A few weeks back there was a fantastic Will Wright profile in the New Yorker. Since I saw him talking at EG this summer he's become one of my heroes and this profile is full of more great thinking. But the bit that really leaped out at me was this little aside about his car:
"He drove a black two-door BMW with a fancy radar detector. The car was a mess, inside and out; Wright never washes it, because he wants it to look like one of the banged-up starships in “Star Wars.”
(And I presume he doesn't mean like this.) I immediately had to read this out to Anne because I realised that's what I feel about our car. I'm not never cleaning it because I'm lazy (honest) but because I want it to look vaguely like something from Star Wars. And I can't be alone in this, surely. There's must be millions of people out there who's aesthetic judgement was somewhat influenced by beat-up spacecraft. Yet the car industry completely ignore them.
Which made me think that there's probably loads of other fairly mainstream sets of tastes and inclinations that get ignored by the automotive industry. Like Goth. Goth is a huge, pervasive influence on youth and mainstream culture but what would a goth drive? There's not a car that does goth is there?
I've always thought that's a mistake the hybrid/electric manufacturers are making. They're either trying to make their vehicles look normal, or slightly different and space-agey, but in a not-remarkable BBC scif-fi way (ie we've stuck a slightly stranger shell on an existing chasis). Or they're trying to make a convincing sports car, firmly in the existing car aesthetic.
What if they also tried to create a new approach to the exterior, one that was more about appreciating and revealing the character of wear and tear of driving life and that didn't have the instant, built-in depreciation of shiny metal? (I guess it's a version of beausage.) Maybe that would encourage a more sustainable relationship with our vehicles. Even if it doesn't, I'm personally more likely to drive a hybrid vehicle that makes me feel slightly like Boba Fett than slightly like Jensen Button.