A leading design firm has come up with a concept for an ultra-low emission car that it believes could replace environmentally-damaging short-haul flying in future.
Hinting at its design ethos, the six-seater is called the Budget Airline Car and has been created by Car Design Research (CDR), a UK-based agency that has worked with 11 of the world’s top 20 car companies over the last 20 years.
Designers Yichen Shu in China and Aditya Jangid worked from the premise that a short-haul flight costs roughly 250g/km of CO2 per passenger, and sought to reduce that figure as far as possible.
While it remains a concept, they claim the the Budget Airline Car’s carbon footprint would be 2% of that of a plane’s, reasoning that an electric car typically results in around 30g/km of CO2 being produced by the energy it is powered with, which equates to 5g/km per passenger in a six-seater.
However, this figure is then further reduced by what the Budget Airline Car’s describe as an “uncompromising approach” to efficient design “unlike today’s performance orientated electric crossovers”, chiefly led by aerodynamics, weight-saving and a powertrain optimised to always prioritise efficiency at cruising speeds.
Underlining the car’s ethos as being an alternative to flying, all six seats, arranged in three rows in the five-metre long car, are individual, so that passengers can have their own space should they not know each other, as is often the case when flying. All the seats also have the same amount of space around them, an arrangement that its makers say is possible because of the space-saving of electric motors over a combustion engine.
The seating layout also means the Budget Airline Car can be 1.8-metres wide and 1.5-metres high - less than on a traditional car, and enough to give it a frontal area 20% less than normal, vastly improving its aerodynamic efficiency.
Although the concept features a steering wheel and controls, its makers say an autonomous application has also been considered.
The Budget Airline Car remains a concept, with no concrete plans to move it into production.
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