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Travel 2040 Lexus enlists students at London’s Royal College of Art to explore the future of luxury mobility.
Cars that change colour with the seasons, personalised VTOLs that dock onto buildings, and tessellating pods that combine to form an urban swarm are just some of the concepts envisioned by students at London’s Royal College of Art when asked to imagine the future of luxury mobility. Lexus – a division of Japanese automaker Toyota – tasked post-graduates at the university’s Intelligent Mobility Design Centre to explore new vehicle architectures in a changing world, and to reimagine the role the Lexus brand might play in Europe’s mobility landscape beyond the next two decades, whether on land or in the sky. The six-month programme included mentoring and assessment sessions with Lexus design studio ED2, culminating in a competiton in which six projects were shortlisted, before Richard Newman’s Alto was selected as the eventual winner. “All of the designers impressed us with their thinking, their ideation and the breadth of their imagination,” explains Lance Scott, Senior Manager at ED2. “What they produced is not just fantasy, but based on factual study of what premium might mean in a future society.”
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