What are your opinions on the modern heckblende and why do you think it's dogshit?
oh i never actually answered this
this gets really long so i'll put a read more if you wanna see me go into car nerd territory but,
when i am talking about the "modern heckblende", i mean horizontal taillights. this shit.
unfortunately, because we live in a nightmare world, almost every manufacturer has decided that this is what the modern luxury car and/or EV should look like. which sucks! because this concept, the horizontal taillight, or heckblende (lit.: "rear cover") used to exist in a way cooler style.
Why are these cooler? Well, for one, look at them. Second, I think they're cool because they actually aren't lights. The part in the middle is reflective material that would bounce light from the surrounding lights to look like a horizontal bar of light at night.
You basically only saw these with German cars in the late 80s/early 90s but a couple manufacturers jumped on the trend.
Some cars didn't even have the reflector, the design trend at the time just got them to design the rear of the car that way.
and then they'd mod the heckblende in because it's sick as fuck
There's a single element to the heckblende: connect the left and right tail lights to form a single bar across the rear. That's it. It's not a single light but make the whole rear of the car the tail lights. And because the tail lights are the keystones, the design language of the manufacturer, the car, and the lights come first. Which is what I think fucking sucks about the modern era because they
are
just
bars.
The Rivian R1 is maybe the most frustrating because the front is incredibly unique. They instantly created an identity that you only assign to Rivian. Why not have that in the back?
The desire to just turn the whole fuckin' thing into a bar leaves little space for identity or style which is undoubtedly a consequence of general design homogenization and actual homogenization of brands. Why does the Audi Q6 look so much like the VW Atlas? Because they're the same fucking truck made on the same fucking chassis.
I think maybe worse is the attempt to force an identity into it.
They tried! See if you close your right eye, it's like an L! You know, like Lexus! Don't worry about the other side. Unless you're viewing it in a mirror from behind, in which case wow! It's like an L, like Lexus!
You'll also notice across almost all of the modern examples that the bades/insignia are just gone. It looks bad, you see, when paired with a big ol' bar. That everyone decided the solution was to pick whatever "Extended" typeface they had in the style guide and spell out the make's name over or under it is... [sigh]. Again, they tried. I guess.
It irritates me because the reason I got so into cars was how varied their design language was in the era I grew up in. Cars were boxy but they had really, really unique markers that with time have mostly become diluted, militarized, and simplified beyond recognition. That anyone thinks the BMW M3 looks like anything other than a joke of its former self is bewildering to me.
Anyway. Now you know why I hate the modern heckblende. Mostly because it's not really that anymore. It's just a big bar. And like sound bars and... a third type of horizontal bar I'm sure I'll think of soon, they offer nothing but serviceable purpose while depriving you of something much more substantial.
