Russell Davies

other aesthetics for cars

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.

slab-sided and slow

I've had enormous fun spotting this kind of stuff in New York. I love the way North American commercial vehicles look.

The design brief seems to be - these vehicles are going to be slow, they'll have to contain lots of stuff and it'd be good if it didn't show too much if a few accidents happened along the way. So they're basically square boxes on wheels, the anti-porsche.

This is pretty much what I'd ask for in a vehicle of my own, but they don't seem to make things like that for regular people. The closest I got was an old Land Rover Series III we used to have.

There's a completely different design vernacular for commercial vehicles over here, the least European things you could imagine. I think it's because US vehicles are designed to travel long-distances in straight lines and European vehicles are designed to go short distances and around lots of corners.

And this is fantastic. I think it's a sanitation vehicle, but it looks like you could set it to 'blow' instead of 'suck' and end up on Mars.

complex formula

Went to see the F1 exhibit at The Design Museum. NDG has written about how splendid the graphics etc were. Personally I was overcome with nostalgia at the site of this lovely black JPS thing. The Formula One of my youth.

And I was struck by the irony (is it irony, I don't know anymore, it probably isn't, maybe I'll start again.)  I was struck by the contrast between this familar design bromide on the wall outside the gallery; 'progress means simplifying, not complicating' and the story that the exhibit itself told - which was of constant progress through increased complexity and complication.

Even if you ignore the splendid Cooper T51 and start in the 80s with these sleek but boxy things you can see the escalating complexity over the next 20 years.

The 21st century things are almost fractal, the closer you peer the more complication you see.

They're still beautiful, but they're asymmetric, unpredictable, with curious little bits that pop up to solve particular aerodynamic problems or whatever. They're things of detail not vision. More like bundles of contingent solution s than a singular, simple design decision. Lots of little ideas rather than one big one. Good Lord,  it's almost like there are parallels with other things.

And I know, it's not always this complicated. It's been exploded.

Having said that, this is probably my favourite car design ever, the Morris Minor. Not because it's simple but because it was famously compared to a poached egg, and it looks a lot like an armchair on wheels.

i'm not alone

Any Idiot Could Have Come Up With The Car

During a recent visit to the Smithsonian's National Museum Of American History, I was more than a little amazed to discover they had dedicated an...

I guess I'm not alone in my car-skepticism. All hail The Onion, journal of respectable and well thought-out opinion. Via plannerliness.

moving lights

I'm not a big fan of motorbikes. They seem to represent all that's wrong with motorised transport. Dangerous. Fast. Uncomfortable. Hard to drive. But we saw the Goldwing Light Parade at the Blackpool Illuminations and I was completely captivated.

It probably helps that Goldwings are some of the most car-like bikes you can get and seem to attract a different sort of rider than the usual macho bike nonsense. But the lights were brilliant. Actually joyful. (And really hard to photograph, at speed, with my little digital camera. Though actually I quite like the effect, it gets at some of the pleasure of the things.) The lights enhance, extend and camoflage the shape of the bike, making them look more like UFOs than anything I've ever seen.

It reminded me of the only good bit of the movie Black Rain; the cool Japanese trucks with the scrolling lights. Those things are genius. I can't find good pictures of them. But check out this page.

But it got me thinking about customisation, which is clearly a fairly deep urge amongst so many car-owners and how I've always wondered why ordinary car manufacturers seem to make it so hard for people. Obviously people do mod their cars. All the time. And some of them are gorgeous and some are horrible. But it's actually pretty hard to do. It's not like cars come with optional wings you can snap in and out. Or with Lego studs so you can stick stuff on. They're made of glossy, shiny metal which is spoiled the moment you go near it. It actively discourages experimentation. Strange.

driving pleasure

Since pictures of Arthur are now officially sanctioned by Business Week, I couldn't resist these two of Anne and Arthur from our trip to Blackpool's Pleasure Beach last week.

If only driving real cars was this much fun.

vans are the future of cars

This is our Escort. We bought it off my Dad for £1,500 when we got back from the States. It's a marvelous thing. No fun to drive or look at or anything but it always starts and it must be the one of the most ubiquitous cars in the world. So everyone has parts for it.

We don't use it much. Hardly ever in fact. But we live in Central London and we get a free parking space and we have a tiny flat/apartment so it's actually seizing to be a vehicle and is becoming a storage device. It actually represents a relatively expensive bit of real estate. Much more expensive than the price of the car. At the moment it's got all the camping gear in there and it'll probably stay in there all winter. I'm thinking of chucking a load of summery clothes in there too.

So imagine if it was as big as this. I'm actually giving reasonably serious thought to trading it in for a van. (I've always wanted to own a van.) And if it's only going to be a mobile storage unit we might as well get the most for our money. I could keep my bike in there too and not find it like this when I got  back from holiday.

