Can I interest you in a hideous BMW? Modern cars shouldn’t be so ugly
From grotesque Teslas to badly drawn Range Rovers, automobile design is having a brutalist moment
Has beauty run its course? This precious commodity, which defines civilisations, seems absent from ours.
Certainly, artists no longer talk about it. And almost the first thing the new Government did was remove the word “beauty” from the National Planning Framework.
And crucially, there are our roads: you find an awful lot of very ugly cars out there. I’d say car design is having a brutalist moment.
Cars are not art, but the best of them were once reliable sources of a beautiful experience.
They express desire and yearning and status; they teach us how form and colour and detail can be meaningful. “Rolling Sculpture” cars are rightly celebrated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
But if a classic Jaguar is almost as exalting as Henry Moore, a Jaecoo 7 (Britain’s best-seller) is dismaying: it looks like an old fridge, but without the charm.
There are several reasons for this “beauty crisis” in car design. One is that the German manufacturers ran, metaphorically, out of road. The concept of “Gute Form” – literally ‘good shape’, but philosophically meaning a confidence about what defined excellence – became exhausted.
This was first realised over 20 years ago by BMW, which, becoming fatigued with Bauhaus-inspired grace, decided, evidently deliberately, to confront customers with cars that were hard to look at.
Never forget that our word “ugly” comes from the old Germanic word for aggression. Suddenly, where once there had been clarity and purity and elegance, there appeared irrational bulges, weird proportions and a head-butt for any surviving believer in the importance of good taste.
Today’s BMWi7 is of this tradition: the ugliest car in a very competitive field of ugly cars, this crass whale has hideously inflamed and flared nostrils that are garishly illuminated day and night; its chrome seems to have been laid on not with tweezers but a trowel.
You would need to have a severe psychiatric problem to want one. It’s a truism of car design that it’s easier to create beautiful proportions in a large car than a small one, but this is an attractive option that BMW has spurned it contumaciously.
Elsewhere in Germany, Porsche has abandoned its founder’s principles of lightness and refinement to manufacture cars that resemble glossily lacquered elephant seals.
Mercedes-Benz is also bent on uglification. Once there was cohesion in Mercedes-Benz design: a small Merc was the same as a large Merc, only not so big. Now there is pointless variety and numbing confusion. With some, you cannot tell boot from bonnet.
Legislation creates many constraints: designers do not have a free hand, but must, for example, position lights at a certain height. But the elephant in the design studio is the transition to electricity, a process in creative matters that is as unsettling as gender re-assignment.
To establish a point-of-difference in the marketplace, the first generation of electric cars was made to look odd. Styling of the Honda Insight, for example, seems to have been inspired by very close study of an orthopaedic boot.
The first Toyota Prius looked like a child’s bath toy. A large part of Tesla’s success may be attributed to designer Franz von Holzhausen, who normalised electricity by making his cars resemble combustion-engined Audis.
But then, tracking the idiosyncratic behaviour of its founder, Tesla produced the they-can’t-be-serious Cybertruck, an affront to all concepts of sense and sensibility: vast, heavy, grotesquely angular, sociopathic and predatory, it looked more like a stealth warship than something to drive to Waitrose. But they say that ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer. We will see.
The beauty crisis in car design will only be resolved when manufacturers escape the inertia that binds them to convention. Electric propulsion means all the traditional assumptions about a car’s architecture are irrelevant: there’s no big lump of an engine to dominate proportions, no need for conventional cooling. But no-one has yet been brave enough to explore these opportunities for the future.
Meanwhile, that best-selling Chinese car does not merely resemble a fridge but it looks like a badly drawn Range Rover ... a fine design that dates back nearly 60 years.
On the current evidence, the market has a taste not just for the past but for ugliness as well.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
