The first bags didn’t appear in electric cars, they may be familiar in farm and mid-range sports cars, where only the engine and two seats are available in the rear, so there’s no better use of space in the nose car as a trunk. Then, since there is no space-consuming internal combustion engine in electric cars, it was a logical solution to converting freed space in the front to the trunk, especially when even electronic cars were designed with the same space layout as their conventional counterparts. However, in the person of the Volkswagen ID.4, an electric car arrived that ran counter to the usual design and had no initial storage space at all.
Many disadvantages, few advantages
So Volkswagen’s electric compact car has been criticized, but there are many arguments against the front luggage compartment. The first is impractical opening: the front trunk of most cars can only be opened from the inside, in addition, the operation can be inconvenient. In the case of the Ford Mustang Mach-E, for example, you have to bend down to the driver’s foot and then pull the trunk release lever twice – as if you just wanted to open the bonnet to gauge the oil level.
In addition, another drawback due to complete isolation from the interior is that the temperature in the first boot is determined only by the outside temperature.
Using a larger, more loadable and familiar rear trunk is more straightforward, says the Autoblog author, who also notes that the front trunk could have its own function. A good example is the electric truck where there is no covered storage other than the front of the vehicle. It can also be useful when rarely used items are stored, as if the need arises, they should not be extracted from the lower compartment of the chest. However, these objects do not take up much space, and space that is too large to accommodate them can easily become unused.
Did the Koreans realize the problem?
It looks like the designers of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 have been working on this. Engineers integrated as much as possible into the front of the car, creating very spacious front seats and placing a small loading compartment in the remaining space at the front. In the case of the BMW iX SUV, they went even further and, as with the ID.4, completely abandoned the first box, which also resulted in a spacious cabin.
By assembling the electric driveline elements in the nose, an accessible rear luggage compartment was also created for both variants. This is why it’s worth considering whether we really need our first box, and whether it can really be construed as a negative if we can’t put it in front of a select electric car.
