g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.



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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001
Thursday, April 15, 2010
05:17 - Concept Cars: Engineering Disappointment

(top)
I've written before about how excruciating it must be to be a car designer, coming up with gorgeous and inspiring designs for Chrysler and Bentley and a million other vehicles whose survival into physical sheetmetal can only be described as Pyrrhic. And I've written with disdain about the tendency for magazines such as Road & Track to fill their pages with "photo-illustrations" of things like the alleged 2014 Nissan GT-R which they decided to write a half-page story on on the basis of, well, some lint they found in their navels, I guess.

“These reports that say we’re planning on producing a new-generation GT-R only five years after introducing the original, and that we’re going to make it a hybrid, are totally unfounded. I said when we introduced the GT-R that the car’s future will be decided in three years, and we are now entering that third year. Therefore, we’ve been too busy making sure that this GT-R makes a positive mark on the world to think about the next car,” he said.

Still, the arrival of yet another GT-R variant, the Spec M, due later this year in Japan (whether this car will make its way to the U.S. is still undecided) and the fact that the GT-R has become one of the most popular performance cars in the world, make us believe that plans are already being considered for the next-generation car.

"Quick, Rianna-Coco, fire up 3DSMax! We've got a story to write!

A chance sighting on the road yesterday, though, reminded me of one of my biggest bugaboos in this whole sad discipline: the Chrysler Crossfire.

Remember what that thing was supposed to look like when we saw the concept back in 2001?



I mean, damn.

What a world would we live in if domestic car companies had the kind of stones to bring cars like this to market?



At a glance it was obvious how it got its name, from the striking cross-plane rear buttresses that converged to a boattail-like point at the rear. An honestly new design idea. And those split contours on the front and rear glass, while clearly stunts for the burgeoning "retro" sensibility, looked damn fun. The Morgan-like headlights sealed the deal. If Chrysler—Chrysler!—could make cars like this, hell, maybe the American car industry isn't in such bad shape.

Well... we all know what happened.

We somehow went from this:



To this:



The damnable thing is that it's ostensibly not all that different. At a glance the basic proportions and lines are all still there; even the wheels are the same as in the concept. But somehow it all looks so much more... safe. Bland, boring, unassuming, banal. And look at how subtle the differences are that make it so: the rear bumpers are more intrusive into the design in the production car, effectively ruining the whole impact of those converging rear contours. The boattail element has been widened, presumably to make the rear hatch more usable, and in the process dramatically reducing the visual effect of those audacious lines and turning it into a dumpy, slouching barrelback. The wheels, while visually the same as in the concept, are scaled down as they always are. And the front, well... the front has been replaced with a generic, conventional, Lego-like 300C treatment, as far removed from the concept's elegance as gluing a Ford F250's nose onto a Porsche.

It's such small things as this that ruin concept cars for me. I love—or have always loved—the idea of creating fantasy cars out of thin air, and the modern world with its photo-realistic design software and limitless possibilities of one-man creativity ought to make it all the more of a playground than it ever was. But knowing that what's bound to happen to even the most buildable of concepts, just by making the most modest and practical of changes to them, and nonetheless causing such irreparable and painful damage to the unity of vision embodied in the concept, must be enough to drive a designer batty.

1910 must have been a hell of a time to be a carmaker.

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© Brian Tiemann