Researches Of Plug-in Electric Automotive Exterior Styling Design

With the increasingly harsh environment and increasingly strict regulations, electric vehicles are developing rapidly in recent years, therefore, each automotive manufacture corporation is working on making their own research and development plan for the electric vehicles. So, electric vehicles is expected to replace fuel vehicles in the future. Plug-in electric vehicles, which have become one of the most essential research direction, have simpler constructions, lower costing, better technical feasibility than other types of electric vehicles, such as EV, HEV and FVEV.However, the internal structures and technical demands of the electric automotive are quite different from the traditional vehicles which use the internal combustion engine. The traditional design method will be inopportune and inappropriate.Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the analysis of plug-in electric vehicles' power assembly, energy system, general arrangement, and other technical characteristics. Then it summarizes the particular styling features, from the perspective of modeling volume, function requirements, surface features, modeling style and brand DNA, with the method of bionic and objectification. At last, it provides a theoretical method and train of thought for electric automotive styling design.On this basis, the above concept is applied to a sport plug-in electric automotive concept design, from user investigation, sketches which determines the basic shape of the concept, to the 3D modeling with Alias and rendering with Keyshot, the paper finally shows a plug-in automotive concept design.