Stand next to a modern electric vehicle and a petrol car of similar size and age, and the visual differences are obvious even if you cannot immediately name what is causing them. The proportions feel different. The front end reads differently. The overall silhouette has a quality that most people describe as futuristic, though that word does less explanatory work than it might seem.
Those differences are not accidental or purely aesthetic choices. They are the direct result of the engineering changes that come with removing a combustion engine and replacing it with an electric drivetrain. Electric vehicle body design is shaped, sometimes literally, by the technology underneath the body panels.
This post explains what makes electric vehicles designs look the way they do, what the main body design decisions involve, and how designers are using the freedom the electric drivetrain creates to develop a visual language that feels right for the technology.
The Engineering Changes That Drive Body Design
To understand electric vehicle body design, it helps to start with what actually changes when you remove the combustion engine and replace it with an electric drivetrain.
The most visible change is at the front of the vehicle. A combustion engine generates significant heat and requires a constant supply of airflow through the front grille to stay cool. The grille is a functional necessity on a petrol car. Remove the engine and the primary reason for the grille disappears. Many EV manufacturers have responded by reducing the grille dramatically or eliminating it entirely. This changes the visual character of the front of the vehicle in ways that electric car body design is still exploring.
Without an engine, the front of the vehicle becomes available for other uses. The frunk, or front trunk, is the most practical result of this change. Where an engine block previously occupied the space under the front bonnet, EV designers can offer usable storage. The size and shape of this space varies between manufacturers depending on how front suspension, cooling systems, and power electronics are packaged, but it represents a functional advantage that petrol-era body design simply cannot offer.
The floor is the other major area transformed by electrification. A conventional petrol car’s floor has to accommodate an exhaust system running the full length of the car, a transmission tunnel, and a fuel tank under the rear seats. These requirements push the floor upward and constrain how interior space can be arranged. An EV’s floor can be genuinely flat. The battery pack sits below the floor structure, the motors sit at the axles, and there is no central tunnel. This creates a flat, flexible cabin that makes many EVs feel more spacious inside than their exterior dimensions would suggest.
Aerodynamics in Electric Car Body Design
Aerodynamics play a more central role in electric car body design than in conventional vehicle design, and for a straightforward reason. Range is one of the most important competitive differentiators for EVs, and aerodynamic drag has a significant impact on energy consumption, particularly at motorway speeds.
Reducing drag has a disproportionate benefit for highway range. A vehicle with a drag coefficient of 0.23, the figure achieved by the Hyundai IONIQ 6, uses meaningfully less energy at motorway speeds than one with a
coefficient of 0.29, even if their battery capacities are identical. For manufacturers trying to maximise real-world range without simply fitting heavier and more expensive battery packs, aerodynamic efficiency is one of the most effective tools available.
This focus on aerodynamics is shaping electric vehicles designs in specific ways. Rooflines slope earlier and more gradually than on equivalent petrol cars, reducing the drag created at the rear. Wheel arches are tighter to the wheel. Door handles are flush or retractable on many models. Underbody panels are smoother and more complete. Rear diffusers and active aerodynamic elements that adjust at speed are increasingly common.
The creative challenge in electric car body design is resolving the tension between aerodynamic efficiency and other priorities, visual distinctiveness, interior headroom, and practical access. The best EV designers are finding ways to address that tension that feel genuinely original.
How Electric Car Design Has Evolved: Old to New
The visual language of electric vehicles is still being established, and looking at how electric car design has evolved since the earliest commercially significant models is instructive.
In the early era of modern EVs, most vehicles looked either like conventional petrol cars adapted for an electric drivetrain, or like deliberately unusual concept-car exercises designed to signal their technological difference through unconventional shapes. Early versions of vehicles like the Nissan Leaf made few visual concessions to the electric powertrain they carried. The BMW i3 went in the opposite direction, genuinely distinctive in its electric car old design era but divisive in public reception.
