Inside out: how home design is playing muse to the Kia EV3

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The South Korean automotive brand is looking beyond the car, citing the home as a direct inspiration for its incoming compact SUV. Image credits: courtesy of Kia

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Kia's EV3 base model.

Amid all the mainstream conversations that get taken up by charging times and kilometre range that get thrown around about EVs in Australia, there’s also an exciting conversation happening within design circles about the shifting role of the car itself that often gets missed within consumer discussions: future liveability.

Unlike cars of the past, EVs now offer us moments more closely aligned to what we would do in our homes. With an EV, we can be free to just sit in our cars and just stare into space, doom scroll, watch a movie, take meetings or chat with friends—without running a polluting, idle engine. New behaviour means we might stop at a charging point for 30-45 minutes at a time and eat a snack or send some emails while we’re waiting. And over-the-air software update technologies mean our cars will advance alongside our personal devices, blurring the line between the two so that the car itself is an extension of our handheld technology.

The car is no longer what it used to be, it’s now a workplace, a sanctuary, a meeting place and, in an EV, a mode of serene transportation. It’s for this reason, some car designers, like those at Kia, are looking beyond the automotive industry for inspiration and direction, and instead, citing the home as a key interior design muse.

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The EV3 GTL model interior.

“One of the great advantages we have with these new platforms is there’s a lot more potential for interior space,” Jochen Paesen, Kia’s vice president of interior design, told us at Milan Design Week, where Kia held a private reveal of the incoming compact fully-electric SUV, the Kia EV3. “Our designers took inspiration from living rooms, that idea of small spaces that are very versatile. And combined that with product design, rather than the traditional automotive styling.”

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The EV3 base model interior.

In the EV3, the living room-like feel is interpreted through the use of soft fabrics across the dashboard (in place of hard plastics of automotive interiors-past), horizontal lines that lift the eye and increase vision and a sense of openness, and lots of fresh ideas for storage and lifestyle elements. Signalling and speaking to the car-as-a-meeting place shift is a new centre console that transforms into a pull-out table big enough to use as a laptop stand. While we’re not entirely sure this will make it to Australia (we can hope), at the launch, it was crafted in a new Terrazzo-like material made from recycled plastics*. “We just wanted to liven things up a little bit, bring a little bit of character to the interior,” says Paesen, “We’re using fabrics and inspirations from homes, from furniture and from product design, to create a warm and welcoming feeling.”

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The EV3 GTL model.

Delving deeper into the process of uncoupling automotive design from its past to look to the future, senior vice president and head of Kia Design Centre, Karim Habib, says it’s a mindset rooted in balance—particularly when we talk about the pillars of a small crossover SUV, and what it might mean to a lot of people. “One of the things in this segment that we talk about is dynamics or stance, or some sort of capability of an SUV. This is something very traditional,” says Habib. As with all of Kia’s new designs, there’s a remix of ideas at play. The South Korean carmaker refers to its design ethos as ‘opposites united’—an approach filled with contract and tension, but it’s also reflective of Korean creative culture itself, from K-pop to fashion and technology—it’s the idea, says Habib of taking what has existed before, and adding contrast, tension or, making things that elevate utility and speak to the messiness of life directly. “The remix here is, we are creating something very automotive and very much about driving. But also, we're trying to bring in something that feels very, very much like a living space,” he says.

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The EV3 GTL model.

The EV3 will be arriving in Australia within the next year and is the smallest model (around the same size as a Kia Seltos) within the trio of polygonic-shaped EV SUVs recently launched by Kia. You may already be familiar with the family-sized flagship Kia EV9 and mid-sized EV5, but the EV3 is aimed at a more urban customer. Habib calls it the perfect ‘companion’, a car that’s not too big, not too small, spacious enough to get away for the weekend (or longer) and is still packed with the high level of detail, technology and thinking that the other two Kia EV models have excelled in, which has arguably helped elevate Kia’s image as a leader in automotive design.

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The EV3 base model interior.

“I think If you try to focus on the essence of your theme, then automatically, it'll be simpler,” says Habib, talking about how the Kia design team are attempting to re-contextualise the role of the car, while also designing for longevity and personal impact. “Take a look at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,” he says. “Obviously, simplicity was not very high on Frank Gehry’s list of things. Right? And that may have lost some interest over time, but I do think it will have longevity. Because it has really contributed to architecture. And this is one of the things we [the Kia design team] talk a lot about: it has to bring something to current design. I don't think any of us wants to be just a car designer, I think we want to bring the field of design forward.”