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.
i think it mostly comes down to $$$, its way cheaper to make every car look like a blob because you can use the same parts for a variety of manufacturers and possibly make a variety of different cars in the same factory
honestly i feel like rather than removing cars outright and replacing them for public transport we should instead try to improve public transport and then naturally car enthusiasts will be the only drivers left on the road as i doubt camry drivers give that much of a shit about their car and see it more as a way to get from a to b
plus that way we wont need electric cars since overall the emissions will be a lot more negligible due to cars being more expensive luxury as a result of their scarcity rather than being the necessity they are now
maybe im just a dumb fuck but to me this seems like a win-win
I like the fact that you pretty much outline the mainstream urbanist take on how we should lessen the dependance on cars, and then tag "is this a hot take?" (Okay I know you were probably referring to the tag before it, which is a hot take).
True about the costs. But I would counter-argue that a) you could also make more standardized cars that don't look quite so blobby and b) the blobs do still have different detailing, like different front ends, but even these have largely done away with designs that used to once be very characteristics of the brand. So even in places where they could have individual design elements, they don't.
I also like the fact that Hank Green did a thing about cars on the literal same day I posted mine: Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??