Pop-up headlights and the death of automotive design.
The death of automotive design for mass market cars started somewhere in the end of the 1980′s.
With the shift to the 90′s came the roundification, the standardization of body types and general (industry-oriented) bad design practices that ended up with LED dotted lamps and the Audi A5 body shape copy-pasted throughout the market.
Thirty years ago was the last production year for the A60 Toyota Supra. How bland is the 2017 86 compared to that? (Hint: one of them has pop-up headlights, the other doesn’t.)
There was a time where racing compelled the car industry and you ended up with museum pieces like the BMW M1 being sold to the public for a few years. Now you have the SUV, the most ridiculous concept ever being sold as genious to all middle class families. Who the fuck would ever want a truck-sized jeep that you can’t park anywhere in any major city and you can’t drive off-road? Everyone with a X5 claiming it’s the best thing to go shopping and drive the 4 kids around should just keep with a Renault Espace and spend the extra money on a MX-5 for the weekends or something...
The death of automotive design, victim to the struggles of the industry with the modern political-economic models is the death of authorship in mass production. The same way author cinema died for Hollywood, the DeLorean died for the Yaris. There are no more John Fords and no more Giugiaros. The 2017 86 could just as well be a Mazda...
Why are hidden headlamps the last paladin of car design then? For one, they are a bad choice. Everyone knows how they constantly stop working and leave you in the dark for a 3 hour drive back through woodland side roads. They are expensive to build as you need a rather intrincate mechanism to the sole finality of lifting up two headlights. Especially when you compare it to the other option, which is not spending anything extra and keep it simple and plain. There is no advantage whatsoever to pop-up headlights besides looking cool and that’s the whole point. It’s purposedly not meant to be simple or plain. How else could you have a completely different car by day and by night? Flicking the headlights up completely changes a car’s character and you feel that in it’s front or behind the wheel. It’s the icon of a long gone age for the importance of aesthetics. It’s the embodiment of a author’s struggle to keep his head out of the industrial standardization swamp water. It’s the film director still being above the producer in the movie making process. It’s his movie and people should be interested because of what it might be as opposed to the movie being made to fit the interests of everyone else.
So here we are in 2016, stuck with bad superhero movies and Qashqais.