Kevin McCloud slams ‘stupid’ electric car design after suffering panic attack by getting stuck in one
Kevin McCloud has hit out at the design of electric cars after temporarily getting trapped in one while filming for Grand Designs.
The presenter of the iconic Channel 4 show is well known for his love of stunning properties but also carries the same passion for beautiful motors. While he prefers classic cars, the 65-year-old has also embraced alternative fuels and modern technology.
However, it hasn’t been without its problems, as he explained to award-winning motoring podcast Fuelling Around.
“I was in this car the other day and I had a panic attack because I couldn’t get out of it,” McCloud told the show’s co-presenters Jason Plato and Dave Vitty.
“There was no door handle on the door. They were filming me getting out of the car, and I swear to God they can’t use the shot, because it’s me just with my hand flapping it around going: ‘Where’s the handle? Where’s the handle?’ It turns out there’s a tiny button and it’s not even much. There’s got to be some kind of safety issue around that.
“My problem here is that with the advent of electric cars there’s a sort of consensus that ‘hey guys, it’s a free-for-all now, we can go back to designing crazy interiors with weird designs and really odd buttons to do stupid things’. It doesn’t make any sense.
“Here’s something highly intuitive. If you’ve got a forward and a backward lever or button, you’d think you press forward to go forward and pull back back to go backwards. It’s nearly always the other way around. I have to imagine the switch that’s in front of me is actually on the roof, like in an aeroplane, I can get it right. Otherwise, I try to do a three-point turn in the road and an idiot watches me stop, go to reverse and drive into the lamp-post in front of me instead.”
The design extraordinaire has owned two BMW i3s and still drives an electric car but doesn’t reveal what one during the episode.
His current fleet includes “one or two runners and a large number of cars in bits” while his personal favourites are a 1932 Marendaz, a 1921 Lancia Dikappa and a Fiat Dino from 1967.
“I am an early adopter of technologies so I’ve still driven a lot of electric cars and loved them and I still drive them,” he added during the episode, which covers a host of topics including fronting 25 years of Grand Designs.
“I know the i3 looks like a small toad, but technologically it’s a really fabulous car. They actually reinvented hybrid because they said: ‘Actually, let’s try and be principally electric and let’s use a tiny little petrol engine in the boot just to help you along’.
“I love the fact that the interior was all done with recycled wool and the rigid panels were done with hemp fibre and bio resin. They really tried to explore and I thought that was kind of the future but actually what’s happened instead is everyone is now making massive cars with massive electric batteries. The one thing I will say, having driven a lot of different manufacturer's cars, dare I say this, they’re all the same.
“This is the inevitable conclusion to a process of homogenization in car design that’s been happening for 30 years. If you didn’t have a logo on pretty well any modern car, you would not know what it was.”