Are these the most boring cars on sale? Electric cars such as the Tesla Model 3, Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Mercedes-Benz EQE were meant to save the sedan, but instead the four-door is getting increasingly dull | Opinion

I recently saw the new BMW i5 electric sedan and… zzzzzzzzzz

Sorry, I fell asleep because the new i5, like so many modern electric sedans, is pretty dull to look at. Apologies to BMW because there are plenty of other homogeneous four doors on the market today, starting with the Tesla Model 3 as well as the Mercedes-Benz EQE and EQS, Genesis G80 and Hyundai Ioniq 6 to name a few.

What happened? I remember a few years ago reading interview after interview with car company designers saying the electric vehicle revolution would be the saviour of the sedan. The more aerodynamic shape would be key to extending range and the SUV would once again find itself subservient to the lower class of car.

Except that hasn’t been the case. While funky, interesting and diverse electric SUVs continue to hit the streets, the sedan is getting increasingly dull and more boring. Look no further than the prime example of the Hyundai Ioniq duo. The Ioniq 5 is an angular, edgy and appealing SUV, while the Ioniq 6 is one of the most awkward looking cars on the market today. It looks like it was designed by a committee and a windtunnel without any consideration that people would look at it with their eyes.

I concede beauty is in the eye of the beholder and a totally subjective issue. I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks the Ioniq 6 looks sleek and cool… maybe. Personally, I think the Porsche Taycan and Audi e-tron GT are two examples of a four-door EV that have some visual appeal, but others may think I should go to the optometrist for expressing such an opinion.

But on the whole, objectively speaking, EV sedans are much plainer and less visually arresting than most of the SUVs on the market.

BMW i5.

Tesla’s minimalist approach, which is primarily about saving money with little thought to aesthetics, even transfers inside the blobby exterior to an interior with a single screen and no buttons or stalks. You get the feeling that if Tesla thought it could get away without offering rear seats they’d just rip them out and just leave the back of the car blank. But I digress…

It seems, at least part of the problem, is the automotive world is very different from what it was less than a decade ago when designers were making bold predictions about a bright electric sedan future. Alfa Romeo design director Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos told CarsGuide last year the supposed freedom EVs would deliver, with smaller motors and flat-packed batteries, has turned out to not be so simple in practice.

“People are wondering with electric cars, ‘Ok, now you have freedom because you have more space and less intakes.’ It’s not true, because we have even more constraints than ICE cars,” Mesonero-Romanos said.

He explained these include the packaging of the motors and the associated cooling hardware, but the batteries are arguably the biggest challenge. They add approximately 110 to 130mm of height, which in-turn increases the centre-of-gravity of the car and typically requires the length of the wheelbase to be extended.

The longer wheelbase leads to a need for bigger wheels for visual balance. Which then becomes a challenge for the aerodynamics as you increase frontal area. The increased need for cameras and sensors for autonomous driving functions also has to be incorporated into the design.

This partly explains why car companies have opted for either SUVs or models like the Polestar 2 and Renault Megane E-Tech which blur the line between a conventional sedan or hatch and an SUV.

Hyundai Ioniq 6.

The hard reality, at least from my perspective, is car makers have discovered what everyone but the most hardcore anti-SUV, sedan-loving die-hards have - modern car buying consumers prefer SUVs. The money and effort is going into the SUVs because they have more opportunity to appeal to a broad audience, while sedans appear to be either designed for an older, more conservative audience or honed in the windtunnel for a headline-grabbing range figure.

So instead of a renaissance of the sedan, we are left with simple, plain and, to be blunt, dull models that put you to sleep.