“Pure and Radical” Italian Design: Lancia’s Gorgeous Pu+Ra HPE Idea Automotive

Here is a stunning idea automobile with a robust identification, a transparent design imaginative and prescient and a horrible identify: The Lancia Pu+Ra HPE. (The “Pu+Ra” stands for “pure and radical,” whereas “HPE” is “excessive efficiency electrical.”)

The tight traces and daring, minimal surfacing mix smooth and sharp in the way in which that solely Italian automotive designers appear to have the ability to pull off.

Whereas the automobile is unmistakably a Twenty first-century design, there’s additionally some fantastic throwback parts to earlier a long time and an earlier, certainly extra pure, spirit that we so typically see missing in at this time’s ideas. The gesture of the automobile evokes the kind of renderings you’d see in ’90s problems with Automotive Styling.

Keep in mind the ’80s, when industrial designers appreciated to randomly incorporate pure geometric shapes inside non-geometric varieties? The highest view of the automobile, which options an electrochromic glass roof, reveals a dead-circular sunroof (I don’t know the way it’s meant to open):

A second circle contains the dashboard. In autonomous mode, it serves as a flat desk; when a human takes over, the entrance half tilts all the way down to grow to be the instrument panel.

The circle motif can be echoed within the “tea desk” between the seats (there’s one each entrance and rear), meant “to elegantly convey the standard cosiness of a house setting.”

The louvered impact of the Venetian sunshade on the rear window additionally recollects the ’80s:

The plush inside, in the meantime—completed in partnership with Cassina–recalls ’70s furnishings.

The automobile seems to be even higher in video than it does within the nonetheless photographs:

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Lancia says the Pu+Ra HPE is supposed to function their “manifesto for the following 10 years.”