What happened to unique and original car designs?

Why are modern cars so “samey”? Different brands and models used to be instantly recognisable and distinctive, inside and out, from near or far. Nowadays the average person has to get close enough to read their badges to know what from which. Or is this just a generational thing, where the young can spot subtle design details that the old don’t notice?- Arthur N.

Age and out-of-date perspectives may be part of the answer. But many other factors almost guarantee a progressively and increasingly similar design result. 

After more than 100 years of invention, experiment and experience, manufacturers are no longer trying to invent the wheel; they are trying to perfect it. And as they get nearer and nearer to perfect, the solutions are, axiomatically, going to get nearer and nearer the same. 

Perhaps the biggest influence in this direction is something called CAD – “Computer Aided Design” - which is programmed to calculate the “optimum” solution to the hundreds of different factors involved in shaping, building, specifying, and marketing a car successfully and profitably.

And it is sales, costs and profits, not individuality, that are the name of the mass-market game. The industry was founded by petrol-heads. It is now more often run (at all levels) by accountants. 

Manufacturers know who their primary buyers are, what they do and want, and what they are ready and able to pay.

So they punch in the priorities and limits and targets on all aspects, and specialised computer programmes consider and calculate everything from materials and mass manufacturing systems to mechanical and structural engineering essentials, space efficiency, weight, safety, aerodynamics, power, economy, reliability, durability, serviceability, global safety regulations, vehicle design statutories, market fashions, tax regimes, trade laws et al, and come up with the most effective technical solution (per sales, costs and profits) to all of them. Creative imagination (and some glorious mistakes) have given way to algorithmic calculus. 

Of course, there are still inventors and stylists, but their creativity must work within the template determined by CAD (or whatever the latest version of that is now called). The result is on the street for all to see.

While there is still scope for cosmetic tweaks to retain and express brand identity, even that has become less individualistic. While once there were several hundred completely independent makes (in 1920 there were 186 in the US alone) all “doing their own” thing on every component, in today’s mass markets there are only about a dozen multi-national mega-conglomerates and even some of those are interwoven with each other, each using lots of different badges but sharing a bewildering collection of co-ownerships… and commonality of multi-sourced components.