On 03/13/2018 09:41 PM, Linda Frasier wrote:
> Why are all the Japanese cars looking more and more like Transformers? The only exception seems to be Nissan, which has suddenly discovered chrome. Ford clearly has a young Japanese guy or a young American fan of Transformers on its design team, too.
The obnoxious uglification trend has been going on since the second
Dubya Bush term, both in cars and pickups. You can see it clearly if
you look at the generation photos in the brand nameplate articles in
Wikipedia.
For several vehicle generations, designs were pretty stable among, for
example, Ford Taurus/Mercury Sable, Toyota Camry, and the F150 series of
Ford pickups. Then the virus broke out about 2006 or so, and vehicle
looks have been going from tolerable, to ugly, to unbearable. For the
latter, see the front-end photos of the 2017 Toyota Camry.
> Anyway, I disapprove of this trend. If I wanted to drive a paper airplane, rocket ship, or angry robot, I’d buy one of those. I might get one if they could fly, but given the damned traffic jam I was in, I suspect the Subaru SUV probably couldn’t fly or sprout huge treads or legs to climb over the rest of us or it would have.
Chaos forfend that we have to start navigating in three dimensions
instead of just two. Only the simplest automated driving in two
dimensions can be accomplished now, and the entire system is not ready
for prime time. The required automated technologies for three
dimensional driving, which would be much more necessary than those for
two dimensions, cannot be much more than ethereal flickers in
unconscious brains, if they exist at all.
Ken