A lounge on four wheels - visions of the car in 2030

By Christoph Walter Nov 16, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Munich - In less than two decades most cars on our roads will be as comfortable as a living room with mummy and the children reclining on the settee while daddy is playing with the remote nearby.

Peter Naumann, a design professor at Munich University, believes it quite possible that the cars in the year 2030 will still have four wheels but that this will just about be the only similarity with the car of today.

The driver will be seated in the rear while passengers are seated sideways on a couch. There will be nothing like the switches, pedals and steering wheel found in every car today.

A draft sketch made by one of the professor's students took up concepts in current cars, transforming them to the future.

'Let us just take the networked car as an example' with so-called car-to-car and car-to-X communication systems, Naumann says. 'With a traffic infrastructure of driver assistance systems, sensors in vehicles, traffic signs and traffic lights, accidents could soon be history and then safety belts, air bags or seats facing the driving direction will be made obsolete,' he adds.

Without many of the safety assistance systems on board, cars will be much lighter, giving designers greater flexibility. Automatic functions will take over much of the driver tasks, according to Professor Juergen Leohold, head of VW research. Then it is only a step away to the car becoming something like an extended living room.

'The driver could be surfing the internet, reading books, having a meal or playing a game - much is possible,' he said.

Some vehicles, like automatic and emission-free taxis in the cities, will not even be recognisable as a car, according to Naumann. Chevrolet is for instance working on a two-seater electric EN-V vehicle that can drive without a driver but can also be steered manually if the need arises.