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What Color Makes a Car Look Bigger?
Color changes the perceived size of a car more than most buyers realize, and getting it wrong costs you. An SUV that should look imposing can look squat and heavy in the wrong color. A compact car that should look athletic can look like a toy. The mechanics behind why this happens are specific enough that you can use them deliberately rather than just hoping you guessed right at the configurator...
Jeffrey Wiley
Does Car Color Affect Resale Value?
The relationship between color and resale value is real, measurable, and counterintuitive enough that it's worth understanding before you make a decision you'll live with for several years.
Cam Walsh
Why Does My Car Look Better in Photos than in Person?
You've seen it happen. The press photos come out and the car looks extraordinary. Then you see one in a parking lot and something is off. The proportions feel different. The color is less interesting. The details that looked sharp in the photos look ordinary in person. This happens with enough consistency that it can't be coincidence, and it isn't. There are specific, technical reasons why cars look better in photos than in person, and understanding them changes how you evaluate any car you haven't seen in the metal...
Cam Walsh
The Best Car for Looking Good Without Trying
Some cars demand maintenance to look good. Black paint that needs weekly washing and monthly polishing. Complex body kits that need alignment after every car wash. A lowered suspension that scrapes on every parking garage entrance. These are cars that look spectacular when everything is right and progressively worse as the owner's time and patience run out...
Jeffrey Wiley
The One Feature That Makes Any Car Look Instantly Cheaper
It's not the badge. It's not the wheel size. It's not even the color, though color contributes. The single feature that makes any car look cheaper than it is, regardless of what it cost, regardless of how good the rest of the design is, is unpainted plastic cladding on the lower body panels...
Cam Walsh
What Is the Hardest Color to Pull Off?
White is demanding. Black is unforgiving. But neither of those is the hardest color to wear on a car. The hardest color is yellow. Not orange, not lime green, not any of the other colors people think of when they imagine a car color that requires commitment. Yellow specifically. And the reason has everything to do with what yellow does to proportion, light, and the viewer's eye before any design quality is even registered...
Cam Walsh
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...
Jeffrey Wiley
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Jeffrey Wiley