Soul Searching

Every nuance of a car's design expresses its personality or soul—just as people do— through a "body language" of facial expressions, gestures, and postures I call empathic expression. In the same way we sense whether a person is relatively happy or sad by their facial expressions and other aspects of body language, we sense a car’s mood and personality by the expression of its grille and all other aspect of its form. We not only sense it, we feel it to some extent and evaluate it.

We are generally drawn to people and cars whose souls resonate with our values, beliefs, and expectations. Soul mates, if you will, that we tend to like or love. We expect a sports car to seem fast and nimble, for example. But we also expect it honesty and integrity. We are put off by a car that pretends to be faster and more nimble than it really is. Lush seats that promise more comfort than they deliver offend our sensibilities as well as our backsides.

Designers routinely conjure automotive souls from metal, plastic and glass. But, whereas we make sense of written or spoken language by rational means, we have difficulty measuring or even explaining body language—even though we “get it” as readily as we a bellyache or “in love.” But my students and clients expect me to explain souls of products and how to tweak them to for greater compatibility, I have to explain them with words and numbers—especially if the tweaking is to be done with a computer.

This has been traditionally difficult but not impossible. Fortunately, we have a tool for taking a snapshot of a car's soul. Called the semantic differential, this analytic tool was developed by Charles E. Osgood, a professor of psychology and research professor of the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois (see his Measurement of Meaning). It has been used for more than half a century as the most effective and respected tool for measuring the meanings associated with anything, from political candidates to automobiles.

The accompanying graph shows results of semantic differential surveys of Ford’s Thunderbird and Nissan’s 350Z I conducted in 2003 (published in the July 2003 issue of Sports Car International). It compares the semantic profiles—the souls—of the two cars. I chose those particular cars because, as most readers probably sense, their souls differed markedly enough to produce decidedly different results.

2002 Ford Thunderbird2003 Nissan 350ZTwenty-one of my industrial design students at San Jose State University (14 men and 7 women, 21-40 years old) participated in the surveys. Looking at side-view photos of the 2002 Thunderbird and 2003 350Z, projected on a screen, they marked paper forms containing several seven-valued scales with opposing adjectives like slow-fast, hot-cold and heavy-light marking their ends.

Each subject simply marked the scales relatively closer to one end or the other, depending on which adjective seemed to best describe the look and feel of the car under consideration. If the car seemed neutral with respect to a particular scale, or only slightly related to either adjective, they placed their mark at or near the scale's midpoint. The averages (means) of all judgments, plotted on the graph, confirm the intuitive impression that these two cars have quite different souls.

Following recommended practice, I randomly arranged the left-right order of the word pairs on the survey form in order to mitigate psychological biases (HOT and FAST, for example might have appeared at opposite ends because they both connote activity and potency). In order to show the differences between the cars most clearly in the graph, however, I arranged the scales, as shown in the graph, so that the adjectives most closely correlated in our minds with activity and potency appear at the right end of each scale. (Studies of Osgood and his colleagues showed that about half of all adjectives are significantly correlated with activity and/or potency; the other half correlate with evaluative notions like GOOD-BAD and its equivalent BEAUTIFUL-UGLY.)

Since judgments of the 350Z's lie to the right of the T-Bird’s in most cases, we can conclude that it seems generally more active and potent (i.e., more energetic) than the T-Bird. It seemed more active, hotter, faster, and more dynamic.

Sharp details of 350ZSoft details of ThunderbirdThe reasons for the differences can be seen in certain lines. Basically, lines that change direction or curvature quickly seem more energetic than those that change more gradually. For example, the sharp points of the 350Z front and rear lights lend its design more energy than the T-Bird's soft ellipses. The crisp creases of the 350Z, compared with the T-Bird's gentler, more flowing lines, also make the 350Z seem more energetic.

Both cars seem desirably clean and simple, and both seem strong. But, generally, the Z's more active and potent soul seems more consistent with what most readers probably expect of a true sports car. This does not necessarily mean that Z's design is better than the T-Bird's—but just different, and appropriately so. Each car has a soul calculated to appeal to different soul mates. The T-Bird seems heavier than the Z, as befits its image as a cruiser. No previous Thunderbird, after all, has been perceived as an aggressive, all-out sports car in the same sense that previous Zs have. While it does seem less active and dynamic than the Z, none of its scores lie at the extreme left. So it by no means comes across as a lame or flightless bird.

In the final analysis, a T-Bird with the Z's soul wouldn't have struck the right chord with traditional T-Bird enthusiasts. By the same token, the T-Bird's more dignified, even genteel, soul would have seemed out of place in the new Z.

Boo! Scary Design

2000 (Gen 1) Honda Insight

2004 (Gen 2) Toyota Prius

Why do so many people think Honda’s first-generation (Gen 1) Insight of 2000 and Toyota’s Gen 2 Prius of 2004 are weird or downright ugly? Look no further than that word “ugly,” which comes from a guttural growl of an Old Norse word, uggligr, meaning fearful; an ugly car literally scares us.

