03. INTERVIEWS
Interview with Mark Adams
Interview with Mark Adams Vice President of Design, GM Europe Words Hannah Macmurray Photography Olgun Kordal
M
eet Mark Adams, uber Design Chief of GM Europe! As the Ampera wins one accolade after another and launches in the UK we thought we should pick his brains on what the future of green car design holds starting with the seemingly left-field decision to create the Rak-e. It turns out he truly believes that positive, green, electrifying change will come to cities around the world and is determined that it not be boring, cookie-cutter change. We find out how far and how fun building the RAK-e was and where it will take Adams and his team in the years to come. Green Car Design : Why did you choose to use Kiska to help you build/design the Rak-e? It seems like a total break away from your day-to-day design routine… Mark Adams : Absolutely! I think that the whole point about electrification of the automobile is starting to build momentum and clearly, as was shown with Ampera winning Car Of the Year, we have got a fantastic core product for our brand that really delivers a mainstream execution. What we wanted to keep building on was all of the other legs of urban mobility and electrification that support our brand message as well. So, we were looking at city centres now, more city centres are starting to put up, if not physical barriers, there are sort of this psychological barriers of ‘stay out…you are
polluting our cities’. Even things like the London Congestion Charge hinder movement and many other cities are picking that up so it’s really sort of pushing out the normal automobile. I guess in the future we see that’s going to magnify, so we are starting to look at how can you create something that is truly much smaller, almost compact around the driver and maybe the occupant. But how can we do something that is super efficient, very light weight, full electric, zero emissions, but also fun to drive? And also gives you this flexibility to not have to just stay in the city because some of these concepts are very much focused on only city driving and you can never go out on the open road. We said we want something that if you had a long commute, lets say 30 miles from outside of a city to a city centre; you can go on fast roads too. That’s when we came up with this concept (points to the Rak-e) that could be fast enough at the right point to keep up even with Autobahn traffic but to feel like a cross between a car and a motorbike to get in the fun aspect of a motorbike and sense of freedom and compactness. In fact, the original concept was a three-wheeler but that didn’t give us the driving dynamic and stability that we also wanted so we created this four wheel concept but it has a very special four wheels, the two wheels at the back are very close together. Our whole philosophy was about how you can simplify the car to reduce the weight but still be stable and dynamic.