Editor’s Note: Big Jim is busy relaxing, so enjoy this Jottings gem from March 2006.
I’ve become a lot more interested in cars lately. I suppose it’s due partly because mine is four years old, and partly because it’s the season.
Starting with the extreme ballyhooing of International Auto Show in Detroit in January, continuing across the nation with other cities? shows, and because that’s what we do as spring nears, the new car feeling is growing within.
I haven’t gone to a showroom, but I have spent a lot of time looking at cars in parking lots and on the highways.
To me there’s a lack of styling to the backs of cars; the trunks of sedans, the tailgates of SUVs and vans.
Grills get all the attention. It’s like the front designers, and the ultimate approvers, are caught up in the Oscar night feminine features.
New cars are being brought out with raised headlights and lower grills. Designers are spending too much time in supermarket checkout lines where all the exposure magazines are displayed.
They get to thinking if this sells magazines, surely it will sell cars.
In reality, drivers spend more time looking at backs of cars than fronts, if you get my drift.
Oncoming cars, like oncoming people, slip by fast, but you can get held up in traffic, behind the same car, for hours. Wouldn’t it make time pass a little faster if there was a good looking rear ahead?
The designers caught what I call ‘Indy-look? fever several years ago, in that they began making cars look like they are going down hill all the time.
Hoods were sloped, and tail ends raised, giving the affect of speed. Steadily these emphases were added to.
Another thing I think the designers were foisting on the driver was a sly hint of fuel economy a car would get if its always going down hill.
Back to backs. Rear ends of many cars are too plain. Too much flat. No style. No design. No appeal.
Seems like in making a trunk lid a stamping machine could put some designer dents in it, or a complementing paint stripe could be added. They do it on the sides.
Some of the 2006 models have no backs. They just slope down to a bumper.
The same lack-of-back-end styling is even more evident in Suburban-urbans, and mini-vans. Wide, flat, unattractive gates quicken the exasperation experienced in highway backups.
Which brings me back to the influence designer magazines have on auto designers. You don’t see models? rears in living color on the covers.
These designers have to get back to the basics, basics Henry Ford thought of when he designed the rumble-seat coupe. Now there’s a rear end worth staring at.
It ain’t plain flat. It’s rounded. It’s interesting. It’s attractive. It’s inviting.
And, Henry didn’t sacrifice the front end of the Model A either ? he made them large and round, the headlights separtated. He made both ends look great, and that’s what I think is missing in today’s car-maker’s design studios.