The Interior of the Future—What Happens When the Steering Wheel Goes Away?

The insides of today's cars carry a radically different style than they did 50 years ago—chrome and vinyl have been replaced by piano black plastic and Alcantara, for example—yet the core function of the interior has stayed the same: piloting the machine. The steering wheel and pedals haven't changed much; they're still positioned within easy reach of the driver and continue to take up a significant chunk of space.

Likewise, the same concessions are being made to the car's traditional mechanical components. The transmission tunnel, a meaty divider between left and right, remains the most significant spatial compromise in many cars—forcing a rigid, inflexible cockpit layout.

In the coming autonomous age, all that will change. When the driver controls finally disappear, the car will pilot itself and rely on only the most basic of inputs from its occupants as they're whisked away to wherever they ask it to go.

Meanwhile, the electrification of the automobile will usher in a new era of interior design, thanks to the proliferation of flexible, flat-floor configurations suitable for work, play, and everything in between. What will the future of the cabin look like? Here are some things to keep an eye out for over the next few decades as the car inevitably evolves.

When designers have complete freedom to rethink an interior sans driver controls or mechanical limitations, cars will begin to look radically different on the inside.

Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst for e-mobility at Guidehouse Insights, referenced a few current prototype autonomous vehicles: "The Cruise Origin and Zoox VH6 shift the interior layout to carriage seating (with everyone facing the center). This leaves more open space for legroom and easier ingress/egress. It can also facilitate flexibility for inserting lockers for last-mile delivery or accommodating wheelchairs."

A car that can convert to a delivery van could generate its owner profits when it would otherwise be siting idle in a parking lot. But a car that can shift its interior to suit different customer needs could also be very powerful. Volvo put forth a compelling idea for a future like this with its 360c concept. The vision here is less about taking your living space with you but instead creating a new space that dynamically reconfigures based on what you're doing, who you're doing it with, and where you're going.

"We explored four themes for the interior layout," Lisa Reeves, head of interior design at Volvo Cars, said about the 360c. The first two themes entail four seats facing each other around a slender table. One is for family time, browsing the morning news, and eating breakfast. The second is similar but configured more for business, "a static office space on the outskirts of the city or for meetings on the move," Reeves said. Here, the window glass acts as a projected display to go over things like presentation notes or research findings.

There's also a "party car" mode, something like a rolling pregame ahead of a night out with synchronized dance and music and, yes, plenty of adult beverages—theoretically legal since nobody will be driving.

Finally, there's the "sleep car" configuration, which is perhaps the most compelling. Here, the 360c is configured for one expansive lounge chair that's perfect for reclining and binging whatever crime drama we'll be obsessed with in 20 years time. When it's time for sleep, the seat folds flat, turning into a cocooning bed that puts the best business-class airline accommodations to shame.

Even basic automotive seats of the future will have greater aspects of comfort than today's chairs. A Swiss company called Dätwyler has shown off concept seats that use shape-changing electro-active polymers to fill bladders within the seat cushions.

These polymers change shape when they receive an electrical charge, not unlike a human muscle, and are not only far more efficient than the air pumps and rollers that many modern luxury cars use in today's massaging seats but also totally quiet and more compact. This could mean more wonderful massages without reducing range or adding in-cabin noise.

But the most important aspect of comfort in an autonomous vehicle might be something more primal: motion sickness. "Nausea is a crucial consideration for automated vehicles," Guidehouse's Abuelsamid said. "People riding in vehicles who aren't directly involved in the driving task tend to be much more prone to nausea, and it can be further exacerbated by the way the vehicle is controlled."

According to University of Michigan research, roughly half of all people suffer from motion sickness, usually caused by reading or mindlessly noodling on their phones in cars. Michael Sivak is the managing director of Sivak Applied Research and the former director of sustainable worldwide transportation at the University of Michigan. Regarding this research, Sivak said: "In autonomous cars, everyone will be a passenger. So you will have a larger potential pool of sick people. The protection that drivers have received from driving won't be there anymore."

In cars, motion sickness is usually caused by your body feeling motion but your eyes seeing nothing other than the book you're reading or the TikTok you're watching. Sivak has patented a solution that uses lights to stimulate your peripheral vision in the same way it would be by looking out the window.

Japanese automotive supplier NHK has another solution: seats with extended headrests that cradle and stabilize the head, which it says reduces the onset of nausea by a third.

At the end of the day, the most important solutions might come from the virtual drivers themselves. Autonomous cars will need to learn to be not only safe and efficient but also smooth and consistent to make sure passengers stay happy and healthy. "Smoothing out the control [with subtle acceleration, braking, and steering] will be a key part of the solution though perhaps not all of it," Abuelsamid said.

