Let's rant about car designs (post unpopular opinions in here)

Ferraris in general just don't do it for me, especially modern ones. My inner 12 year old still loves the Testarossa, but the adult me hates it for being too wide, brutish, and unrefined. Most modern Ferraris are not pretty cars, they are the shape necessary to meet performance benchmarks, but that's it. Aston Martin is not nearly as good a car, but it is far better to look at.

Astons were, but even they are going down the same path, although to be fair so are the rest of them. They're all so obsessed with chasing and outdoing each other's performance statistics that the form ends up following the function.

I guess it's down to the bottom line - no point making a truly pretty shape if you have to spend millions shoe-horning the engineering into it - and the fact that safety regulations dictate the basic framework of modern cars which severely limits what the designers can do.
 
Maybe that's why I tend to like the "low" end super cars (like the Ferrari California), they aren't chasing the top speed numbers and can focus on making a beautiful and functional car that still does more than I would ever be able to get out of it.
 
I didn't even like the California.
 
Unpopular opinion: The original California was not a good looking car, but all the changes they did with the T make it actually a quite handsome hardtop convertible.
 
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Unpopular opinion: The Aston Martin Lagonda was a damn good looking car, especially in it's day of boxy designs.
 
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Porsche 959
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I know, this is an AWESOME car when we consider the technology and importance, I know.
But design? I don't like it. It looks like a 911 that was attacked by a Latin American tuner and he put on some aftermarket wheels, a weirdly long tail and a chubby widebody. It looks weird to me.
 
Porsche 959
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I know, this is an AWESOME car when we consider the technology and importance, I know.
But design? I don't like it. It looks like a 911 that was attacked by a Latin American tuner and he put on some aftermarket wheels, a weirdly long tail and a chubby widebody. It looks weird to me.

And incredibly soft suspension.
 
But design? I don't like it. It looks like a 911 that was attacked by a Latin American tuner and he put on some aftermarket wheels, a weirdly long tail and a chubby widebody. It looks weird to me.

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Redliner, you're correct. I adore the 959, but you're on it; a beautiful design piece it is not.
 
After posting this, I checked the history of the car.
It is based on the 911, and it shows.
 
Y'all is cray, I love that chunky body

Don't worry, so do I, but I still think the possibility to create something that looks less like a 911 was there.

Funny also how Porsche tried to sack the 911 beforehand and then created a supercar that looks like a 911 v1.5.
 
People often let the brand cloud their judgement.

I know people might not agree with me on this but I'm from a place in the world where Volvos are liked, and I grew up around them. The 800 series is generally considered to be a proper and well made Volvo while the Dutch designed 400 series generally is considered to be a disgrace to the proper Volvo brand. A Volvo fan once told me the 400 series is an ugly piece of shit. I bet most people can't even tell which is which.

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I can't say I haven't noticed it before, but still... Wow. They are indeed remarkably close in terms of their design language.

I will however say that as a non-Volvo-purist, I still think the 400 doesn't look ugly. Uninspiring and perhaps boring? Yes. Bad? No. Similar can be said about the 850. And I still think that, S60 Cross Country excluded, Volvo have never designed a properly ugly car. Okay, maybe add the 300 series to the ugly list. Anyhow, my point is, while they did most of their designs with a ruler and a divider, and feared any sort of actual experimentation, they've never screwed it up royally, unlike some did.

On topic of those who did screw it up, here's another Jaguar design from me. While I like some of Ian Callum's designs (namely the Aston Martin DB9), in my humble opinion, he royally shat up the XJ. While I like the XK he did, and can tolerate the XF Mk1 (which was fixed with the facelift), the XJ was sort of a Porsche 911 of the luxury cars with its constant design and an iconic image. So what do you do when the legendary design in its latest iteration is declining in sales? You screw it up, obviously. I'm not sure people avoided the X350 and X358 because of the design (I might as well be wrong), because that's the one thing it made it stand out, for better or worse. Well, the X351 still stands out, but for all the wrong reasons.

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It's because it's so disproportionate. The taillights are too close, the front end around the grille looks just bad, and the black C-pillars look like an afterthought. And why am I even complaining about this? Not because I'm a Jag purist, not even because I think X350/X358 was such a great design (which it wasn't), but because JLR had one shot at turning the XJ into something cool and fresh, and they just screwed it up. The design definitely has some potential, but if they did some things just a little bit differently, my opinion on this car would be radically different.
 
On topic of those who did screw it up, here's another Jaguar design from me. While I like some of Ian Callum's designs (namely the Aston Martin DB9), in my humble opinion, he royally shat up the XJ.

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This is hardly an unpopular opinion, es evidenced by the sales numbers :p

I will give it some credit. I would like it much better without the blacked-out C-Pillars and if it was branded as literally anything else but a Jaguar. Looking at that pic right now I keep thinking on how cool it would've been as a Lexus LS or Acura RL. The fact they haven't come up with anything more Jaguar-y in almost ten years is a very bad sign.
 
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