It’s not as scary as it would be bearing down on you in a crosswalk. But ugliness triggers the same “fight or flight” reflex any tangible threat does, albeit less intense. The same psychological and physiological reactions automatically unleash the familiar adrenaline rush associated with fear. Your heartbeat quickens, your breathing deepens, the hairs on the back of your neck perk up, and the pupils of your eyes dilate.

You flee an ugly car by averting your eyes, showing it your back, and scratching it from your shopping list. You don’t physically attack it (although I know a man who did go after his Subaru Brat with a sledgehammer). You fight it instead by hurling insults at it: “Ugh!” “dreadful!” “frightful!”  Someone chastised the Insight by saying it looked “like a kid hauling a load in his diapers.” One friend calls the Prius a “pregnant armadillo.” Another, who owns and loves one, reminds me of enthusiastic Volkswagen owners of the 1960s who made fun of their “bugs” and “beetles.” Like them, I suspect that when my friend calls his Prius a “pig on roller skates” he does so with the same indulgent affection.

 Our nervous systems are wired to make us instinctively wary of anything novel because most threats arise from things or situations that are unusual, abnormal, unexpected, or strange (including strangers). Your brain seems to have concluded that, if familiar surroundings haven’t harmed you yet, they probably won’t. If you weren’t wary of novelty you might have already poisoned yourself by indiscriminately sampling every new fruit, berry, and mushroom that caught your eye. Imagine how long you would last if you went up to every unusual animal you encountered to examine it more closely: “My goodness! What a big kitty you are!”

It doesn’t take much novelty to turn people off. The subtle bulges in the sides of the infamous “Pregnant Buick” of 1929 are to us hardly distinguishable from the virtually flat sides common then. But novelty has a way of exaggerating differences. The Buick’s sides seemed so blatantly outrageous compared with other cars in 1929 that they sent Buick sales into a nosedive and nearly nipped in the bud Harley Earl’s career as GM’s first styling chief.

2011 Buick LaCrosse. If the 1929 Buick had looked like this it would have bombed, despite its considerable appeal today; it would have seemed weird because it was so unfashionable. We are so sensitive to novelty that If General Motors designers and management had been far-sighted enough—and gutsy enough—to launch in 1929 a model shaped like any of today’s quite attractive Buicks they would have offended most car buyers simply because they were too far out of step with then-current fashions. At best, people would have said it was “too far ahead of its time,” the polite way of dismissing a radical design. If you think this is a far-fetched supposition, consider the initial negative reactions to the revolutionary grille-less1986 Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable. Critics called them, among other things, “bars of soap” because of their unusually curvaceous forms. When I stopped in Southern Utah to gas up a Sable wagon just days after they reached showrooms the station attendant, seeing one for the first time, said: "Wow! That looks like a car from the moon!" As they became more commonplace over time they looked quite normal. Nothing, after all, can remain new—and shocking— forever. The extremely raked tailgates on the wagons soon seemed normal. Their curves seemed to flatten out over the years until, today, they look quite boxy. In hindsight, they weren’t so different after all.

1986 Mercury Sable

Hypothetical 198X "Aero Citation"Or consider the illustration I did for an article I published in the November 1980 issue of Crossroads (a now defunct automotive magazine), fully five years before the controversial 1986 Taurus and Sable were introduced. Titled "Aerodynamics Take Off as Fuel Economy Soars," I illustrated it with a rendering of a stock 1980 Chevy Citation parked alongside a hypothetical future Citation with a smoother, slightly modified shape calculated to deliver aerodynamic efficiency some 15 percent better than the stock Citation. The changes were based on principles I became familiar with while at Ford’s Advanced Vehicle Concepts Dept. They included a grilleless, more circular nose and a rounder windshield and skirts covering the rear wheels. By today’s standards, it looks quite ordinary, even humdrum. But my editor refused at first to publish it. “That’s the ugliest car I have ever seen!” he proclaimed. He didn’t reluctantly agree to publish it until I made the design more normal by adding whitewall tires—and gave it to him without payment.

The rear-wheel skirts were probably the most controversial feature, even though many cars had them during the period between the 1930s and 1950s and even into the 1960s. My automotive design students at the College for Creative Studies at the time also found the skirts especially disgusting. With fingers in their open mouths they’d give me the gag sign whenever I suggested skirts would return for the sake of aerodynamic efficiency. And I still believe it.

But wait! Don’t we also crave and enjoy novelty? Indeed, we do. We seek it in every work of art, music, and literature. We expect next year’s car to differ from all that have gone before just as we expect the next novel to be novel. But, remembering Goldilocks, we have our limits.

