Are Ugly Electric Cars The End Of Beautiful Car Design?
The great car designer Ettore Bugatti said of his rival Bentley in the twenties and thirties: “They just make fast lorries.” This ceased to be true in the early fifties when the Bentley R-Type Continental established a standard of lithe industrial beauty not yet surpassed
But now Bentley returns to its old inclination towards monumentalism: the new all-electric Torcal is named after a mountain.
Some may find it difficult to look at. Beauty is a fugitive commodity and has, seemingly, run its course in car culture. …snip…
But electric cars in particular are decidedly hideous in this modern age of ours. Today’s electric BMW 7-series is a crass whale of a car which looks at home outside a de luxe Hong Kong bordello, whereas its predecessors were distinguished by German Gute Form: Bauhaus restraint.
As for the Tesla Cybertruck, it is an affront to all notions of good sense.
Even Ferrari is guilty. No other manufacturer has a historic record of such metal gorgeousness, yet the new Luce EV is poorly proportioned and has an interior as chilly as a Jony Ive-designed man-cave.
The Pope was inveigled into the official press launch. God may well be in the details, but when you have to put Leo XIV in the driving seat, you are in trouble.
Something about electrification is the root cause.
The very first EVs from Toyota and Honda were deliberately odd-looking to give them a visual point of difference to make their unusual drive-trains explicit. They looked like a child’s bath toy.
And no one really wants to drive a rubber duck. Their successors are not much improved, artistically speaking.
There seems to be an international conspiracy against beauty. And this tells us something about our contemporary psychological condition.
We perhaps have a collective guilt about what the car has done to our cities, and that guilt might be expiated by owning something remarkably maladroit and ugly, rather than something gorgeous.
And in the absence of gorgeousness, EV designers resort to absurd light-shows front and rear. Garish strips of diodes on the boot seem mandatory, as tail fins once did.
So too are illuminated badges and grilles that look like an explosion in a stardust factory.
This is to demonstrate that your Volkswagen iD5 is powered by electrons, not hydrocarbons.
The silliness of it is a form of public penance.
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Tom
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Even the regular Tesla is uglier than sin.
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Left Coast
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Good looking cars started to disappear with the Japanese invasion in the 80s . . . . the sedans all looked much the same, boring and utilitarian. And after a decade looked even worse . . .
Best looking 80s car had to be the T-Bird Turbo Coupe . . . 87 & 88 models.
Mustangs after 2005 . . . Vipers as well. Real Pickup Trucks had more character and you could tell one brand from another.
Most today are just SUV Boxes that get lost in a Mall parking lot . . . even the lowly VW of the 60s has more character than much if the new stuff today . . . and they didn’t monitor your every move!
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Left Coast
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Good looking cars started to disappear with the Japanese invasion in the 80s . . . . the sedans all looked much the same, boring and utilitarian. And after a decade looked even worse . . .
Best looking 80s car had to be the T-Bird Turbo Coupe . . . 87 & 88 models.
Mustangs after 2005 . . . Vipers as well. Real Pickup Trucks had more character and you could tell one brand from another.
Most today are just SUV Boxes that get lost in a Mall parking lot . . . even the lowly VW of the 60s has more character than much if the new stuff today . . . and they didn’t monitor your every move!
Reply
crackpot
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They lost me at plastic bumpers.
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Khari Griffin
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“Someone amazing could be waiting for you right now. 💕” ………………..> spoold.com/s/4HjhigIS
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Herb Rose
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I’ve created a mono pole magnet. A regular magnet has bi directional flow, north south, and when the two flows neutralize the direction flow is converted into general radiated energy.
A mono pole magnet only radiates an attractive force in one direction. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed this means the mono pole magnet is absorbing energy surrounding field and converting it to a direction flow. Using negatively charged capacitor the direction of the flow can be controlled giving motion in na single direction
See.if the electric cars are more attractive when there is no cost to run them.
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Len Winokur
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Electric cars aren’t just getting uglier to look at. They’re the ugliest by nature.
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