Cars & Crystal Balls:
Update
by Pedkop Bumbera
| Backstory: Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Pedkop Bumbera, our car person, did one of our more popular pieces: Cars & Crystal Balls. It was Mr. Bumbera's conceit that, for reasons which he was at some pains to lay out, you could use car design as a kind of crystal ball, to see what was coming culturally in the next five to ten years. In the year since he wrote the original
article, he's been keeping his eye, well, on his four-wheeled crystal balls. And is
worried, as he explains below. |
Row 1: BMW Gran Turismo, Buick LaCrosse, Cadillac Imaj**, Chevrolet SSR.
Row 2: Chevrolet Traverse, Chrysler 300 Hemi, Chrysler Citadel, Chrysler
Java.
Row 3: Citroën C3, Citroën C6 Lignage, Dodge Power Wagon, Ford
Thunderbird*.
Row 4: Hummer H2, Infiniti Q45*, Jeep Varsity, Lexus C340*.
Row 5: Mazda Neospace, Mercedes SLA**, Mercedes SLR**, Oldsmobile
Profile.
Row 6: Pontiac Aztek*, Pontiac Piranha, Toyota RAV4*, Saturn CV**.
*In production or **scheduled for production.
Look at that, will you. Here we are, with our feet now firmly planted in the new millennium, and those 24 photos represent the current state of global car design. Not a single pretty picture in the lot. And not a very hopeful picture taken as a group, wouldn't you say? What do we see here? 1. Color? A lot of gray, for one thing. And, except for maybe the Citroën C3, no joyous, outrageous, jump-up-and-down, hey-look-at-me colors of the 1960's, that's for sure. Not a hint of the jolting two- and three-tones of the 1950's. 2. Form? A massive failure of imagination (again, with only a couple of exceptions--make your own choices here). Recycling of the past continues. Apparently car designers haven't heard that post-modernism, with its willful urge to appropriate, is already passé. Even the po-mo stuff is unimaginative. The Cadillac Imaj, which is going into production, looks like nothing so much as a squashed Chrysler PT Cruiser. As for the rest, what a copycat lot. Take some Play-Doh, make a model of an '85 Taurus, squoosh it a little this way, squeeze it little that way and voilà! You have the 2005 Oldsmobile/ Camry/ Volkswagen/ Lincoln. If you asked me for one adjective to describe this group, I'd choose "ungainly." <> What are we to make of this, future-wise? I see these possibilities: 1. My old idea of car-design-as-crystal-ball no longer works. Maybe car design (as I suggested in the original article) is no longer a critical cultural element. Maybe the creative people have all gone elsewhere (computer games? advertising?). Plus, lead-time for a new car design used to be 5 to 7 years. Now, manufcaturing efficiencies and computers have got it down to less than 3 years. So the designers are not having to look as far into the future. The leaps of imagination are shorter, less courageous, less revealing. 2. The car, like the bicycle is close to the limit of design possibilities. At this point, the four-wheel mechanical passenger-carrying vehicle is as close to perfection as it can get and all we can do now is tweak and fine-tune. 3. My old idea of car-design-as crystal-ball is still valid, and what you see (above) is what we're going to get in the next decade or so: a buttoned-down, severely reserved, inhibited, muted, extremely quiet and rapacious, fear-filled culture. What these pictures of concept cars do not accurately represent is the global popularity of overweight, gas-guzzling SUV's. At this writing, that mania shows no signs of lessening in intensity. If so, I'd have to say the near- to medium-range future looks pretty bleak. Which may mean it's time to 1) get your money out of the stock market, and 2) settle in for a long winter's nap culture-wise. END
Click here to see Bumbera's original article
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