CRUISE Sensor Pod
CONCEPT ART, COMPONENT LAYOUT, 3D MODEL, RENDERINGS
DISCIPLINE(S): Industrial Design
ROLE: Principal Industrial Designer (sole designer; full-scope ownership from concept through production handoff)
SKILLS & TOOLS: Sketching, Photoshop, Class A Surfacing, Solidworks, Keyshot
Cruise, a San Francisco company developing a self-driving car system, needed a roof-mounted electronics enclosure to house a radar, two cameras, and their associated components as part of the vehicle's sensor package.
Problem/Opportunity
The enclosure had to contain specific hardware (radar, dual cameras, supporting electronics) without a pre-existing styling mandate — early direction was to explore forms that could establish their own visual language rather than simply conform to the host car's design.
Once the first version reached real-world road testing, a problem invisible at the concept stage surfaced: audible wind noise at highway speed, a functional failure no amount of aesthetic refinement could paper over.
Goal
Version 1: design a distinctive, production-viable enclosure suitable for the company's public reveal.
Version 2: resolve the wind noise problem through form change, while using the same revision cycle to bring the enclosure's aesthetic into closer alignment with the specific test vehicle it sat on.
Impact
The Version 1 enclosure was 3D-printed, finished, and painted, then featured in Cruise's initial public reveal advertising — real hardware, on camera, not a rendering standing in for a product.
Version 2 revisions shipped a measurable functional fix (reduced wind noise at speed) alongside the aesthetic refinement, closing the loop between design and real-world vehicle performance.
Promotional photos taken on reveal day
Photorealistic renderings photoshopped onto existing car imagery for use as marketing materials
Ideation & Development (v1)
The brief started as a packaging problem — fit a radar, two cameras, and their electronics into a single roof-mounted enclosure — but the direction given was explicitly not to default to the host car's existing styling language. Sketches and photomanipulations explored a range of forms without that constraint, and 3D models followed from both the strongest sketches and fresh starts developed straight in CAD.
The team ultimately converged on one direction, which was color-matched, rendered, and composited onto real vehicle photography to evaluate it in context before committing to a physical build.
The concept eventually chosen to become Version 1 color-matched, rendered, and photoshopped onto an existing image.
Final (v1)
The selected concept was built as a 3D-printed, finished, and painted physical enclosure — not just a rendering. That real unit was what appeared in Cruise's initial reveal advertising, meaning the design had to hold up under actual photography and public scrutiny, not just concept review.
Concept Development (v2)
Real-world testing found what the design process couldn't: at highway speed, the gap between the enclosure's side "wings" and the vehicle roof beneath them was generating audible wind noise. That's not a problem solved with a styling pass: it required closing the gap and rethinking the underlying aerodynamic form.
Revision 2A addressed the noise directly by improving aerodynamics and closing that gap, and used the same pass to question whether the radar glass was even necessary to expose visually — cutting it from the design along with reduced overall width and length.
Revision 2B then focused purely on aesthetics, refining the enclosure to more closely match the styling of the Audi test vehicle it was mounted to, rather than reading as a generic add-on part.
Revision 2A: This revision sought to fix problems with wind noise at higher speeds by improving aerodynamics, and to explore a visual style that left out the radar glass. The width and length were also decreased
Revision 2B: The main goal here was to more closely emulate the stylistic elements of the Audi test vehicle being used by the team
3D Model
What the Real World Taught the Concept
A design that survives reveal photography and design review can still fail the moment it's driven at speed — that's the real story here, not the enclosure's final shape.
What's worth noting is what the fix turned out to be: closing the wind-noise gap was an aerodynamic correction, but it also happened to simplify and clean up the form, which means the functional problem and the aesthetic one weren't actually two separate problems wearing different names. Solving the noise issue solved a visual issue neither of us had explicitly flagged going in.