I have seen the future, and it is ugly.

Early days in Magellan's Log I mused at length about car design as a kind of cultural barometer. My idea was that, because of the several-years' lead-time between the first design of a car and its appearance on the showroom floor, you could study concept cars and maybe get insight into our collective cultural future. (You can read those musings here and a later update here.)

For some time now as I continued to follow car design, I had been developing this awful pain in my stomach which felt like a serious esthetic ulcer aforming.

First, Pontiac had the brogdingnastic effrontery to foist the so-called "Aztek" (what did the Meso-Americans ever do to deserve this?) off on us:

At the time, I thought: the less said about that, the better.

Then here came the Honda Insight, which for all its admirable hybrid-engineering sophistication would be a finalist in anybody's eyesore-of-the-decade competition:

Eyesore? This is chronic pink-eye, sty, call-in-the-ophthalmologists stuff.

While this was going on, as a kind of over-amplified figured bass, in the background we had the continuation of the my-freeway-tank-is- bigger-than-your-freeway-tank competition, which led to such gargantuan wonders as the Cadillac Escalade:

We all make mistakes, even global car conglomerates. But here we had the beginnings of a trend whose offensiveness harkened back to the glory days of the Edsel and other faux pas's of the 1950s. In spite of stomach turmoil, I was willing to give the designers time to see the error of their tight-assed, poorly proportioned ways.

Then along came the 2001 Tokyo Motor Show, which along with the Detroit and Frankfurt shows, is one of the major venues for manufacturers who want to strut their newest four-wheel stuff and show us what we'll all be riding around in five years from now.

So, my friends, we're all mature here: I give you the future. Undiluted, unbuffered ugly.

First, the low-end. in the form (?) of the Honda "Bulldog":

Is Muffy going to be thrilled in 2008 when you present her with a Bulldog on her graduation from Miss Pinkham's for her to drive around in her freshman year at Stanford?

OK, let's try the high-end ugly future. Thanks to the wizards at DaimlerChrysler we have this to look forward to, the Mercedes "Carving" (don't ask):

How can we control our impatience, waiting for the appearance of such outside the local Starbucks?

Somewhere far, far beyond such retro-economic concepts as "low-end" and "high-end", indeed beyond concepts such as "concepts," Honda's visionaries have now given us the "Unibox," which pretty much renders further speculation about the future of humanity moot:

END

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