I've thought for a long time that vans are the future of cars. Car companies are too obsessed with ideas of speed and luxury and aren't giving enough consideration to the practical stuff we want to do with them. When we used to do focus groups on cars and ask people what was important to them about a new car they always used to say boot (trunk) capacity. And we'd pershaw and say they don't really mean than, that's just what they feel they have to say, they're really concerned about image and status and speed. But, actually, maybe they weren't. Maybe they just wanted to know how much stuff they could keep in the damn thing.

The continuing consumption of stuff is leading to a huge boom in the self-storage industry. It wouldn't surprise me if that also led to a huge growth in the demand for vans, or a more van-like cars. Not mini-vans. Not big cars for lots of kids. But car-sized things that you can use to keep stuff in, and move it around.

Like this Toyota thingy. Cute isn't it? I could use something like this.

Which only reminds that one of my many huge errors when I worked on Honda was my complete failure to get them to import all the brilliant little van-like things they have in Japan. Thing like the Spike or even concepts like the Acty.

Well, maybe not the Acty. Toyota did hugely well with the Scion in the US and Honda could have beaten them to it. In Europe at least.

And it's not like vans have an entirely uninteresting pedigree or image. There's the Mystery Machine or there's this. Which got we wondering what ever happened to the new VW bus. Which led me to this rather nice concept:

But apparently that's not it. This is it, and while it's been kicking around since 2001 they've decided that Chrysler are going to build it. That'll be good then. Good to see the car industry really firing on all cylinders.

highly abashed gearhead gnarlyness

(This is a stream of nonsense about cars. Because everytime I see one of metacool's splendid Gearhead Gnarlyness posts I want to write something. But I don't know anything about cars, really.)

I'm getting old. I'm finding toy cars more and more evocative and nostalgic. I was in a model shop with Arthur the other day and found this Battle Kings Tank Transporter and this Bertone Barchetta which overwhelmed me with nostalgia (a bit, I'm not Proust or anything). So I bought them.

(I especially remember the bouncy suspension on the mid 70s Corgi Whizzwheels. They don't make them like that anymore)

And I was in a very nice model car museum near Skegness (it was raining) and saw these rather fine Hot Wheels Blings. And they made me start to think about my relationship with cars.

I've worked on car accounts for most of my career in advertising. A few years on Fiat/Lancia, a few on Nissan and a few on Honda. I've always rather enjoyed it but I never really fit in. Because I'm not a  petrolhead. We used to the British Grand Prix all the time and I spent the whole time complaining about the noise. We'd drive a selection of exotic sports vehicles and I'd try and get everyone to slow down. The first time I took a company car home to show my Mum and Dad it was a Nissan 300ZX and I was proudest of the carphone in it. I probably never got it above 80mph. (Apart from the time I spun one, showing off to some creatives, which finally proved to me that I was not built to drive fast.)

But it's not that I don't like driving or cars. I love driving and cars. I just don't like driving fast. And I don't like all the stuff you're supposed to like about cars.

This seems to capture more of the essence of 'car-ness' than some fancy Porsche or Ferrari.

I love the way we use cars to say so much about ourselves. They're such a conscious, careful and expressive brand choice. And I love the way we turn them into our little worlds. (The best ever expression of this is Martin Parr's From A To B and the accompanying TV programme - does anyone have a tape of that? This picture's from there.) And I love the romance of driving. Late nights. Shouting along to the radio. Truck stops. All that.

This is probably my dream vehicle. I'd love one of these. But if not available at large scale I'd settle for this.

But I hate the complacency of the car industry. They promise so much and deliver so little. (Which is why Honda was such a refreshing change). But the thing that constantly gets me is the paucity of the design imagination. Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Funkmaster Flex can come up with stuff that actually excites people. Interesting shapes. New ideas. But the car industry? Nothing.

Which is why I've started collecting vehicle designs that actually seem interesting to me. Like these fantastic looking RNLI rescue vehicles. Look at the shapes and the scale of these things. This is what we were promised in the 70s.

You're not telling me there wouldn't be a consumer market for one of these. It might be slow but it'll out Hummer a Hummer.

(Finally a front three-quarter facing right, I knew we'd get there eventually)

Or look at this. Finally someone has taken their design cues from Gerry Anderson. But why does it have to be a crane? Why can't it be some cool, hybrid, electric truck? That's how we'll persuade people to give up the gas guzzlers. By building stuff that looks like the future was supposed to look, not cute little smart cars.

Anyway. Hmm. I'm getting interested in cars again. It's been a while. More on a car theme later. (And it's become clear to me. Basically, I like big wheels.)