BUICK ELECTRA-L CONCEPT CAR · 2023-2024
Designing Buick's first ever interactive cockpit, as the sole UX designer on the team.
RECOGNITION
All work shown has been publicly disclosed.
(DEMO VIDEOS)
(THE CHALLENGE)
Design the cockpit experience for Buick's first interactive concept car.
(MY ROLE)
Sole UX Designer
Worked alongside UI, motion, interior design, CMF design and Unity dev team.
(MY APPROACH)
🎛️ LEVERS
🎬 FLOW
🤯 Effect
🏔️ Mission
...
LV1 IMAGined
LV2 STAGED
LV3 PARTIALLY REAL
LV4 FULLy real
LV5 Beyond REALITY
Research, framework, concept, prototype, and calibrate.
2 original frameworks built from scratch. Both adopted department-wide.
(UI SHOWREEL)
SETTING THE BAR
The cockpit is the new battleground for showcars.
To figure out where to start, I studied both the industry and our own history of building concept cars, especially the interactions taking place inside. Two questions kept coming back.
What does good look like?
I studied over 20 concept car cabins from the past five years. The ones that truly resonated all seemed to have answered the following 4 questions.
“LEVER”
“FLOW”
“EFFECT”
“MISSION”
▲ The fantastic four. When one was missing, the experience fell apart.
Successful concept car experience serves a brand story, not a user task.
▲ The dial made little sense as a product as you wouldn’t actually drive to a destination by spinning a dial, but that’s never the point. People still lined up to see it.
How real is real enough?
On our last concept car, Buick Wildcat EV Concept, we built a beautiful facade of the in-cabin experience. It was well scripted but never truly interactive.
Some of our competitors had already moved past this. Fully responsive cabins were becoming the new baseline. The fidelity level varied.
▲ “Aromatherapy” was described in the press release. “Biometric monitoring” appeared as a looping video simulating a heartbeat reading. The features were present more as narrative than interaction. BMW i Vision Dee/Mercedes Benz EQXX
To understand exactly where we stood, and where we needed to go, I needed a shared language. So I built one.
▲ The reality check. We were at LV2. The best were already at LV4. Phew!
These two questions shaped everything that followed. Looking back, the answers became two tools I kept returning to throughout the project.
A four-dimension lens for analyzing what makes a concept experience work. And a fidelity scale for deciding how real ours needed to be.
Showcar UX Cheatsheet
🎛️ LEVERS
🎬 FLOW
🤯 Effect
🏔️ Mission
…
Fidelity Framework
LV1 IMAGined
LV2 SUGGESTED
LV3 PARTIALLY REAL
LV4 FULLy real
LV5 BEYOND REAL
CREATIVE DIRECTION
What if the car… could breathe?
To start with, I sat down with interior designers to get an early brief. The interactive experience needed to grow from the same design language.
▲ Early sketches from the interior design team gave a defined direction: organic, homelike, nothing aggressive. The car as a third space.
Levers were the biggest constraint, as they defined what we could build and how far we could go. Rounds of brainstorming to narrow them down.
LEVERS
30-inch Screen
Zero gravity seat
ambient lighting &
translucent surface
Soundscape
in-car projection?
HUD?
▲ Final decision: a Unity-powered screen-based experience, with control over zero-gravity seats, ambient lighting, and translucent surfaces. Early explorations also included in-car projection and head-up display.
To define the concept, I started with three observations.
▲ Three observations, one direction. A cabin that feels alive.
That became Bio-Flow: the car as a living organism, made visible.
The idea of Bio-Flow: the car as a living organism.
Car with its own circadian rhythm.
We couldn’t out-tech the tech brands. But we could out-feel them.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
A cabin for every seat.
A mode for every state of mind.
I designed five scenario modes that follow one interaction model: touch the 30-inch panoramic screen, and seat, lighting, and soundscape shift together.
The project began with three scenario modes. As the design matured through Buck validation (physical cabin mockup testing), we expanded to five to cover both front and rear cabin experiences more completely.
▲ AOD (Always-on Display) Mode. An 11-second ambient loop across screen, lighting, and soundscape. No off state.
▲ Sanctuary mode. Seat slides back, panoramic screen shifts to a guided mindfulness view.
▲ Cocoon mode. Seat reclines to zero-gravity, lights dim to near-dark, sleep audio takes over.
▲ Cascade mode. Light flows through the translucent rear console, casting moving shadows across the cabin.
▲ Komorebi mode. Warm ambient lighting and spatial audio recreate the feeling of a sunny afternoon indoors.
TESTING GROUND
Good enough on screen,
wrong in the room.
The first time AOD ran on the actual door panels, it looked nothing like it did on screen. The vibe was wrong.
Not all lights needed to be active in every mode. Concentrating the effect on fewer, more intentional zones gave each mode its character. Two spec documents covered all five modes: one for screen interaction, one for lighting. These became the single source of truth for UI, motion, and the Unity engineering team.
The first time AOD ran on the actual door panels, it looked nothing like it did on screen.
The animation curve was wrong. On screen, the motion read as organic. On the physical panels, it pulsed hard and fast: two to three seconds per cycle. The light-on window was also too short relative to the dark. People standing outside couldn’t tell the lights were on at all.
I brought my laptop to the supplier’s factory floor and iterated directly against the physical LED strips. Softened the easing, slowed the loop to 11 seconds, stretched the duty cycle.
Final validation happened on-site, with the full team and design leadership in the room.
Final design review with the cross-functional team and design leadership. The experience passed!
THE LEGACY
Built to live beyond the showroom.
The Electra-L debuted at the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, and was named winner of the 2024 Shanghai Design 100+ award! 🎉
Buick Electra-L Concept lets light and shadow rise and fall with every breath, every pulse.
Source: 2024 Shanghai Design 100+ Award Citation ↗
· 🗂️ ·
The project also left behind two things: a direction that shaped the next vehicle, and a way of working that shaped the next team.
The concept’s direction carried forward into production.
The Buick Electra L7 launched in 2025 as a direct production successor. Signature features like the zero-gravity seats and scene-responsive ambient lighting, which are the soul of Bio-Flow concept, transitioned from concept to road as standard equipment.
Both the Cheatsheet and the Fidelity Framework were formalized after this project and presented to the design department. They are still in use today.
With the Cheatsheet and Fidelity Framework in place, every new concept car can be broken down in a consistent structure and added to a shared competitor library. The next concept project will start with both a structured external benchmark and an internal precedent.
0 Series Saloon
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The future arrived early.
Now what? 🤔
Concept cars were once a brand’s declaration of intent, a glimpse into futures not yet built. In China, that future is already on sale.
By the time Electra-L debuted in Beijing, BYD, NIO, Xiaomi, and Xpeng were already shipping tank turns, personalized LED matrices, and AI copilots that hold full conversations. The gap between “concept” and “product” had collapsed. Not everywhere, but here, and fast.
What would it take to design this way, at scale?
Electra-L taught me how to design for feeling at a systemic level, across hardware, software, light, and space. That’s the thinking I wanted to take into production. ■