Car concepts do not always highlight exactly what cars will look like and what they will be capable of in the near future. Sometimes they are just the embodiment of ideas and any wild fantasies of developers. One of these was demonstrated by the Lincoln company at Monterey Car Week, where it showed the Model L100 Concept.
A large glass car with doors taking three quarters of the body and a lifting roof (probably getting out of the car during a downpour would be even more fun), looks like something from a movie about the distant future. Of course, the concept is designed to be fully electric. And its external “inspiration” came from the classic model Lincoln Model L of 1922.
And all this is not the main thing in such a car, because the “feature” of the concept is control without the classic steering wheel and pedals. Here, the designers were inspired by children’s games with model cars. The essence of the idea is as simple as possible: the driver takes a figure of a car, which is installed on a special panel, and sets its direction of movement, which, accordingly, is already performed by a real car. Yes, as if being in childhood again, you can roll a small car on the surface with your hands, but actually driving a car.
“While talking to our designers about how we’ve reimagined the future of driving — how we can reimagine driving when you don’t need a steering wheel anymore — one of them recalled seeing his kids playing with toy cars. He watched them play with the cars, and it all seemed so natural when they grabbed the cars with their hands and steered them left and right,” comments the company’s global design director, Kemal Curic.
We are not talking about convenience now. Such a concept really looks very pretentious and there is no need to search for the flaws of the idea for a long time. It is enough to simply imagine how the car comes across a pothole in the road, which even slightly shakes the driver’s hand, and because of this the car will fly to the side, for example. Although it would really be much easier to park this way.
“You see children steering the car left and right and forward and back just moving it with their hands, it’s actually something very emotional, very connected. It was this aha! moment. When he [the designer] sketched it all out, he came up with this beautiful idea of this chess piece, this crystal piece, that you can place on this surface and grab it and move it around and move the actual vehicle,” Curic says.
A similar idea went through several variants of the idea. The initial one resembled a joystick, but later it turned into an unfixed model on a corresponding “tablet”.
“The surface it sits on is a map, and there’s a magnetic field that senses where the chess piece is moving, and that’s how you’d drive the car around on the map, around a city,” Curic added.
In any case, this is only a concept and it is far from a fact that someone will seriously consider its implementation. But despite all possible gaps in the idea, the company managed to do something unusual, futuristic and interesting. I will not be surprised if this concept, in one form or another, gets into some movie about the future, where the implementation of control will be just like that. But it will be such a future in which you can lose the “steering wheel” in your pockets, backpack, or among various little things on your desktop.
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