Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

Imagine it’s the future. You’re standing in a residential area of a British city. Thanks to cleaner car technology, the suburbs are leafier than they used to be. The buildings look cleaner and brighter, with façades that incorporate more glass and sustainable materials such as woods. Yet perhaps the most surprising feature of this landscape is the absence of parked cars.

Sure, there are a few stationery vehicles dotted here and there, but it’s nothing like as bad as the situation in the early 21st Century. Then, streets were clogged frequently, or even inaccessible to two-way traffic. Urban drivers were prone to a fraught mechanical dance of ill manners. Road rage flared. And rows of unoccupied vehicles served as an invitation to thieves.

What’s changed is that cars are increasingly being parked inside the home - not merely in garages but as an extension to living spaces. With no exhaust fumes to worry about (certainly none at low speeds), the car can be driven into the house to dock with domestic functions. So, for example, the seats can recline to become the bed in a bedroom, or reposition themselves to serve as living room furniture.

It’s an old idea but one that has become more viable and desirable as the era of zero-emission urban driving approaches. Today’s architects are struggling with the problem of affordable housing for key-workers such as nurses and teachers. Their response typically is to design small spaces such as studio accommodation, with prefabricated construction. If hybrid cars could become part of the home, they might enable cheaper alternatives to this cheese-paring of traditional domestic space. They might, in fact, usher in a new way of living.

The car can also be viewed in this context as a standard packaged environment conditioner. By this I mean the car may be the means through which its immediate domestic environment is controlled. Cooling, heating, humidity and sound might all be provided by the car as a greener source of these ambient factors than normal domestic systems.

Further, the hybrid engine represents an efficient and green technology that can enable specially designed houses to change their outward appearance; floor plates and internal partitions; even their position within a plot of land.

Imagine a structure similar to the sort of gantries that lift containers off lorries. A similar structure powered by a docked hybrid car could shunt a container sized house into different positions within a garden. If this garden had a swimming pool at one end, a meadow in the middle and a tennis court at the far end then our house could at different times have a basement pool, an internal tennis court or a meadow carpet. Facades and internal partitions would be subject to similar but smaller systems.

To conclude, hybrid car technology might create a more symbiotic relationship between driver and car, and be a catalyst for a deeper spatial flexibility in dwelling, working and playing.