Honda e

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...

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...