time, you should be cognitively in control of driving and not doing other stuff,” said Muyres, executive director of product innovation for Yanfeng’s North America unit. “One of the things that will happen for consumers is that when you don’t have to drive, you have time to do something else.”
Representatives of the Shanghai company, which designs interiors for major automakers around the world, visited San Jose last week to display one of Yanfeng’s self-driving-car interior prototypes, designed for the potential 2025 model year.
Yanfeng has offices in Holland, Mich., and in Europe, but is also planning to open a Silicon Valley office. Most all of the big automakers have established research and development facilities in the Bay Area to work on car technology, including autonomous driving.
But carmakers still face myriad technological, regulatory and legal hurdles before they can sell autonomous vehicles, which will have different levels of computer-controlled driving.
Moreover, “with Uber and car sharing and all these new ownership models, that’s going to drive changes,” Muyres said.
Yanfeng’s ID15 concept interior assumes that first-generation autonomous cars will be able to drive themselves part of the time, with the driver assuming normal control the rest of the time.
In the prototype, Muyres pressed a button to start self-driving mode and took his hand off the wheel. Lights in the dashboard and side door panels pulsed red, and the car emitted a series of audible vibrations to signal the driver to mentally prepare for the car taking over. The steering wheel retracted, and the driver’s seat moved toward the back to give the driver more room in the cabin.
The center floor console has a rotating table top that in drive mode swings only toward the passenger side. But in self-drive mode, the table can also swing toward the driver.
“Driving is not efficient at all,” Muyres said. “All you do is get somewhere. You don’t get anything else done.”
But with the car in control, “I could get my work done before I get home,” he said.
In the prototype, the glove box has a tray that slides down and out toward the passenger seat, providing a work shelf for a laptop. Or the driver could use the center console table.
And under the center console is a “cool box,” a refrigerated compartment to provide cold drinks accessible to both the front and rear passengers. In addition, Yanfeng designed another storage area in the console with movable partitions to create room to stow items of variable sizes.
“With more time to play and do other things with your time, you have to put that stuff somewhere,” he said.
Or the driver can shift from “tasking to relaxing,” just concentrating on “de-stressing, so when they’re home, they’re refocused on that fun experience of being home,” Muyres said.
LED lighting in the instrument panel and the doors creates a relaxing ambiance. And the dashboard is sleek, free of “visual clutter.” Vents are discreetly hidden.
Auto designers already give a thumbs-up to the clutter-free dashboard. “One of the things most engineers and car designers don’t like are air vents,” Muyres said. “They’re mechanically complicated, there’s a bunch of tubes and hoses and noise. Plus, they take up valuable real estate on the instrument panel.”
And in auto-drive mode, the driver and passengers are more free to talk with one another, so Yanfeng designed front driver and passenger seats to rotate in toward the center by up to 18 degrees.
“We chose 18 degrees and not 24 degrees because up to 18, we can still meet the front crash requirements,” Muyres said. “We wanted to make sure you had some rotation for connecting socially, but still you’re safe.”
However, the designers still had to make sure all the driver’s controls were within reach to take over in case of an emergency. The next prototype, which will be unveiled next year, will assume that the vehicle is capable of driving all of the time, requiring an even more radical shift in interior design.
“Now, the seats are two up front facing forward, two in the back facing forward, even though 85 percent of the time there’s only one person in” the car, Muyres said. “In the next car, we’re going to reprioritize the seat locations based on actual usage versus theoretical usage.”
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
