Wednesday, July 29, 2009 |
05:53 - No accounting for (my) taste
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I seem to be in the distinct minority of opinion here. TTAC offers its collective community aesthetic judgment on the new Ferrari 458, which seems overwhelmingly positive:
I dunno—to my eyes, it's distinctly fugly. The beltline crease leading down to the rear wheels gives it a weak, skinny-waisted look; the overwrought haunches are trying too hard to make it into a baby Enzo; and the pointy B/C-pillar shape is just plain gross. I've never been a fan of such clumsy shapes ever since they showed up as a matter of inelegant necessity on the 911 Targa; here, the effect is made all the more painful by the nails it pounds into the coffin of the iconic quarter-window shape shared by all the mid-engine V8 Ferraris from the 308 to the 355. It was still there in ovoid vestigial form in the 360 and 430, but now it's gone for good, if such a word even applies.
And what the hell is up with those headlights? Pop-up lights were cool. Their demise was tragic, but I eventually grew to love and appreciate the crystalline molded units we see on most cars today. But now apparently the game is to see who can create the most inefficient and aesthetically unbalanced shape possible; these lights don't quite outdo the professor-professor-look-at-me-I-did-something-original boomerang things on the 370Z, but they come awfully close.
In short, this is the first descendant of the 308 that seems to be so deliberately divorced from its history as to be filing family-court lawsuits against it. (Yet even though there's no central grille in the front, they've mocked up a pretend one with a big black expanse just so they could stick a prancing-horse emblem in there as some kind of cynical afterthought callback. Sorry, I'm not impressed. Get rid of the shiny blinger wheels and put on something with a tasteful satin finish and we'll talk.)
And then there's this, which the TTAC community seems to think is boring and lame: the new Saab 9-5.
"Is it ugly or what?" the site propounds in question form. Well... yes? Yes it is. And that's why it's awesome.
Recent Saabs have been far too anonymized, watered-down, and “normal”. Saabs in the past were always sort of what you’d expect a Martian to build after you described a car to him over the phone, to quote a friend's take from years back. This is the first Saab to look like a Saab—weird, concave in all the wrong places, and yet oddly endearing—in over a decade.
Indeed, in this day and age, all cars have started to look like one another even more so than ever before; true, in a given era everybody builds to the same aesthetic standard, but the more years we rack up in the history of motoring, the more historical baggage we have to drag along and the more difficult it is to do something truly maverick-like. Today, even making a retro-mobile to cash in on a formerly profitable nameplate or body form is predictable and passé. It takes some real guts to design something like this—not retro, but obstinate. It won't win any new converts to the brand from focus-group-tested prime market demographics, but it'll serve its loyal, long-suffering following with exactly what they were looking for.
Ugly? Saabs were always ugly. And that’s why people loved them so.
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