Can AI design a car?

Smart is using artificial intelligence to help design its new-generation vehicles and the brand’s chief designer believes it will continue to play a key role going forward, especially for EVs.

“AI just blows you away with possibilities,” said design boss Kai Sieber.

“What is the next thing, is that we are working a lot with AI, but what is always important is to keep true to your idea.

“It’s so easy to be carried away by what is possible with AI, and then you would do what the tool proposes because it surprises you, you fall in love.”

Anyone who has played with an AI image generator will be familiar with that sense of gratification, especially as artificial intelligence tools have become more adept at translating text prompts into finished images.

The utility of AI tools has been embraced by design departments like Smart's, with Sieber telling carsales how AI has become a valuable tool in the earlier phases of design, being deployed somewhere between pencil-on-paper concept sketches and the emergence of scale models.

AI’s value to designers lies in its ability to quickly blast out vast numbers of iterations based on a single concept, helping guide the styluses of designers rather than replacing them altogether.

Can AI design a car from top to bottom, though?

Perhaps theoretically, but the car industry sees it as just another tool for designers to use during the ideation phase.

From Sieber’s perspective, knowing when to disengage from AI and return to more traditional design tools is vital.

“At a certain point, you lose sight – it’s not really what I intended to design,” he said.

“The important thing is that we need to guide the tool, and I’m always very careful that we’re not just following a tool, because that is when you’re not standing out with your own design.

“Car design needs to be clear and honest and recognisable, it needs to have a human touch.”

Speaking to the #5’s design which takes Smart into the realm of boxy, upright SUVs for the first time, Sieber said for a brief period the brand was heading toward a vehicle that would look more akin to a Tesla Model Y than the outdoorsy two-box wagon it revealed in Byron Bay last week.

“The first discussion was that, okay, it’s an EV, we need all the range we can get so we will do an aero SUV like the Tesla Y, but that’s not too smart,” he said.

“So, the Smart way is that we need to be honest. For a two-seater you want it as small as you can get it, but if it’s an SUV, you really want it to look like an SUV.

“Simply, if you tell a child ‘draw an SUV’, you get a box. Therefore, I want to have it boxy, we want to have it boxy.”

However, a side-effect of chasing that boxy aesthetic was a negative impact on maximum range.

According to Sieber, convincing Smart’s senior management to let the #5’s upright form through the goalposts took some diplomacy.

“It sparked this discussion that we would not achieve good aerodynamics, and we will lose 15 miles or 20 miles of autonomy,” he said.

“We even had discussions with the board and we had, until the end, still always a more aerodynamic proposal competing alongside the boxy proposal.

“And then we managed to convince everybody about the boxy proposal, because we decided that by 2025-2026, range anxiety and battery technology will be better, and we convinced everybody that #5 would have enough range.”

So far the only battery that has been confirmed for the Smart #5 is a 100kWh NCM pack, though other execs at the company have told us that this won’t be the sole battery option.

With a maximum range of 740km on the Chinese CLTC test when equipped with that 100kWh battery (expect a real-world number closer to 600km), it’s clear that the pursuit of a rugged and boxy shape has come at an aerodynamic penalty, but it’s a compromise that Smart – and Sieber – thinks is worth making.

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