Do all car stylists meet once a month in a big bar somewhere to compare designs? Do all initial styling sketches get processed through some kind of blandness mainframe, where they are digitally neutered to achieve a numbing stylistic consistency? Or is maybe just one guy doing the styling on all new cars worldwide, and manufacturers only act like they’re coming up with their own designs?
What other possible explanation can there be for how amazingly similar most cars look?
It’s a reasonable question. At any given point in styling history, you can find the same recurring themes in cars supposedly designed a world apart. Oh, there are some visible small-volume exceptions, but most models produced in large quantities have a certain homogeneous character. This isn’t because designers can’t think of anything interesting to show us, it’s because the narrow and restrictive requirements of mass production and the surprisingly unpredictable nature of the public taste make it so.
Automotive styling is by necessity a fine, high-stakes balancing act. Lead times are long, and predicting future tastes is a black art. To get a feel for this, try to picture what sort of styling will be popular in model years 1997 through 2000. That’s the stuff they’re working on now; you’d better start sketching right away, because the people in Product Planning and Engineering will want to see what you’ve come up with by the end of the week.
There are no easy answers. Suppose you’re working on a nice little high volume coupe. You’ll want something that causes a stir when it hits the market, but will wear well during a four-year model run. You’ve got to try to beat the 18-month barrier, which seems to be the usual honeymoon period a competently styled new car enjoys before it starts to look like some relic Charlton Heston would’ve dug up in Planet of the Apes.
Daring styling gets old fast, and it’s harder to hit the moving target of public taste with a high-power pin-point shot; if you miss, you really miss. It’s more effective to lay down a shotgun blast – you get better coverage that way, even if you’re a little off the mark. The downside of this is that we end up with a largely homogeneous crop of new cars each year. The upside is that most of these designs wear like gray pinstripe suits – inocuous but workable.
The glory days of bland, interchangeable styling are numbered, however. As manufacturers move inexorably toward greater market segmentation, they’ll pursue us with smaller-volume models able to take a more daring approach. This will be a good thing for people who like pretty cars, because there will be more to choose from.
My only fear is that the stylists will keep right on attending those monthly beer-drinking sessions and every one of those daring, low-volume cars in the late 90’s will look just like the Dodge Viper.
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