The figure you can see highlighted was registered by Ford in the US Patent Register in April 2016, and is now publicly known. This reveals a circular cabin , with a unique pattern in the arrangement of the seats, arranged in a circle around a central round table.
This cabin allows all passengers — at least six, looking at the picture — to see each other as if they were sitting at a table. According to the patent description we are seeing:
A vehicle includes a cylindrical shaped wall surrounding a passenger compartment. The vehicle includes a table in the passenger compartment, a circular rail secured in the compartment around the table and a plurality of seats mounted and independently slidable along the rail.
Where's the conductor?
Perhaps the most obvious question has to do with the driver's seat, or rather, the lack of the driver's seat . And its absence is what gives meaning to this very unusual solution. As you may have already noticed, it is a solution for an eventual Tier 5 autonomous vehicle , which allows you to completely dispense with the steering wheel and pedals.
When fully autonomous cars are a reality, seat layouts won't have to be the same as they are today — they don't have to face forward and be placed in rows one behind the other.
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If there is no need to drive, as is the case today on a train or other means of transport, we already see seats positioned forwards, backwards, sides, or even in a semi-circle.
However, it is still an unusual solution, not least because of its cylindrical shape — it doesn't seem to be the most aerodynamic solution for a car — which is similar, especially in the second figure, to a… carousel.
Will there be an autonomous Ford vehicle with this unusual configuration in the future? Who knows… It's a patent and countless are registered constantly, so that doesn't mean that something will happen in the next few years. But it definitely deserved a prototype to demonstrate the validity of the solution.