Originally Posted by XFiringInNC
Yeah, what he said. Except that they followed up by giving the Pacifica and Sebring very similar front ends and the Sebring similar lines and of course all the Chryslers have the mini-van grill on them. It pisses me off that my fun, two seat car, shares any styling cues with a mini-van. It's just stupid. No one buys a mini van because it has the same grill as a Crossfire (or anything else) and CERTAINLY no one bought the Crossfire because it had that awesome Chrysler mini-van grill on it.
You want to know why creativity is dying in American cars? Because people like Tom Peters are running the programs. Tom Peters is the Design Director of rear wheel drive performance cars at GM. You know what he said about the new Camaro? "The overall proportions, long hood, and powerful fender forms say, 'this is a front engine, rear wheel drive performance vehicle'" Is that what they say to you? I think whether you like the Camaro concept or not, it doesn't say THAT to you. Corporate speak is why creativity and innovation are dying all over the place. Too many people looking for WHY something makes you like things and then trying to design something with some of those features, instead of just letting passion and imagination rule. No one would ever have built the '57 Chevy Bel Air today. No one would ever have built the Stingray Corvette today. Everyone's too busy looking backward to try to pull stuff that we used to like instead of working to built the next NEW thing.
At least our car started out unique (more or less). Too bad the lesson learned from it in corporate world is that unique doesn't sell cars instead of 'man, we sure screwed that marketing thing up'.
I agree with you! However, for the design of our car, they looked waaaayyy back to the 20s and 30s for inspiration. Back to the days of Art Deco to be exact. I'm glad designers are taking a retro approach. It's too bad that they can't design anything new, but at least they are copying cars that did look good at one time. The problem with today is money. The companies are too worried about squeezing pennies from people, to go all out on a design. Look at concept cars. Materials are nice, features are nice, many of the designs are breathtaking because the designers didn't have a price point. The car companies have lost the passion of the art, now it's mostly about the passion of more money, more money, more money. Recently though, the big three have learned that you can penny pinch for only so long before people give up on you and move to a car company that actually cares about their products. That is a main reason why they are trying to play catch up today. Some might not make it!