What would you do with 26 minutes of your morning and evening commute if you were encouraged to take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road? That’s the problem drivers will have when autonomous cars take over much of the daily drive, and it’s the one that Volvo is trying to solve with Concept 26, its innovative interior platform that elegantly shifts from driving command center to your own private “third space."
Volvo unveiled its C26 sculpture, also known as the Time Machine, at the 2015 Los Angeles International Auto Show. This next-generation concept isn’t a car—rather, it’s an interior cabin that gets its name from the amount of time Volvo says the typical commuter can recapture and spend focused on something else when autonomous drive becomes a reality.
The C26 interior is different than any driver’s seat on the market today because it has a split personality. On one side of the coin, it’s a driver-centric cockpit suitable for the backroads. On the other, it’s a comfortable extension of your living room when you set the car in autonomous mode and delegate driving to the car. It’s a single solution for a no-compromise driver’s seat. Moreover, it’s what Volvo says customers really want.
Move over, Tesla
The Time Machine is the end product of a 6,000-person survey on what they want in the car of the future. What you see in Tesla Model Ss equipped with AutoSteer on the road today isn’t true autonomous drive. Legally, the system still requires the drive to pay attention to the road. To Volvo, these semi-autonomous systems are half-baked: a premature technology experiment at best, and at worst a dangerous parlor trick (and they’ve seen the YouTube videos to prove it). You may as well be driving if you need to hold the steering wheel.
The driver's seat transforms from command center to private "third space" in the C26. (Credit:... [+]
But doing away with the steering wheel all together isn’t the answer. The art and pleasure of driving deserve to be preserved, says Jesper Andréasson, Director Consumer Insights & Business Development at Volvo Car Corporation, although the “save the manuals” campaign launched by driving purists is something akin to denial. There needs to be a system that lets the driver drive when he wants, yet relax when the car is driving. Volvo’s solution captures the best of both worlds.
How it works
At the heart of the next-generation cabin is a revolutionary car seat design that will help the driver disengage from driving so he can focus on something more meaningful, or nothing at all. The seat is different from what’s currently in cars because it’s composed of two separate pieces that tilt and recline without buttons, levers, or motors. It operates like a mashup of an office and dental chair, offering a flexibility and fluidity of movement that would make Herman Miller proud and extends it with full body recline, complete with footrest.
Sit in it and the pressure is immediately alleviated from your lower lumbar region because what Doug Frasher, Director of Advanced Research and Development for the Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center (VMCC), calls the “thigh pan” extends to keep the body’s center of gravity in the naval. In its most reclined state, its form is similar to an airline business-class lay-flat seat. It’s what every car seat should feel like, and while we’re at it, Volvo should license this to every airplane manufacturer out there. Sufficed to say, it beats the hell out of any 20-way power adjustable car seat with lumbar support.
A radically more comfortable seat is just the start of the Time Machine’s capabilities. To understand why a free-form car seat matters, you have to remember that the driver’s seat as you experience it today is designed to keep the driver at attention. You’re upright in a position that focuses on the road and cars ahead of you with immediate access to the instrument gauges, steering wheel, and pedals—great for driving, bad for doing everything else. But doing away with the command position isn't an option, because drivers still need this position for pleasure driving (on backroads, road trips and date nights when they enjoy this feeling of freedom and control). But when they feel like delegating the grunt parts of commute to the car (e.g., gridlock, bumper to bumper highway traffic, or circling the block looking for a parking space) they will need more space from the wheel and the road to disengage and do something more meaningful with their free time.
This is where reclining comes in. In an autonomous Volvo vehicle, there will be a point when the driver can hand off control to the car when the commute stops being fun. At that handoff mark, the steering wheel of the C26 sculpture retreats and the seat slides back. The driver selects one of preset modes: Drive, Create, and Relax. Each mode controls the seating position and moves the center console-integrated tablet with it. In some modes, a footrest extends and a 25-inch flat-screen for media viewing rotates out from the dashboard to put driver is in a better position to completely disengage from the driving experience. And at the point where the driver is expected to resume the helm, components are tucked away and the seat slides into its upright position.
I had a chance to try this cabin of the future in advance of the LA Auto Show. As I stepped into the driver’s seat, the pressure was immediately alleviated from my lower back. A fictitious route was highlighted on the digital instrument cluster, and a red dot marked the handoff point. As the vehicle I was pretend-driving approached this handoff point, I engaged levers that resembled paddle shifters on either side of the steering wheel and completed a “handshake,” which is something of a progress bar denoting that the vehicle is now in control of the drive. The seat slid back, the steering wheel retreated, and I was free to move about the cabin. I selected the Create mode, which is basically just a euphemism for doing more work, but the possibility of reviewing documents became almost fun as I watched the dashboard transform into an office. The transition is elegant, seamless, and the pinnacle of luxury.
This cabin is designed for production, but there are still some kinks that need to be worked out. The second I stepped into the chair, my heel left an ugly divot in the creamy leather of the foot rest. The seat is next-level comfort, but as a member of the diminutive 5th percentile of body shapes, I lacked the upper body weight to recline, and the seat kept tilting me back into an upright position. But by any measure, Volvo’s vision of the future is way more civilized than using the steering wheel as a make shift desk. And this is the value proposition that Volvo is bringing to the table.
Time is the ultimate luxury
The mechanics of autonomous drive have more or less been figured out, so it’s just a matter of time before truly self-driving vehicles are on the road from a range of manufacturers. The competition for the buyer’s wallets won’t be won with the most high-definition cameras or latest algorithms, but rather with the best interior cabin experience that helps the driver make the most of this idle space. By changing the conversation from how we drive to what we will be doing when we aren’t driving, Volvo is establishing time as the new currency of luxury.
But the promise of reclaimed time that comes with full autonomous drive is still a few years away. Volvo is adamant that this seat is more than just a shiny futuristic concept; that it’s designed for production and can fit in any Volvo vehicle that uses its new SPA platform, which in the next three years will be every vehicle that rolls off the assembly line. In fact, although the full vision of the C26 sculpture depends on autonomous vehicles, this seat will work in conventional automobiles which means that drivers of the most basic Volvos in the future will have a much better commute if they are relaxed and not suffering from lower back compression.
