This is gonna be a long one — you might get redirected to the website that hosts my newsletter, as a heads-up.
A big thank you to esteemed friend of the program J. Baker for sharing some pictures of he and his friends’ car collections.
I think that when it comes to cars, people usually fall into one of two camps: those that appreciate the classics, and those who are enamored with ultra-modern designs and high-tech components.
I generally find myself in the first camp — there’s something about the look of those older boxy cars that is infinitely charming to me. The Range Rover Classic of the 90’s, the old Mercedes SLs, Alfa Romeos, and even Volvo station wagons. So much character in those old bones.
If you look at the (regular people) car market now, you might notice something a little unfortunate — it’s getting harder and harder to tell the differences between manufacturers. If the cars in the picture below were de-badged, would you be able to correctly guess the brand? I don’t think I could.
In other words, the whole market is kind of blending together into a single cohesive design. Brands that used to be able to differentiate themselves because of their distinctive looks are slowly but surely losing that edge, for a variety of reasons.
The most prominent of said reasons are environmental and safety regulations, which have left us with the sleeker and more rounded looks that have defined car aesthetics since the 2010s.
Combine these with consumer selection pressure (see the recent proliferation of SUVs) and a hypercompetitive market, and you’re left with a standardized product meant to appeal to as many people as possible.
Even if a car manufacturer wanted to cash in on its old iconic designs, bringing back a signature look from the past (the Ford Bronco, for example) just isn’t feasible. You end up with an approximation that just doesn’t satisfy that ‘itch‘ in the same way that the original did.
Higher-end manufacturers, especially performance brands, have been historically immune to the aforementioned sameness — their sleek silhouettes are synonymous with the word fast and have defined the look of the exotic car market for many decades.
The styling of Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche, et al., maintain a relatively unique look, but are also not immune to the issue of design refinement. The exotic car market experiences it in part for different reasons, which are mainly centered around optimizing power output and performance with respect to aerodynamics.
As normal cars continue to become rounder and sleeker, it is clear that we are converging on a singular style — one that might be best described as the Tesla-fication of car aesthetics.
For now, I am maintaining hope that the newest design fad in cars is simply a reaction to the market disruption that Tesla has caused. Tesla’s explosion in popularity has certainly forced many of the legacy manufacturers to step their game up in terms of electric offerings and tech packages.
In my opinion, the most notable thing about Tesla is their willingness to force innovation in the auto industry. It got people to think seriously about electric cars for the first time. There have been EV offerings for over a decade now, but they never had the exposure that they did until Tesla became a big player.
It seems that there are many similarities that you could draw between Tesla’s cars and Apple’s iPhone (and more recently their AirPods) — the market for these items certainly already existed, but it was small until they got involved.
Volvo, a company that makes cars for people who look like Elizabeth Warren, now has sections listed for Hybrids, Electric Cars, and then ‘Other Cars’. The section for ‘Other Cars‘ are of course their normal offering which most of their sales likely come from. While I can’t say this for certain, their willingness to frame their website in such a way is probably a direct result of Tesla’s influence on the market.
So whether or not you’re pro-EV (there are very valid arguments for both points of view — more on that in a minute), electric cars are here to stay.
With all that being said though, Tesla’s design feels like a caricature of the 2010s to me.
One of my highest hopes for the proliferation of electric cars is that we will once again see some uniqueness built into the designs of cars. Two brands actually announced earlier this year that they would be reviving old models from the past, with all new electric engines, at the very least as concept designs.
The Ford F-100 Eluminator and the Hyundai Grandeur were both decently popular models back in their day. These brands are using their new electric platforms to take a step away from the comfort zone that is the current state of auto manufacturing. They are taking a gamble by bringing back these icons, but all-in-all, we could be looking at the first baby steps toward something revolutionary.
In brining back these old models with electric components, Ford and Hyundai are able to bypass one of the aforementioned limiters on design - environmental regulations. Environmental regulations have been the main driver of the overly-rounded shape that we’ve seen cars take on in the last 20 or so years. Without them as a deciding factor, it gives automotive companies more room to experiment with their silhouettes.
This leaves safety regulations as a major hurdle, which given the concept photos for these cars, seem to have a pretty small footprint when it comes to overall design impact.
Car safety has improved drastically from the time of the Ford F-100, in large part due to the crumple zone. This is one of those rare instances where plastic components are superior to their metal counterparts. So while you’ll likely never be able to get a fully-metal car ever again, you can rest assured knowing that automotive materials scientists have done their due diligence.
