This year’s Seattle auto show should have been held during Halloween rather than the second week of November. That’s because the auto industry’s latest wares were a frightful bunch. On the inside they offered the usual warm-and-fuzzy comforts, but from the outside many cars and trucks seemed to be designed to scare little — and not so little — children.
True, this is not a new trend. Keith Bradsher (2002), in his classic critique of sport utility vehicles called High and Mighty, pointed out that Chrysler pioneered scary styling back in the 1990s. Market research by Clotaire Rapaille drew upon the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to postulate that people’s initial reaction to products such as automobiles tap into three different parts of the brain.
Intellectual responses originate in the cortex whereas emotional responses emerge from the limbic realm. Meanwhile, the “reptilian” part of the brain generates reactions based upon “survival and reproduction.” Rapaille argued that styling which spoke to our inner reptile would sell more SUVs (Bradsher, 2002; p. 95). And trucks.
“For Rapaille, the archetype of a sport utility vehicle reflects the reptilian desire for survival. People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence. The Jeep has always had this image around the world because of its heavy use in war movies and frequent appearances in newsreels from the 1940s and 1950s, and newer SUVs share the image. ‘I usually say, if you put a machine gun on the top of them, you will sell them better,’ he said. ‘Even going to the supermarket, you have to be ready to fight.'” (Bradsher, 2002; p. 96)
Rapaille must be so proud. Automakers are not yet offering machine guns, but the scary look has picked up steam to the point where it not only predominates among SUVs and trucks, but has now spread to most cars. Largely gone are friendly fascias in favor of big, gaping grilles. And once you get past those menacing maws, you are next confronted with a mysterious jungle of crevasses and taillights that look like weapons from distant planets.
You think I’m exaggerating? Then how else to explain the 2019 BMW i8 roadster? Or the Toyota C-HR?
I hereby propose that Rapaille receive a MacArthur Genius Award for his successful effort to turn American highways into a vast army of mobile warriors, ready to rage at the slightest threat to our automotive freedoms.
Any discussion of 2019 auto designs that hit our reptilian button must begin with the trusty truck and SUV. Perhaps the most outstanding recent advancement comes from GMC, whose Sierra Denali would be a perfect fit as Christine in a 2019 remake of Steven King’s horror movie (Wikipedia, 2018a).
When the lights on the Denali below started flashing at me, I jumped back involuntarily. My first thought was what that GMC logo would look like embossed on my face.
Even us old timers may have forgotten how different truck front ends were back in the day. So as a point of comparison, below is a 1969 GMC Sierra Grande. The grille has all the charm of a stove fan cover, but this GMC doesn’t intimidate like its 2019 progeny.
The Ford Motor Company has certainly not been napping in the scary design department. Its Lincoln Navigator looks like it came right off the set from a remake of the movie, The Exorcist (Wikipedia, 2018b). Although the Lincoln star might be a more attractive logo to have embossed on one’s face, the SUV’s sinister lower grille would be more likely to suck your guts out first. I think I’d rather go that way.
The kid below trying to open the Navigator’s hatchback couldn’t possibly fathom what he’s getting into — in more ways than one. This vehicle may have Dearborn leather stretching out so far and wide, but its 19 miles per gallon (Edmunds, 2018) may expedite this child’s opportunity to experience the full force of climate change within his lifetime.
At least that’s a finding of a recent scientific report the Trump administration released on Black Friday. The Fourth National Climate Assessment concluded that “without substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and regional adaptation efforts, there will be substantial and far-reaching changes over the course of the 21st century with negative consequences for a large majority of sectors, particularly towards the end of the century” (2018, Chapter 1).
Translation into layperson’s terms: “Enjoy the ride, kid.”
Ironically, even though Chrysler launched the reptilian styling revolution, it offered one of the least aggressive front-end designs for a truck. The 2019 Ram 1500 has a surprisingly friendly-looking fascia. The Ram’s gentle curves moderate rather than accentuate the truck’s massive size.
If you thought scary styling was just the purview of gas-guzzling behemoths, consider the Nissan Leaf. The 2018 redesign mostly looks better than the first-generation models. Gone are the bizarre bug-eyed headlights and muffin-shaped C-pillar. However, Rapaille’s disciples apparently insisted that the Leaf needed a much more aggressive front end.
Behold, an electric car with a big fake grille! It looks suspiciously like it will sneak up, chew off your leg and then snicker with delight. Bastard.
Even fairly low-priced small cars such as the Toyota Corolla hatchback and Honda HR-V have been given frightful grilles. The Corolla looks particularly cartoonish — and all but begs for aftermarket whiskers.
