Life
Car design evolved from the production-centric era of Henry Ford, to the expressive styles of the mid 20th century. Why is this millennium’s vision so boring? By Elizabeth Farrelly.
Do today’s cars have to be so dull?
Why are cars now so boring? It’s a paradox of late-modern life that the more we espouse diversity, the more same-same everything gets. Grey-box houses, brown-box apartment buildings and a hundred brands of car indistinguishable from your basic four-door sedan or suburban SUV – most of them white, silver, charcoal or (the currently fashionable) mushroom soup. Even the new Aston Martin looks like, well, a Kia.
It wasn’t always thus. True, Henry Ford reputedly packaged the mass-produced Model-T with the famous tagline “any colour as long as it’s black”. But that early monopoly begat an explosion of mid-century exuberance.
For a start, from the 1930s was the brilliant Battista Pininfarina, designing Peugeots, Lancias and Alfas (including the gorgeous Spider Duetto) of astonishing chic. But there was more, far more. The VW Karmann Ghia in Oriole yellow, a cerulean-blue Citroën 2CV, a Porsche 911 in defiant mustard, a lipstick red E-type Jag or a BMW 2002 tii in stinging citrus yellow. Find a new car now that’s a tenth as sexy as the 1950s deep-burgundy Citroën Light 15, the Alfa Spider in brilliant turquoise or just about any VW Beetle or Mini. And that’s before we even get to the extravagant fins and fancies of the American auto.
This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s about the draining of personality from our public realm. As with cereal – where every supermarket offers 20 brands of granola that are essentially all the same – so with cars. But cars are not cereal. Cars carry us into our public lives.
You might consider the car a massive cultural blight. That’s true – of course car culture has driven uglification, sprawl and climate change, but the car is no less evil for being rendered boring. Indeed, the less engaging we make our cars – the more we disinvest in them emotionally – the easier it is to ignore their existence and their destructive effects.
The car is more than mere transport. Like a house or a suit, the car expresses the self in everyday life. It’s a persona, a mediator between self and world, a mask – an internal room, an external re-presentation and a mediator between the two. The car, in a word, signifies.
As an internal room, in which we may spend hours a day, the car is a sealed acoustic shell for intimate talk, impassioned argument or exuberant song. As an external face, its form and colour – its messaging – speaks to the world, offering an idea of who you are; not only your wealth but your values, accomplishments and personal flavour. In mediating between the two realms, further, the car operates a kind of transformative magic. Your car can give you agency in this all-important self-world relationship, so it should offer a degree of choice over exactly what is conveyed.
Yet, increasingly, we behave as if it is nothing more than a tool. As Jeremy Clarkson notes in a recent Instagram post, “after 35 years, do I still have the same love for cars? No. Honestly, no … 90 percent I couldn’t even identify them… They’re all s**t, now.” Indeed, says former chief designer for Holden Richard Ferlazzo, this is a commonly asked question: Why do modern cars look the same?
Which only makes me more curious. If we notice it and lament it, why doesn’t it change? Isn’t that the whole thesis? The free market will provide? I press Ferlazzo on this, expecting that he might blame aerodynamics and the push for energy efficiency. But no. “The single most important influence on car design now,” he says, “is safety.”
To illustrate, Ferlazzo runs me through a potted history of car design. The earliest cars, designed for gentry, mimicked carriages – tall and narrow like the hansom cab (to accommodate a gentleman’s top hat) or open, low-slung and glamorous, like the early Rolls Royce and Bentley. After World War II, however, cars were for everyone – huge and flamboyant in confident America, modest and quirky (like the 2CV or Beetle) in straitened Europe.
Then, says Ferlazzo, came the whole space age period – with fake after-burners as tail lamps and fake torpedoes in front. Kitsch, certainly, but beautifully executed kitsch. It was also both the cause and the effect of a world view in which land and fuel were essentially costless and limitless.
The late 20th century changed all that. We began to worry. We were at risk, with more people (apparently) dying on roads than in wars. The planet itself was at risk – from sprawl, from hydrocarbons. As safety become a serious issue, car design entered what Ferlazzo calls the “crumple zone era”, with sacrificial areas fore and aft designed to cushion the driver from impact.
Superstructures, too, were stronger. Until then, the car was essentially a super heavy chassis bearing a massive engine, topped by a light, vulnerable superstructure, which housed the humans. That’s why modern cars can look and feel like tanks, with gun slots for windows and short, muscular pillars like hypervigilant bodyguards. Compare, for example, the experience inside a BMW X5 with the airy 1970s BMW 2002 tii, with its gloriously slender pillars and glassy carapace.
And yes, this reveals a shift in our personal and collective values towards ever more personal safety, reinforcing all those studies that show the safer people get, the more they angst about their safety. But it’s also about the safety of others, which is why “pedestrian compliance” has become a serious design constraint.
If a car hits you, it’s better to go over the top than under, so many cars became lower and chunkier in front. Some, rather than bulking up – certain Volvos, Lexuses, Nissans and VWs – have an exploding bonnet that, like a pedestrian-oriented airbag, lifts the hood on impact to stop the victim’s head hitting the engine. With electric vehicles, of course, this changes again. The much lighter engine means the front end can lose the chunky look. This should be a design liberator, yet mysteriously, EVs are as dull to look at as everything else.
So the question remains: Why can’t car designers accommodate these constraints and still create varied and interesting forms? Why isn’t the astonishing array of tiny EVs that park on a sixpence all over Rome and Vienna available here? Why must colours be so drearily bog-standard? Above all, why doesn’t someone make the 2CV, the Karmann Ghia or the Volvo P1800 as a shell atop a super-safe, eco-conscious, sexy-handling chassis? Surely that can’t be hard?
I can almost hear Ferlazzo sigh. These are what he calls top hats. People want one, but not enough people want them enough to justify the two or three billion dollars it costs a manufacturer to bring a new car to market.
If a Pininfarina exists today, he’s likely either out of work or enslaved to the ultra-high-end market, with its boutique productions. It’s just like houses. They’re boring because “the market” is shaped not by what the little guys want but by what the big guys are prepared to offer. Also because we, the demand side, have jettisoned our mid-century exuberance. We have allowed ourselves to be browbeaten into thinking of ourselves and our lives as dull and utilitarian – so that a system meant to nourish a rainforest actually creates a hushed and deathly monoculture.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "Cereal boxes on wheels".
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