Restomods
A portmanteau of “restoration“ and “modification“, this concept has been alive in the car community essentially since cars were invented. The process centers around taking vintage cars, restoring them, and integrating aftermarket parts that wouldn’t have been available when the car was first introduced. This is different from a restoration alone in the sense that a restoration’s aim is generally to use the same factory components as the original, whereas the restomod would use newly available parts.
The topic as I understand it is quite controversial, where some diehard car enthusiasts might argue that restomodding is more akin to slaughtering someone and then fashioning a skinsuit out of their corpse. For a less dramatic take on this, see the Ship of Theseus.
Anyway, electric restomods are rising in popularity and we are seeing some truly beautiful results come out of this sphere, though don’t expect them to be cheap — the Alfa Giulia below has a lofty price tag of $500,000.
Restomods offer a promising look into what is possible with fully updated aftermarket parts — the future may offer auto manufacturers the opportunity to look back through their archives and make some stunningly gorgeous works of art.
Electric Cars, But at What Cost?
Now that I’ve spent a good chunk of your time talking about the benefits of electric car platforms, let’s take a moment to talk about why they still suck:
Strip mining
Most electric cars on the market today use lithium-ion batteries. As you can see from the picture above (from western Australia), this is what it takes to ensure that we maintain a steady supply of lithium — this is obviously very destructive to the local ecosystem. On top of that, all of the equipment used to mine lithium runs on fossil fuels, so it’s doubly bad for the environment.
At this point in battery technology, we’re more or less just swapping one method of pollution for another, given how costly it is to actually get lithium out of the ground. Plus, disposal of EV batteries isn’t exactly sustainable either.
Electricity still almost fully relies on fossil fuels
That’s great that you have an electric car, but it’s not making a difference if that electricity is coming from a coal-fired power plant. As it stands, 13% of the energy produced in the United States considered renewable (wind, solar, hydroelectric, etc.). The most optimistic estimates put the US at reaching 90% renewable energy usage in 2035 at the earliest. This is just for the United States too — countries like China and India, who are rapidly entering the first world also use a massive amount of non-renewable energy, and don’t seem to plan on slowing down any time soon.
Further, if we plan on relying on wind & solar energy, we would need substantial infrastructure capable of harnessing that energy. Electricity dissipates over time, and we don’t really have a realistic way of “holding“ that electricity for times when it might be needed (like a cloudy, windless day, or times of great energy demand). It seems that our best bets are pumped hydroelectricity (extreme geographical restriction, requires energy to pump the water) or pumped thermal electricity storage (heat dissipates due to insulation inefficiencies, requires energy for thermodynamic cycling).
Current battery technology means that each charge of a battery will be shorter than the previous one
For the same reason that your phone battery gets gradually worse, all batteries have limits for number of cycles for the inherent reason that a battery charge/discharge is a chemical reaction, and a chemical reaction can never go fully to completion. This means more mining of rare earth metals to replace the old, unusable batteries, a problem that is not as essential to the function of a car with an ICE
People have managed to keep cars from the 1950s running in good order — that seems like a dubious task, given the way that electric cars (and indeed the automotive field in general) are headed.
Electric car designs suck ass so far
Teslas are for GOOBERS don’t @ me.
For real though, who is actually designing a car matters a lot, and electric cars are currently marketed to the epic Redditor science worship crowd, marking an absolutely devastating blow to aesthetic considerations.
For Your Consideration
This article ended up turning into me rambling about why electric cars might be cool in the future. Battery technology is progressing at breakneck speeds, so we might see some really cool stuff in the next couple of decades, provided that the funding is there.
Overall, I don’t really like the design of electric cars — as previously stated, I tend to gravitate toward the classics. I think that forcing the car market to become fully electric by a given date (2035 in the US) is a foolhardy decision, but there is not really much to be done about it at this point. Hopefully design considerations improve as the tech continues to improve.
I would like to use this last point as a reminder that industry accounts for a staggeringly large portion of the CO2 emissions pie, and as regular people, we can only reduce our output by so much before we have to examine the actual root of the problem. The 15 biggest ships in the world produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world.
Shipping and air travel are causing a genuinely large amount of harm, but this point is only ever brought up as a gotcha for when Leonardo DiCaprio flies to the Oscars or whatever in his private jet.
We have a habit of acting like it’s the people themselves who should absorb the responsibility for climate change, when in reality a massive factor lies in the US labor force being exported overseas, as well as the increasingly globalized economy. Blame the people that stripped this country and sold it for parts.
P.S., If you really care about the climate, only buy products made in the USA (or your own country). Support local manufacturing and support your countrymen. Simple as.
P.P.S, Some more of my friend J. Baker’s pic collection:
Cover photo: Lightning McQueen from ‘Cars‘
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