Car manufacturers have a long history of making “concept cars of the future” that are really publicity stunts to make them appear to be working on cutting edge technology. People really eat this stuff up too. I’ve been guilty myself of falling for it. Unfortunately this trend has lasting impacts on something I care about a lot: the electric car industry.

Those wheels! Why!?

Let’s take a look at a recent example of this. Here’s an image from a press release of the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” Volkswagon concept electric car from September 2016. It has all the painfully cliché blue accents all over it that we’ve seen time and time again to let you know “It’s an electric car! from the future!”. Maybe somebody needs to inform these car designers that electricity has been around for over a century now.

Thankfully, this car will never be produced. Nobody will ever buy or drive this car. So who cares? Why waste valuable time on stuff like this? What is revolutionary about images or a even a one-off prototype of a fake car? Why do we continue this ridiculous tradition of making an absurd car design? More importantly, why do we do this with electric cars the most, and why do they always look like high tech dildos from the future?

It’s not just an annoying tradition either, because it has caused permanent damage to electric car design. To this day, most of the auto industry continues to make their electric cars look ridiculous. Why? Because they think that electric cars are an eccentric idea, that only eccentric people will buy into. So they design their cars to look like they are obviously electric. I think most people who want an electric car would agree that we don’t want weird looking electric cars. We just want what is under the hood to change and nothing else.

We don’t want weird looking electric cars. We just want what is under the hood to change and nothing else.

I was out and about yesterday and saw a BMW i8 parked in front of a mall. BMW makes some really beautiful cars, but this car is not one of them. The blue TRON-like accents are so bad and the overall design is something an 8 year old would think is cool.

Many of the car manufacturers are scratching their heads and wondering why a company like Tesla Motors is able to do what it’s doing and selling so many electric cars. There are a lot of reasons that Tesla is successful, and I worked there for a few years and can tell you they work around the clock like maniacs there. The one most important reason for their success though: They made an amazing overall car that doesn’t look or drive like a typical electric car. That’s why I went to work for Tesla. They are on a mission to make electric cars mainstream.

We need good looking electric cars right now.

Major car manufacturers keep sending the message that electric cars are not ready to be mainstream. Even if they aren’t meaning to do it, it’s coming across in their car designs. But as our power supply continues to move toward cleaner sources, we have to position ourselves to be in a place to use that clean energy. Right now it makes up a small portion of the global electricity supply but that is changing very fast.

Internal combustion engines are the technology of the past, at least in cars, and they will die out entirely. I just want to see auto manufacturers take this seriously. Our planet and our health is at stake, and so is the future of their company. I know that every major car company is working on electric vehicles and has at least one model, but we also need them to get serious about selling lots of them. The only way to do that is to make them look good so ordinary people will want to buy them.

TLDR; I think we all want an electric car that looks like this:

Not like this:

Thanks for reading.