In thirty years of designing in the sports industry, on good days my work was about improving human performance—designing the things that would make athletes run faster and jump higher. From a design and engineering standpoint, that meant developing materials that would optimize the performance of a product in a form that was light, fast, and strong.

This is essential in sports such as sprint racing or Formula One when milliseconds make the difference between winning and losing. Sometimes it meant adding material, as I did for an Olympic sprint suit in which “brushes” designed to reduce drag were strategically placed around the sprinter’s body.

However, in most cases, it was about reducing to the max; minimizing the product to only its essential elements, as I did with the 99g racing shoe worn by Puma-sponsored Formula One drivers Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Max Verstappen. Such is the case with two standout vehicles that I saw at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas last week.

It was impossible to see all that there was to see at the show in the four days that I spent there, but two electric cars bookended my visit: the Honda Saloon concept I saw on the first day and the long-awaited production Bollinger B2 I saw on the last day. Both cars are beautiful examples of maximum distillation of form to achieve optimum function. Yet both cars serve very different uses.

The Saloon, although not a race car, is an EV whose aerodynamic quality stands to prolong vehicle range. Whether that is true or not, Honda’s “man maximum/machine minimum” vision is what seems to drive the low, elongated, and uninterrupted form. This less-is-more approach strips away all unnecessary elements and makes the vehicle look fast even when standing still. On the other end of the spectrum is the Bollinger B2 electric pickup truck. Its elongated form accentuates one of its key features, a full-vehicle-length passthrough that makes it capable of hauling 16 ft long cargo.

Bollinger’s design approach—everything that is essential and nothing that is not—recalls the approach that former Adidas Creative Director, Peter Moore, brought to the company’s Equipment range of performance sports products. (Moore, an industry legend and prolific designer of important products like the first Air Jordan, passed away last year.) Eliminating the creature comforts typically found in modern trucks exposes the beautiful and simplistic overall form of the truck. One of the details I found most sensitive—if one can say that about a truck—is the locally sourced, wood boards in the bed of the truck, an effort to bring sustainability into the vehicle’s material mix.

These product bookends designed to serve very different purposes are, in my view, of a similar family. The Honda Saloon and the Bollinger B2 are excellent examples of purpose-built, minimalist mobility.