The Appearance Design Of Four-wheel Drive City Electric Vehicle

The research on electric vehicle in domestic and foreign countries is on the rising with the approach of serious environmental pollution and energy shortage crisis, four-wheel drive electric vehicle has become the unique research direction because its better driving performance, high degree of electrical control, lightweight body, etc. This thesis relies on the four-wheel drive project, provided an appearance design solution using bionics principle, Kansei Engineering and other modern design methods. Combined the aesthetic design and engineering usability principle together, this thesis explored a new appearance design process for electric vehicle based on understanding the relative merits of four wheel drive technology and analysis of design trends. The incremental innovation design method and rational assessment methods used in the thesis may avoid the problem of poor usability design caused by shortage of individual designers.The first part of this thesis focuses on the data collection and literature research. Through analyzing the design idea of pure electric vehicles in current market, the design trends of this typical vehicle was predicted, this part also determined the benchmark model of conceptual design stage using benchmark method. The second part of the thesis includes concept design stage and optimization design stage. In order to carry out the project smoothly, the sideways styling was designed in the beginning, after explored the design direction, several design concepts was evolved. Using objective evaluation methods to evaluate the design concepts, finally three-dimensional model was outputted. Optimization phase is mainly about aesthetics and human factors analysis aiming at the concept design scheme, refining the design details and describe the colors and materials of appearance design. The third part of this thesis mainly consider about the body frame and safety performance of electric vehicles, and modeling the body frame according to preliminary design scheme to prove the feasibility of the design.