Cars with in-cabin Wi-Fi are nearly ubiquitous at this point, and an estimated 91 percent of new cars sold in America have active connections. That means they can connect to the internet whether or not you remembered your phone.

Those active data connections will just keep getting faster. 5G wireless, rolling out now in most cities, is upward of 100 times faster than the 4G LTE connections most new cars use today, so just upgrading them to 5G will be a massive performance update, something that could be crucial as more and more cars accept things like over-the-air software updates.

Soon even 5G won't be good enough. China has already launched its first prototype 6G satellite. That next generation of wireless is expected to be in service by 2030 and, by some projections, could be another 100 times faster even than 5G. What does that mean? Typical 4G connections can take more than an hour to download a high-definition film. With gigabit 5G speeds, it's possible to download a full film in less than a minute. At 6G speeds, that could theoretically be done in less than a second.

More significantly, imagine fully immersive VR experiences, massively complex compared to simple two-dimensional films, streaming directly to the car. And, with lower latency, in-car gaming would be just as snappy and responsive as you'd expect it to be when sitting at home.

Americans spend about a third of the average workday doing work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has actually increased by 30 minutes over the past 18 years. Given our workaholic tendencies, it'll surely just keep climbing over the next 20 or 30 years that it's going to take to get autonomous cars everywhere we need them.

The future of work is still a nebulous concept, but lately Meta, the company that owns Facebook, has been making waves by pushing the boundaries on what's possible in virtual and augmented reality.

Briefly, virtual reality is wearing a headset that completely blocks your view of the world around you, instead giving you a digital view into a virtual world full of ... well, anything. Augmented reality is similar, but here you're still able to see the real world, this time with information overlaid on top of it. This could be anything from projected information about roadside points of interest to digital video game characters jumping around on your dashboard.

Meta has been bundling all that into what it calls the Metaverse, betting billions that this technology will be the future. Business productivity in the Metaverse has been the company's latest big push. Major brands like Disney and Procter & Gamble have already hired so-called Chief Metaverse Officers, while big-business consulting firm Accenture has shown off an in-Metaverse office that could be a preview of virtual workplaces to come.

Why is that relevant here? Because working in the Metaverse doesn't require a desk or even a laptop. You could just throw on a headset and be virtually teleported to anywhere—the biggest, most spacious corner office on the planet. Common productivity apps and web browsers are being rewritten for use in VR, while collaboration in virtual meetings will be far more engaging than on something flat and lifeless like Zoom.

In the future, working from your car might be even more productive than being in the office.

The Metaverse won't just be for work. It'll be for play, too. In fact, the most popular VR applications right now are all games, and there's no reason to believe that's going to change any time soon. So look forward to some major in-car VR gaming—hopefully with no nausea thanks to some of the technologies mentioned above.

Still, in-car entertainment won't just be about gaming. Sometimes you'll want to kick back and enjoy something more visual with others. Today's in-dash displays are getting bigger and brighter, but in the future there's no guarantee that cars will even have a dashboard. That's part of the thinking behind Volvo's Ambiance Interior, which beams images right onto the ceiling of the car. Pair that with integrated surround sound, and you've got a high-quality theater experience on wheels.

Interestingly, that sound experience might be a very personal thing. "Directed personal audio is a technology that should be appearing in production soon, where each occupant can have individual audio cocoons," Abuelsamid said. With this technology, narrow beams of sound are directed specifically at an individual, tracking them as they move. Others nearby can't hear a thing. "This could be an interesting technology in shared robotaxis."

Finally, AR can come into play for in-car entertainment, as well. Augmented reality doesn't just mean wearing silly glasses. For the Volvo 360c, the window glass and even the in-car air freshener of the vehicle can be used to augment reality. "AR is used in the side glass, enabling the passengers to block out the landscape if they wish, from a busy city scene to escape into a relaxing safe place by displaying scenes of nature of their choice on the side glass," Volvo's Reeves said. "A scent module matches the scene to provide tranquility."

The big question on all of these technologies, of course, is when. While much of the above is possible today, without self-driving cars much of it needs to stay at home. Sadly, as we progress from one year to the next, true widespread implementations of autonomous machines never seem to get any closer.

Volvo's Reeves said there's no timeline at all for the 360c, saying it's "a project to start conversations about the possibilities of autonomous drive, exploring the benefits to customers in their daily lives, and to understand public perceptions."

The reality is that autonomous driving technology is likely still decades away from being widely available and functional on the majority of roads around us. But as we get closer to that future, look for many of these technologies to begin filtering into cars. Soon, we'll wonder how we survived without our in-car Metaverse and high-definition massaging seats.