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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Cars That Look Best Dirty
Most cars look worse dirty. A dusty black sedan looks neglected. A water-spotted white crossover looks like it spent a week in a grocery store parking lot. But there is a specific category of vehicle where a layer of dirt, dust, or mud does not hurt the design at all. In some cases it actively improves it. These are those cars and the reason is more interesting than it sounds...
Why the Car You Drive Says More About You Than You Want to Admit
Nobody wants to believe their car is a personality test. The standard defense is that it is just transportation, a practical decision based on budget and needs and maybe a little bit of what was available on the lot that day. That defense does not hold up. The car you chose, out of every car available at your price point, is one of the most readable signals you broadcast to everyone who sees you pull into a parking lot...
The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Car Design Was the SUV Boom
In 1990 the ten best-selling vehicles in America included sedans, coupes, and a handful of trucks. By 2005 the list was unrecognizable. By 2015 it was almost entirely trucks and SUVs. By 2023 Ford had stopped selling passenger cars in the United States entirely except for the Mustang, which survives only because it is culturally untouchable...
Should You Wash Your Car Before Photographing It? Why The Answer Is More Complicated Than You Think
The obvious answer is yes. Wash the car, get a clean photo, submit it. But spend any time looking at what actually wins faceoffs and you start noticing something that complicates the obvious answer. Some of the most compelling car photos are not of perfectly clean cars. And some of the most forgettable ones are of cars that look like they just rolled out of a detail shop...
Background Matters: Why Your Car Looks Better in Some Locations Than Others
Same car. Same photographer. Same time of day. Two completely different faceoff results depending on where it was parked. Location is doing more work in a car photo than most owners realize, and getting it wrong is one of the most common reasons a great car underperforms in faceoffs against cars that frankly should not be beating it...