Walking home from work today I saw a Saab. And while I hate cars as much as the leftist urbanist public transport nerd, I do find them fascinating as design objects, and seeing a Saab launched me into design thoughts.
Saab was a car with a look. You could immediately identify a Saab even if you didn't see the badge, since all Saabs had an inherent Saabness to them. And it wasn't the only one: back in the days a Mercedes-Benz looked like a Mercedes-Benz, a Volvo looked like a Volvo. Whereas today, pretty much every car you see on the road looks like a blob, and you can only identify whether it's a Merc or a Toyota by the badge. And the badges, especially in European cars, are huge. On a new Volvo or Mercedes the badge is the size of a human head, and on a BMW the iconic double ovals (which used to be tiny) take up the entire front of the car. I guess they have to be, since that's the only way you can identify whether the car is a Mercedes or something else.
But why? Why do all contemporary cars look the same, and as a result need to have cartoonishly large badges on them to differentiate from other cars?
And the thing is, what happens in car design doesn't stay in car design. Because cars are some of the ultimate aspirational design objects in our world, the aesthetic of car design seeps into other things as well. The new Artic X54 trams for Helsinki have front ends designed to look like a car (but a car as they appeared roughly a decade ago). The Siemens Vectron locomotive clearly borrows it's blobby shape end the decorative grills as both ends (which the Finnish versions fortunately don't have) from recent cars.
Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud, but I liked it when things had unique, easily identifiable shapes. And I'm not saying a 2024 Mercedes should look like a 1984 Mercedes. But it should look like a Mercedes.