What’s the way forward for automobile interiors?

Look again on the evolution of automobile development and styling over the course of a century and the progress is clear. As we speak’s automobiles are styled like spaceships in comparison with the boxy, top-heavy motorised carriages of outdated. However with regards to interiors, the evolution has been slightly slower. Examine the cockpit of a 1912 Rolls-Royce and also you’ll probably discover 4 or extra forward-facing seats, quilted leather-based, wooden trim, milled metalwork, intricate dials, a clock, pedals, a gear lever and a steering wheel. It is likely to be slightly low-tech and drafty in contrast with the modern-day equal, however the format stays a lot the identical.

‘Traditionally, automobile interiors have been designed as singular, managed environments, providing occupants a novel, hermetically sealed expertise,’ says Luke Miles, founding father of brand-experience studio NewTerritory. ‘Whereas exterior design usually represents the model, the inside has been a missed alternative for delivering extra significant, multi-sensory experiences.’

Formally head of design for Virgin Atlantic and LG Europe, Miles based London-based NewTerritory in 2017, which specialises in expertise design for transport manufacturers reminiscent of Delta Air Traces and Mercedes-Benz AG. The Clerkenwell studio is awash with design literature, intriguing samples and mock-ups of an plane cabin and a automobile’s cockpit. It’s no shock this buzzy townhouse studio caught the eye of US expertise consultancy Geniant, which acquired it in July 2025.

Contained in the studio, Miles and his workforce work throughout a wide range of top-secret transport-related merchandise and options for well-known manufacturers, all designed to take inside areas into the following degree, instil that exact model’s beliefs on these travelling and, all being nicely, give them a constructive expertise to jot down residence about. Not all that simple when your viewers of travellers is both busy, distracted, harassed or all the above.

‘Traditionally we’ve performed a number of work in aviation areas, that are very high-density experiential areas, with an viewers that’s captive for a very long time. However with automotive, it’s totally different – you’re in a sealed atmosphere and have full management over your local weather and what’s happening round you,’ says Miles. ‘Different than simply the physicality of the inside, we’re how will you pull in additional of the senses to ship an expertise that’s significant and memorable.’

Whereas the construction and format of automobile interiors hasn’t modified a lot in a century, it hasn’t dampened carmakers’ urge for food for experimentation. In 2013, Mercedes made in-car perfume diffusers mainstream when it included its Air-Stability package deal into the S-Class, which pumped scents reminiscent of ‘Nightlife Temper’ or ‘Downtown Temper’ from refillable cartridges into the cabin.

Regardless of it being a barely extra upmarket tackle the air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror, Mercedes nonetheless makes use of perfume, alongside sound, local weather, lighting and seat therapeutic massage capabilities, to ‘increase driver wellbeing’, as a part of its consolation programmes in automobiles just like the all-electric EQS. It’s as full-on because it sounds, significantly when by accident triggered it on a quiet motorway stretch at night time.

At Jaguar Land Rover, the Vary Rover Sport SV noticed the arrival of the ‘Physique and Soul Seat’ (BASS) in 2024, which plugs into the leisure and vibrates the seat to the music – one thing that was added to the brand new Defender OCTA additionally. Whereas each Mercedes’ and JLR’s in-cabin improvements may be handed off as barely eccentric novelties, there may be one side of automobile inside innovation that every one carmakers have homed in on: the display.

‘There’s this sort of centre of gravity pull in the direction of the display, which has led to display dominance,’ says Miles. ‘There’s a lot you might do sensorially with that area. It isn’t about simply chasing know-how and going for screens as a result of they’re there, however about attempting to be extra quiet, delicate and empathic with how that automobile communicates with you. It’s exhausting to display a model by way of the display as a result of it turns into this midpoint the place you may’t actually inform one from the opposite,’ he provides.