Joe Simpson, research lead at Car Design Research, who supervises student research for the college’s vehicle design master’s program, tells his students to “forget about the current architecture of the car and think more systemically about how it fits into cities of the future”.

New driverless car technology – such as Google’s – is causing a paradigm shift in design, he said. Driverless cars no longer need a steering wheel. The interior and exterior might be designed differently and the space can be “multi-functional and multi-personal”, he explained.