In 2040, You May Drive a Car That Looks Like This
The Lincoln Motor Company recently revealed a quartet of concept cars aimed at depicting the types of vehicles the automaker might potentially produce in 2040, and the designs are shocking and compelling in all the best ways. The concepts were created by four teams of transportation design students at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California—one of the world’s premier institutions for up-and-coming automotive thought—and were based on a very simple brief.
“We didn’t want to restrain or limit the students, so we had very few descriptors,” says Kemal Curic, Lincoln’s design director, who helped shepherd the project into existence. “We wanted an autonomous, electric, and shared two-seater, four-seater, high-riding four-seater, and six-seater. We wanted to include our brand pillars of humanity, beauty, and gliding, based on our vision of Quiet Flight, which is what Lincoln stands for. And we said, let’s dream up something the world has not yet seen.”
The results are quite stunning, and complete, in part because the automotive students worked in conjunction with colleagues in other design departments—film, illustration, animation, and architecture—to create not just vehicles, but also stories of the worlds in which these vehicles might exist.