The generation of electric vehicles designs that emerged from roughly 2019 onwards showed a clearer sense of what EV design could look like when developed from first principles. The Volkswagen ID.4, the Hyundai IONIQ 5, the Kia EV6, and the Tesla Model Y all use the freedoms of the electric drivetrain to create proportions and details that would not be possible on petrol equivalents, each at a different point on the spectrum between accessible and distinctive.
The IONIQ 5 is a useful example of what confident electric car body design looks like when it commits to a clear point of view. Its proportions are unusual, with a long wheelbase relative to its overall length, made possible by the skateboard platform that removes the front and rear overhangs required for drivetrain components. Its exterior details, pixel-inspired lighting, flush door handles, and a parametric surface treatment, reference digital aesthetics without feeling forced. It looks like what it is.
Electric Car Best Design: The Interior
The interior of an EV is where many of the most significant departures from petrol-era design are felt most directly. The flat floor is the most fundamental change, creating an open, lounge-like quality in the best EV interiors that is impossible to achieve in a car with a transmission tunnel dividing the front footwells.
The dashboard is the other area where EV interior design has diverged most from conventional vehicles, and where the results have been most uneven. With no mechanical speedometer cable from the gearbox, no tachometer, and a much simpler set of mechanical controls required, EV designers have had real freedom to reimagine the dashboard.
Many have responded by consolidating controls into large central touchscreens and reducing or removing physical controls. This creates a visually clean result that photographs well and communicates technological sophistication. Whether it serves drivers well is a separate question, and the evidence from user experience research and owner feedback consistently suggests the answer is mixed.
Physical controls allow adjustment by feel without requiring the driver to look away from the road. A touchscreen requires looking to locate the control, confirming the touch registered, and often checking the result. In a parked vehicle, that is a minor inconvenience. In a moving vehicle, it is a safety consideration that the best electric car body design and interior design teams are increasingly taking seriously. The conversation in the industry is
shifting toward using both physical and digital controls intelligently, placing each where it genuinely serves the driver in real conditions.
Electric Car Design Projects and New Directions in 2025
The current generation of EVs is still early in the development of a distinctly electric visual language. Electric car design project work happening at manufacturers and design schools in 2025 points toward several directions likely to define the next decade.
Lighting is one of the most active areas of differentiation. LED and OLED lighting technology enables thinner, more precise, more expressive signatures than earlier lighting designs could achieve. Full-width light strips running across the front and rear of the vehicle, dynamic animations on entry and exit, and lighting that communicates the vehicle’s state through its behaviour are all appearing on recent models and becoming more common.
The electric vehicle wrap design market is worth noting as an indicator of how EV owners relate to their vehicles aesthetically. The flat, smooth surfaces of most EVs make them well-suited to vinyl wraps, and a significant aftermarket has grown around customising EV exteriors in ways that are less practical on the more complex surfaces typical of petrol cars.
Electric vehicle 3d design work is enabling exploration that was not practically possible in earlier eras of automotive design. Vehicle shapes can be developed and validated in virtual environments with far greater accuracy and speed than physical modelling allowed. This compresses development timelines and allows more design variations to be explored before committing to a direction. The tools available for electric vehicle 3d design work are increasingly accessible beyond the traditional automotive design studio, which is opening up the conversation to a broader group of designers and researchers.
Conclusion
Electric vehicle body design is not simply the design of petrol cars adapted for a different drivetrain. The engineering changes that come with electrification, the removal of the combustion engine, the flat battery floor, the freedom from exhaust and transmission constraints, create genuine new possibilities for how vehicles can be shaped, proportioned, and detailed.
The best designers working in this space are using those possibilities to develop electric vehicles designs that feel appropriate to the technology rather than borrowed from petrol-era conventions. The aesthetic of the electric vehicle is still being defined, and the most interesting work is still ahead.
For designers who want to contribute to that definition, the EV space offers something rare: problems where the conventions are not yet fixed and where thoughtful design can genuinely shape what becomes normal. Follow Riye Volts for ongoing writing on EV design, from electric vehicle body design to dashboard interfaces and the ownership experiences that complete the picture.