The catsup oracles say that some younger car buyers are willing to pay a bit more to get extra pizazz. Enter, the Hyundai Veloster. Its aggressive snout goes well with being a hot hatch. That said, one might ask why are those jaws big enough to devour at least four children and a medium-sized dog with one bite?
At some point the feds are going to step in and insist on no more than two kids and a small dog. Might Hyundai wish to stay ahead of the regulatory curve?
In days of old, conservative car buyers could avoid such stylistic frivolity. This is no longer the case at Toyota. The Avalon, that paragon of biblical probity, has been given a facelift for 2019 which could scare the Wicked Witch of the West.
Know that the Avalon doesn’t just look scary. Before granny comes home with her brand-new car she will have to stop by the police station to register those lower-body gills as lethal weapons.
Toyota may now be the leading avatar of scary design, but in its own quirky way Honda is trying to play catch up. The automaker’s finest achievement to date is arguably the Clarity. Inspired by the Prius’ out-of-this-world styling, Honda designers gave their own green car a crinkled-paper look that’s more menacing than a Citroen. Bad people will rue the day when they get caught in those lobster-claw front fenders.
This is not to say that all cars have been turned into mobile haunted houses. The Buick LaCrosse still has a friendly face. Not surprisingly, sales have been so low that the LaCrosse is among the full-sized passenger cars that GM will discontinue (Wayland, 2018).
In retrospect, perhaps the LaCrosse would have had a greater chance of survival if it had jumped on the scary design bandwagon. Buick would not have had to copy the likes of Toyota to do so. GM designers merely needed to update the styling of the vastly-ahead-of-its-time 1950 Buick. As you can see here, for one model year Buicks were graced with nine massive vertical chrome bars that functioned as a grille, a bumper and a portable blender.
Of course, the basic look would have needed to be post-modernized to work well in 2019. Most notably, the chrome should have been replaced with an ivory color in order to make the bars look like elephant tusks. For those who sought a sportier look, the tips of the tusks could have been painted bright red.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of 2019 is that the Ford Ranger does not look very scary. In fact, this new mid-sized truck comes across as almost benign. (Dare I say beta?) Perhaps Ford designers purposely did this so the Ranger doesn’t cannibalize too many sales from Ford’s ever-alpha F-150.
In contrast, Chevrolet’s new-for-2019 Blazer has a gaping grille, a menacing turret top and a scar-faced rear-quarter treatment. With looks like this, Chevy marketeers would do well to place the Blazer in slasher horror movies.
And then there’s Volkswagen. Poor thing. Designers went through all the trouble of giving the Jetta new sheetmetal but clearly didn’t get the memo: Tasteful, well-proportioned styling is out — scary is in.
As a case in point, the Jetta’s new grille is more pronounced but has a Cheshire cat’s smile. Perhaps this might work if the smile disappeared and reappeared. Or if they added teeth. Without these kind of improvements, the Jetta is passe.
Perhaps VW should have followed in the footsteps of Audi, whose designers have come to terms with their inner reptile without going quite as sci-fi as the Japanese automakers. The A7’s grille can easily eat as many children and dogs as the Hyundai Veloster pictured above, but side and rear styling is more restrained.
Clearly, the scary look has thus far gained only a limited foothold at the Volkswagen Group.
Fiat is even more behind the times than Volkswagen. Designers have been so fixated on revisiting Fiat’s golden years that its cars look cute rather than imposing.
For example, the 124 Spider’s headlight does a decent job of evoking the original . . . although the lens is shaped like a CPAP mask. This is not nearly as sinister of a look as the Mazda Miata’s hawk-like brow.
One could argue that the Alfa Romeo Stelvio does a better job of being scary. The headlights have a “don’t mess with me” frown and the lower-level gills appear to be quite efficient at capping ankles. The main problem is that the traditional Alfa radiator grille looks more like a urinal than the jaws of death (press logo to flush).
This brings us back to the car pictured at the top of this post, the Lexus LC500. I would suggest that this super coupe ranks right up there with the BMW i8, the Toyota C-HR and the Avalon as the scariest car designs of 2019. None of these four passenger cars may possess the indomitable mass of a Denali or Navigator, but they almost make up for it with styling that activates the reptilian brain like a loud thump in the night.
This is a terrific moment in automotive design. Thanks to the pioneering work of Rapaille, you can now protect yourself from many supermarket parking lot dangers even when driving a small economy car.
Of course, having a machine gun on the roof of one’s vehicle would be ideal. Given the way the industry is moving, it seems like that could happen soon. Any bets on which automaker will take the lead?
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