Mini presents the Vision Urbanaut. An autonomous and fully electrically powered concept car, which above all shows how Mini envisions the space in a car in the future.
The future is electric and the future is autonomous. That applies according to many brands, at least when you talk about cars. Mini is still a bit careful in both areas, but this Vision Urbanaut shows that both things are being worked on. The specially designed concept car is fully electric and equipped for fully autonomous driving. The Urbanaut combines things we know from Mini with future music.
‘Major’ evolution
The exterior of the Urbanaut shows similarities with Mini as we know it today, especially in terms of lighting and in terms of ‘grille’. Yet something new is definitely going on here. The matrix LED lighting can change color and is completely hidden when switched off. The ‘grille’ is of course no longer a traditional grille because of the electric drive. It is a closed panel, behind which Mini has hidden the technology needed to make the Urbanaut drive independently. Also striking is the shape of the grille; it is a rounded octagon instead of the well-known hexagon. According to Mini an ‘evolution’ of the current grilles. In any case, kicking sacred houses is something that Mini does not shy away from.
This Mini is not really mini. With a length of 4.46 meters, it is already a large car in length. However, the height, of which Mini does not yet share the exact size, is the most striking. The brand also says that it is ‘unusually high’ for a Mini. Of course, all of this has to do with what is happening in the Urbanaut. That is the most important according to the subsidiary brand of BMW. It wants to show how you can optimally use the interior space of a car in the future for all kinds of things that have little or nothing to do with driving. After all, the Urbanaut does the driving itself.
Interior
You enter the Vision Urbanaut via one central entrance and then you can encounter different situations. In normal travel mode there are simply four seats, two per ‘row of seats’. Nothing shocking in that regard. Things will be different when the Urbanaut is transformed into a kind of seating area. The seats can be transformed into two sofas and a separate chair. A table with a plant has been placed in the middle. Nice and homely. In this arrangement, the Urbanaut’s dashboard slides into the floor to create the bench at the front and the controls of the car are moved to the table. If you want to make it all a bit cozier when you are standing still, you can open the windscreen upwards and thus create a kind of ‘balcony effect’ at the front, according to Mini.
That operation is also a different story. You can adjust the atmosphere in the Urbanaut by inserting a so-called ‘token’ (photo 9) into one of the three openings in the table. ‘Chill’ is the mode in which everything becomes as soft and calm as possible for the senses, so that you can concentrate optimally on, for example, your work or reading a book. In ‘Wanderlust’ mode everything is more focused on driving and you can operate the autonomous functions of the Urbanaut or decide to take the wheel yourself. Finally, there is ‘Vibe’, which is aimed at a pleasant gathering with others in the Mini. Then, in terms of sounds and visual matters, the most spectacle is taken to make it a stimulating experience. You can also set a personalized mode yourself.
Practice
All nice future music of course and one seems more convenient than the other, but what good is this in practice? Well, it reflects Mini’s vision of the future for the more conventional production cars, of course. Mini wants to get the most out of the space available in the cars. The fact that the wheels are traditionally positioned as far as possible on the corners of the cars plays an important role, but electric powertrains bring a new advantage. The lack of a gearbox and the fact that an electric motor takes up less space naturally helps to retain interior space. Combine that with technology for autonomous driving and the interior can be designed increasingly minimalist and more spacious.
Chances are that we will see a more forward-looking vision of Mini especially in a new all-electric crossover of the brand. That is in fact in the offing. Although Mini, like parent company BMW, wants to supply its models with both combustion engines and fully electric, ‘The Power of Choice’, as they call it, there is also one purely electric model of Mini in the barrel. It could just be that we already got a hint to that car with this Vision Urbanaut.