The Nissan Friend-ME

The new Nissan Friend-ME concept car swoops into the Chinese automotive market with sleek design and youthful sensibility. “Swoop” is the operative word as an undulating, wave-like energy flows through every sculpted line of the hatchback sedan. Sensitive attention to detail manifested in bold, uninterrupted shapes dictates the seemingly weightless quality of this otherwise chunky vehicle. Similarly, the neon-gray exterior color is designed to illuminate the car’s energetic lines at night and appeal to a tech-savvy, futuristic aesthetic by day.

Created to cater specifically to China’s twenty-something or “Bālínghòu” generation (referring to the around 240 million born in the 1980s), the Friend-ME is designed with both passenger and driver in mind – perfect for a night out or long road trip with friends. In the Friend-ME, everyone is in control. The information and entertainment systems are displayed on central console screens that are in view of all four separate seats, enabling all passengers to both experience and custom-control the car’s ambiance and environment. Days of a single musical dictator are gone! Instead, every passenger can sync their smartphones and mobile devices to the car’s info-entertainment center and gain access to all of the system’s content.

With the Friend-ME, Nissan has perhaps offered the world a new way of conceptualizing the automotive experience through intuitively tapping into the current twenty-something generation’s finesse for [or dare I say dependence on] ‘syncable’ and sharable technological entertainment. Therefore, with such relevant and applicable design, we may not have to wait long before the Friend-ME goes from a clever concept to the must-have tech toy of the not-so-distant future.