Why don’t all cars look like Ferraris?
Take a walk on the street. How many different car manufacturers can you spot without peeking at the car logo? I went ahead and tried this exact challenge near my army base, at Ramat Hasharon, a quite expensive piece of land in the center of Israel. This town hosts a high percentage of rich families and is considered a luxurious area, Therefore I immediately recognised a few BMW cars and a couple of Mercedes cars. However when I tried to make difference between the rest of the cars on the road, I couldn’t.
Middle class cars are highly similar in their external appearance to each other. Why is that? Why not manufacture a Lamborghini looking car with a Hyundai i30 engine?
There is no one answer to this intriguing question. Many different compatability considirations, market trends, cost implications and cultural influences affect the outcome, which I will detail below in short.
Compatibility & Market Size
Have you ever looked at the difference between a wheel on a Ferrari vs a wheel on a Mazda?
Can you see the difference? The two wheels are aimed to perform in completely different situations. One is tested in heavy rain and snow, sand storms, and many other weather conditions so it will benifit the largest amount of customers and enlarge it’s consumer base. While the other is designed to look slim, perform in high speed situations, and appear luxurious and iconic.
One car is family friendly, the other has a retractable hood for the summer. One car has an incredibly good looking engine showcased in the back while the other hosts a massive trunk for long trips.
Middle class cars and High end cars are aimed at a completely different consumer bases and are shaped accordingly, starting at the metal body and down to the wheels, nuts and bolts.
Middle class cars are designed both visually and internally to appeal to the mass general public, While high end cars are similiarly designed both visually and internally to appeal to a small market of the rich and famous. This also directly translates to sales. Middle class cars are sold in the hundreds of millions while high end cars are sold rarely in the millions. A company that manufactures middle class cars is likly to bring in more money than high end car manufacturers.
Shape vs Price tag
The goal of middle class cars is to be tagged with a low purchase price while benefiting the average consumer and making a nice profit for the manufacturers.
Talking to a worker at GM (General Motors) who works as a tool and die maker, He revealed that GM is “obsessed with tolerances in their panels”. Maintaining tolerances in panels decreases the drag of the car thus making the car more fuel efficient. To do this means that the gap between the hood and front quarter panel is to be the same near the windshield as it is near the headlights. Same goes for all other areas of the car. It’s simply hard to get right. If you start to get more complex designs with panels meeting at odd angles and with multiple bends it gets even harder, and more expensive.
As you reduce the purchase price, you need to increase volume to ensure profits. Similarly, you want to absolutely minimise construction cost to maximize profit. As you increase volume and minimise construction cost, you rapidly reduce the scope of possible manufacturing techniques that can be used to perfect these tolerances and shape cars in exotic and sporty looking ways.
Cultural Influences
In the documentary Objectified, a BMW designer brings up the point that a car design should express what the car is. If there’s a mismatch between the look, and how it feels to drive, it will be rejected by customers. This is the very practical definition of “tacky” design. It’s when something visually promises something that it isn’t in performance. Form and function are very much tied together and a car that looks like a Ferrari but feels like a Civic would cause a negative cognitive dissonance.
Conclusion
Some car manufacturers have tried designing cars that appear sporty and have a middle class price tag attached to them and failed (for example the Toyota MR2 & Pontiac Fiero). The reasons that they failed are broad and are on a per situation basis, but as of now I mentioned above some of the major influences that set the status quo of car design and manufacturing in the world of 2017.
As you can tell it is not so simple to point out why I can’t tell the difference between a Civic and a Volkswagen in the streets of Ramat Hasharon in Israel. Let’s all hope that this will change when innovation and low price will arrive together to give us a more diverse future on the roads of the next era.
*Cough* Looking at you Tesla *Cough*
— Amit Assaraf 2017
All of the written in this article is based on research and is opinionated. In addition I do not think bad of manufacturers I used in “Good vs Bad” examples, it was truly just for the example and you should not let it affect your opinion when purchasing a car :)
(Special thanks to the comuninity of Hacker News)
Instagram: amitassaraf
