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White Is the Hardest Color to Pull Off. Most Cars Fail.
White is the best-selling car color in the world. Has been for over a decade. Buyers choose it because it's safe, resells well, hides dust reasonably, and looks clean on a configurator screen. None of those are design reasons. And design is exactly what white tests, mercilessly, every time a car wears it...
General
Jeffrey WileyMay 4, 2026 at 4:33 PM ET
Jeffrey WileyLatest Articles
The Last Great Era of American Car Design (And Why It Ended)
American car design peaked twice. The first peak was the 1950s, when post-war prosperity and genuine cultural euphoria produced colors, proportions, and detail work that no subsequent era has matched. The second peak was shorter, more aggressive, and in many ways more interesting: the roughly decade-long window from 1964 to 1974 when American muscle car design produced some of the most visually forceful objects ever put on public roads. Then four things happened simultaneously and it was over within eighteen months...
News
Cam WalshMay 3, 2026 at 3:44 PM ET
Cam Walsh
Electric Cars Have a Design Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Electric vehicles solved the engineering problem. The range improved. The charging infrastructure is building out. The performance numbers are extraordinary. What nobody solved is the design problem, and the design problem is not about styling. It is structural. It is baked into the format at a level that cannot be fixed with better headlights or a more aggressive front end. The best EV designers in the world are working against physics and losing in specific ways that are visible in every faceoff where an EV goes up against a comparable combustion car...
GeneralJeffrey WileyMay 2, 2026 at 1:59 PM ET
Jeffrey Wiley
Why Cars Looked Better When They Were Dangerous
The most beautiful production cars ever built would kill you at a rate modern safety regulators would find unconscionable. The 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB had no crumple zones, no airbags, a steering column that would impale the driver in a frontal impact, and drum brakes that required planning your stops several seconds in advance. It is also one of the most visually perfect objects ever produced by human hands. The connection between these two facts is not coincidental...
GeneralJeffrey WileyMay 1, 2026 at 3:09 PM ET
Jeffrey Wiley
Why Concept Cars Always Look Better Than the Production Version
Every few years a car company rolls something onto an auto show stage that makes the crowd go quiet for a second before the applause starts. The proportions are perfect. The surfaces are sculpture. The details are unlike anything currently on the road. Then two years later the production version arrives and something has happened to it. The roofline is higher. The wheel arches are smaller. The front end has been softened. The car that made people stop talking is now a car people drive past without looking at. This happens so consistently it might as well be a law of automotive physics...
GeneralCam WalshApril 30, 2026 at 3:41 PM ET
Cam Walsh
Why Japanese Car Design Quietly Became the Best in the World
Japanese automakers have been quietly building the strongest design portfolio in the world, and the automotive press is only now catching up to what has been happening. This did not happen overnight. It is the result of a philosophy shift that started in Hiroshima with one mid-size brand and spread outward in ways that are still playing out...
GeneralJeffrey WileyApril 29, 2026 at 2:06 PM ET
Jeffrey Wiley
Sedans Are Not Dead. Automakers Just Stopped Trying.
Every few months a new obituary gets written for the sedan. Sales are down. Automakers are canceling models. The crossover has won. The four-door is finished. And every time someone writes that obituary, the Toyota Camry sells another 300,000 units, the Honda Accord moves another 200,000, and the Tesla Model 3 quietly becomes one of the best-selling vehicles on the planet. The sedan is not dead. A specific group of automakers decided it was not worth their effort, walked away, and then pointed at falling sales as proof the customer did not want it anymore...
GeneralCam WalshApril 28, 2026 at 4:32 PM ET
Cam Walsh
Why Black Cars Are a Trap
The gap between what black promises and what it delivers over time is the trap. Most people do not figure this out until they are three years into ownership...
AdviceJeffrey WileyApril 27, 2026 at 4:37 PM ET
Jeffrey Wiley
Why Some Cars Age Beautifully and Others Don't
The 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 looks better today than it did when it was new. The 2002 Pontiac Aztek looks exactly as bad as it did in 2002, possibly worse now that the cultural context that produced it has faded. Both cars are over twenty years old. Only one of them aged. The question of why some cars improve with time and others calcify into their worst qualities is worth taking seriously because the answer tells you something about what good design actually is...
GeneralCam WalshApril 26, 2026 at 5:18 PM ET
Cam Walsh
What Makes a Car Iconic vs Just Expensive
There are expensive cars everywhere. Most of them will be forgotten. The Porsche 911 will not be forgotten. Neither will the Ferrari Testarossa, the original Land Rover Defender, the Volkswagen Golf GTI, or the first-generation Mazda Miata. None of those last two cost anywhere near what most people think of as an iconic car's price. Expense has almost nothing to do with it...
GeneralJeffrey WileyApril 25, 2026 at 1:05 PM ET
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