Front grilles are the toughest enemies of EV design
How to suddenly stop designing with a component IC engines made essential over decades of massive use?
Modern internal combustion engines (ICEs) apply a radiator for cooling. The radiator, in turn, requires cold air from the outside so as to properly work. Adequate intake is obtained through grilles on regions of high volumes, while efficient intake comes from designing the path to the engine as short as possible. Parallel to that, placing the engine up front has many advantages for city cars. The only possible outcome is locating any grilles on the front fascia.
The paragraph above states how fundamental front grilles are for urban cars. Add decades of massive use to this train of thought and you’ll understand why the industry simply had to adapt to their existence: there have been moments of insurgence, as this post comments, but it ultimately learned how to use it in favor of car design. In fact, it’s become a key part in many automakers’ design language. Now, how can we simply start talking about removing it altogether?
Electric motors also require cooling, of course, but their characteristics enable applying many other layouts for that — in practice, we can say they don’t really need front grilles. That’s very important for designers because it increases the freedom when creating the front fascia. It can become more wedge-like from every perspective, the lights can take pretty much any position, and there can be creases, spoilers and trim accessories (such as chrome strips) everywhere.
On the other hand, the absence of the typical front grille means having fewer proven guidelines with which to design. This makes it easier for a car model to end up considered ugly because the automaker didn’t properly work with the shape proportions on its front fascia. And we all know what happens when the public considers any product ugly… it’ll have a hard time achieving desirable sales figures no matter how attractive any of its other characteristics may be.
One can say the safest solution is to adapt the front grilles. Audi, for instance, created the e-tron with a smaller version of its famous design and having part of the mesh closed. “Safest” because it’s the most similar to what’s been used so far, so it’s the one people will find the most familiar. Some models even use it in black, so the resemblance with regular grilles is uncanny. This solution is particularly useful in all-new models, which need all possible help to prosper.
The polar-opposite idea is to simply close the traditional grille but make that change as noticeable as possible. Mini, for example, transformed the original grille into a plain region painted in gray which highlights a narrow open area giving it a yellow frame. Solutions like that are highly divisive, so they should only appear in cars for which exotic design is a sales argument — yet they may still be rejected because even their target audience won’t accept everything.
If you’re thinking both solutions seem, well, not quite good, you’ll be happy to learn that the industry agrees with you. Now that EVs are finally finding ways to become popular in the market, automakers are doing their part by thinking outside the box: creating new design standards which don’t depend on a front grille to look good. In other words, they’re developing visual guidelines which fully include electric models without blatant distinctions as we’ve seen so far.
Instead of starting with the hybrid powertrain, Fiat decided to wait and work with fully-electric models. The all-new 500 was designed from the beginning to shun ICEs and its external looks shows: the iconic compact design was preserved in a much cleaner interpretation. The main elements are now the multiple lights, while the central portion replaced the traditional grille with a large logotype of the model’s name. Not bad for an image-oriented car, right?
As of 2020, electric automobiles are still far away from being popular around the world as intended. One of the reasons for that is the fact that they’ve never looked as familiar as those which use ICEs and that, in turn, can be explained by the fact that car design as we know it in nowadays was shaped considering only the latter. IC engines used to be as constant as four wheels, windows on the body’s upper half and doors on the sides. EVs are fighting the status quo.
Over time, the tendency is that old and new design trends will find balance, as they always have. Since many companies have made front grilles a distinctive design feature, it’ll be easier for them to derive an EV version than to abandon this component. Nevertheless, they’ll surely make good use of the new options to not only design the upcoming models, but also to reshape the features with which they work. Who knows what design tendencies we’ll see in the future?
