June 2026

Autonomy is an interior problem before it's a technology problem

Every autonomous concept starts with the same question: what does the driver do with their hands. Wrong question. The real one is what happens to the front passenger seat, because that's the seat that's been a compromise since the beginning of car design, built around someone else's driving position.

Working on the Muse forced me to treat the cabin as the primary design surface and the exterior as its consequence, not the other way round. Level 4 autonomy doesn't remove the driver, it makes the front-row hierarchy optional for the first time. Whether that reads as liberation or loss depends entirely on whether the brand has something meaningful to put in that freed-up space, or whether it just becomes a slightly bigger cupholder.