Car companies realize that streets full of their products look terrible
Car companies realize that streets full of their products look terrible
As an art and design nerd who really appreciates cars as pieces of industrial design, that is an extremely succinct and perceptive criticism.
(Also it a lot of them just aren’t that beautiful or interesting of pieces of design anymore which makes me a bit sad. Maybe it’s actually always been that way. Regardless, that’s really a different issue)
Artistic designs has taken a backseat to profitability.
So we have a whole bunch of stylistically identical designs from all major companies. Without a logo on most vehicles today it is very difficult to distinguish between companies. They are all about the same with very little variability.
Cars used to be awesome, now they suck. Go look at pictures of cars from the 40s to 60s or 79s even… there is no comparison.
This isn’t necessarily true. Even back then the streets were filled with shitbox cars that all looked the same. But only the cars that were beautiful and unique are still remembered and the rest are forgotten
I don’t know, I think the streets were probalby really rad in like the late 40’s early 50’s. I mean:
If you ignore all the nice neon and look at just the cars all you see are a bunch of similar looking cars. They all look like a Chevy Bel-Air to me. Now I am sure a 50s car enthusiasts would be able to name them all, but to your average person there aren’t any significant differences.
This is the same for cars today as well. Maybe 60 years in the future people will reminisce about the good old days of the Mazda Miata, Shelby Mustang, or Toyota Supra without realizing that these cars were few and far between and the streets were actually just filled with cheap Toyotas and Kias and Nissan Altimas.
I always love the “cars all look the same these days” comment as if vehicles of every decade weren’t closely following the same design trends. Cars today don’t look the exact same unless you’re blind, especially if these people are supposed to be enthusiasts, so the other option is these people are just fuckin’ stupid.
One thing I will give older cars, though, is that at least they were colourful. I have a WRB BRZ(that’s mostly parked because I have great public transit options) and I feel so out of place not because it’s a sportscar but because it’s not a greyscale mass of shit rolling down the grey road.
They all look like a Chevy Bel-Air to me.
Nothing wrong with that!
But the shit boxes people were driving in the 60s were VW Beetles, an objectively good looking car. Easily the most popular car of the 60s was the Mustang, an objectively beautiful car.
The real shit boxes didn’t start popping up until after the oil crisis in 73.
The real shit boxes didn’t start popping up until after the oil crisis in 73.
How dare you rip on the Pacer and the Gremlin!
79s even
Uh, my first car ever was a '79 Chevy Malibu. There has never been a more boring basic car in existence, and for good measure it was mechanically a piece of shit. The only good thing about it was that it had once been owned by semi-famous comic book artist P. Craig Russell.
You throw the right tires and tint some windows on a Malibu, and it looks like a car with attitude.
Otherwise yeah, it’s fairly mundane, I agree.
Just like theme parks, the idyllic vision of the product is when you’re the only one around enjoying the product. The reality of LOTS of people enjoying the product while you do inherently reduces the appeal.
This is why indie rock lovers hated that it went mainstream. Suddenly everyone was enjoying the product they previously had to themselves.
I think the difference for music, movies, books, etc is that the product itself doesn’t change in substance or function when more people are using it. Parks, Cars and the infrastructure that enables them, Restaurants, and other experiential products are negatively impacted by widespread usage. Cars are less enjoyable because of traffic. Lines to get on space mountain make the whole experience worse than you imagine the ride itself being. All this stuff is marketed as a fantasy version of the actual experience you have in a way that isn’t the same as when other people are cringe with your music.
For some products you can probably draw some nice enjoyment curve. Cars for example, if you are the only one that has a car it sucks, no roads, no gas stations, etc. If everyone has one it also sucks, traffic jams, polution, noise, etc.
Some goes for most other things, beaches are great when it’s not crowded but there are enough people so they also have some places to get drinks and go to the bathroom. When it’s crowded and it’s basically towels touching it sucks.
I think for bikes the curve is much more spread out, even in the Netherlands where basically everyone ownes a bike, you can still enjoy it.
I do notice that when I was younger bicycle roads where a lot less crowded, so I feel for me personally the peak of the curve has been reached.
Most definitely. Like another commenter pointed out, music and movies don’t change but the way you experience them does. Theaters, Event halls become larger and more crowded on a kind of curve as well which makes them more expensive while also becoming less enjoyable.
I often wonder why there aren’t more copies of things rather than making the existing one bigger. The population of my city is bigger than the population of the bigger city an hour away did when they first had the airport i have to drive to, or the bigger stores and restaurants when they first opened. Why don’t we have more of those things even though in the last 30 years we’ve grown to what was at that time large enough to support that expansion?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Gotem.
