Genesis G80

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...

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...

Every car person has been in this argument. Two cars, two owners, zero agreement, and a conversation that has been going in circles for twenty minutes. Your car looks better. No, mine does. Yours is common. Mine is refined. Yours is trying too hard. Mine knows exactly what it is. Nobody wins because nobody has a referee. Until now.

The debate about two-door versus four-door cars almost always ends up in the same place. Two doors look better. Four doors are more practical. Case closed, move on. But that framing skips over something more interesting, which is why the two-door almost always looks better, what specifically it does to a car's proportions, and the cases where the four-door actually wins...