"There's no denying the Smart car looks happy and friendly. So what happens when it faces down a mean-looking Dodge Charger?"
Posted on 07/06/2007 11:38:10 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
I've often wondered if 20th century cars were designed with human faces -- headlights for eyes and a grille and bumper forming a mouth-- or whether people have an inclination to graft their own features on any machinery remotely resembling themselves.
One of my earliest television memories involved an animated character named Otto the Auto, spokescar for the American Automobile Association. The talking grille and googly headlight eyes seemed such a perfectly natural fit that I never questioned it. Psychologists have backed this up. Of all animals, human beings have the strongest desire to identify familiar faces where none exist.
In a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2003, researchers Isabel Gauthier of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Tim Curran of the University of Colorado at Boulder studied the parts of the brain that are fired up when people identify such common items as cars and human faces. While the human brain processes some images holistically, other images are more slowly identified by their individual components and then mentally assembled. The scientists recruited 40 subjects -- split evenly between car lovers and car novices -- and presented them with alternating images of cars and faces. The car-savvy set recognized cars as a whole, using some of the same brain circuitry employed by automobile neophytes in identifying faces. While car lovers may be pleased to know their ability to recognize cars lies in the brain's right hemisphere in the "fusiform face area," they also experienced "difficulty" in recognizing faces when asked to identify cars and humans in rapid succession. (If we were meant to recognize people's faces, why did they invent name tags?)
Earlier cars had round headlights, making positive facial IDs a slam-dunk. Cars of the 1930s, '40s and '50s all had nice big grilles and massive chrome bumpers that gave the vehicles a friendly, powerful toothy grin. These cars were at your service -- friendly and servile, their welcoming faces told you they were both pals and allies of their human owners. Cars of the 1960s began to lose their benevolent expressions, trading big slobbery smiles for sly glares coupled with a touch of meanness. Huge sedans of the 1970s traded round lights for rectangular lamps, giving old-man automobile stylings a hint of an age-appropriate Benjamin Franklin look.
The identification with human facial characteristics isn't entirely a design accident, either. Automobile manufacturers also pay some lip service to the faces of their vehicles. Designers of the Mazda Miata, which debuted in 1989, said they modelled their car's "face" after a character common in Japanese Kabuki theatre.
The greatest disservice to automobile face recognition is the creation of unusually shaped headlight strips that transform vehicles from friendly and human to robotic or menacing.
Disney cartoonists further disassociated automobile faces from their traditional appearances, moving eyes from headlights to windshields in last year's computer-generated hit Cars.
These days, vehicles sport anything but friendly visages, perhaps reflecting a meaner age. Dodge Chargers resemble predatory tigers, while the Hyundai Talus concept car sports the face of a demonic goat creature. The Wall Street Journal noted that car manufacturers with vehicles that offer meaner features seem to outperform those that offer friendlier looks, with sweet-natured Saturns and beatific Beetles taking a hit in the marketplace. CNW Marketing Research of Brandon, Ore., says that about 70% of drivers judge their vehicles primarily by the headlights and grilles, with about 88% of men and 64% of women preferring cars with distinctive designs up front.
Despite the obvious success of beatific-faced vehicles such as the Smart and Mini Cooper, why are consumers taking a turn to the dark side of automobile facial features? Are drivers feeling more threatened by streets choked with drivers suffering from road rage and massive SUVs that make moderately sized vehicles appear like pint-sized weaklings alongside them? Are our vehicles a reflection of a militaristic age in which cars become potential weapons of mass destruction? Are scowling faces and cruel, slitted eyes a reflection of the drivers themselves or mere totems designed to ward off the evil that surrounds them?
I can buy the latter theory, except for one salient point. In most cases, we're not as concerned with oncoming traffic as with traffic moving in the same direction, so our cars rarely get a chance to stare the other vehicle down. Most accidents seem to involve vehicles travelling at least nominally in the same direction, not head-on.
My own theory? If we favour a car with a nasty pair of glowering peepers and a mean set of choppers, it's designed to warn the vehicle ahead of us to play it safe -- or we'll bite it in the ass.
"There's no denying the Smart car looks happy and friendly. So what happens when it faces down a mean-looking Dodge Charger?"
Need a pic of an Austin Healey Sprite.
I’ve seen a car (can’t remember what) that had some real “zoomers.” Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge. Wink.
Didn't they use to say the Edsel grill was built to resemble (a-hem) the female anatomy?
Can't say I see the resemblance, but......
A toilet seat, or an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon....
I have always wanted one - a ‘58 Citation with all the bells and whistles in coral and black.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
A Japanese friend told me that there is a word for this in Japan and that many cars are purposely designed to have a face that has certain emotional connectiosn for people. Some are also designed to have a face on the back of the vehicle as well.
I’m borrowing this neat image you posted not long ago, which as you’ll recall didn’t quite register here at first.
Perhaps if they’d named it the “Vulvo”...
“By the way, once, a fear pierced me, in that I mistook the shadow of my equipage for blackbirds.”
Same here — only it looked like ravens.
Oh, you meant your glass coach.
That's it.
I've loved Edsels since they came out when I was 5 years old; Dr. Freud would be proud of you for figuring out why. And I'd still give my first-born (sorry, Son) for a 1958 Ranger convertible.
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