Each of us has an appetite for a particular level of novelty that seems “just right!” The optimal level differs from one person to the next. A car that misses the mark for a particular viewer, will either offend him (if it is too novel) or bore him (if it isn’t novel enough). Generally, conservative consumers have little tolerance for novelty and lean toward traditional designs like the Gen 1 Prius. Early adopters who can’t get enough novelty favor radical designs more like the Gen 2 Prius.

Beautiful cars are at root ugly. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux suggests in his book, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, that fear is the prototypical emotion. All stimuli provoke fear first. All other emotions, including the good ones associated with joy, love and beauty, emerge from initial jolts of fear. And that’s a good thing. If you had only one emotion, you’d want it to be fear—if you are to survive into old age.

Beautiful things always come shrouded in some degree of stress due to doubt and uncertainty, just as ugliness does. There is a critical moment of hesitation as apprehension grips you and a negative bias takes hold and begins to grow. “Why is that car so peculiar?” your mind says. Your wariness grows until you determine, perhaps unconsciously, that the design’s strangeness somehow makes sense. It enables the car to do something better than other cars or in a new and better way than before. Only then does your mood swing from disliking to liking. As the age-old maxim of good design goes: form follows function.

We might more aptly say, “Beauty lies in the mind of the beholder” rather than merely “in the eye.” Philosopher George Santayana said it best: Anything that pleases us—for whatever reason—is by definition beautiful. What Santayana called the “sense of beauty” is empowered as much by rationality as emotion. Liking a car’s idea or rationale can account for its beauty as much or more than its tangible form.

 LeDoux goes further: The sense of beauty depends as much on knowing as feeling. He describes what amounts to a race between two basically different processes in the viewer’s brain: affective processes involving feelings and emotions; cognitive processes involving thinking and reasoning. A new car activates both simultaneously. But hair-trigger affective processes led by fear always jump out ahead of sluggish, deliberative cognitive processes trying to make sense of its unusual aspects. So cognition always lags behind affect.

Put simply, the designer must create (1) a design novel enough to excite the viewer and get his emotional juices flowing and (2) a design that is obviously better than usual by virtue of its novel aspects in order to speed cognition and thereby shorten the affective-cognitive lag. When the car looks quick, nimble and otherwise like a car should, the viewer feels good and likes its design. “Getting” a design in microseconds is like getting a joke right away. That feels really good. Since the viewer can’t make sense of a car that looks like a pig on roller skates no matter how long he ponders it, he ends up dismissing it like a bad joke. And you know how a joke not gotten makes you feel.

I immediately liked the Gen 2 Prius because it met both of those objectives: It was new enough to be very exciting (lots of affect); and I “got it” right away because it was more aerodynamically efficient than other cars (quick cognition that made for a brief affective-cognitive lag). Its profile conformed closely to a profile tested by England’s Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) that I became familiar with while a designer at Ford’s Advanced Vehicle Concepts Department. It had a CD (coefficient of aerodynamic drag) of just 0.27; the Gen 2 Prius’ CD of 0.26 is 4 percent better but well within the plus or minus 7 percent predicted error of the MIRA method. The Gen 2 Prius was the aerodynamic champ until the Gen 3 Prius, launched in 2010, edged it out with a CD of 0.25.

Ideal MIRA profile (orange) compared with 2011 (Gen 3) Prius. For perspective, a CD of 1.0 corresponds to the worst possible aerodynamics; a CD of 0.0 corresponds to the lowest, but unachievable, drag. CDs of between 0.30 and 0.35 are typical today, down from a whopping 0.55 in the 1970s before the Arab Oil Embargo focused attention on reduction of air drag as the least expensive way to increase fuel efficiency. Some of today’s SUVs still have CDs as high as 0.60, which accounts largely for their relative inefficiency. The greater frontal areas of wider and taller SUVs also contribute to their fuel consumption.

Incidentally, those skirts covering the rear wheels of the Gen I Insight might have reduced its overall wind drag by as much as 3 to 10 percent.

The Arts & Crafts Taxi

New York City officials recently chose two finalists from the mayor’s Taxi of Tomorrow competition to replace the ubiquitous Ford Crown Victoria that will no longer be produced: a Nissan minivan and Ford package delivery truck, each modified to suit it to taxi duty. I’m guessing that New Yorkers expected something designed from the pavement up to be a taxi, however, capable of rising to the iconic status of those inelegant but sturdy and roomy Checkers of long ago. It might have been more like the diesel-powered prototype designed 39 years ago by automotive design students at the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts. Founded in 1926 to foster the Arts and Crafts movement, the school is now known as the College for Creative Studies (CCS) and globally renowned for its outstanding automotive design alumni.

The project began during the fall 1971 semester when two students asked me, as Chair of the Industrial Design Department and its automotive design program, if they could create an entry for the Urban Vehicle Design Competition. I quickly answered, "Yes. But mindful of what “urban vehicle” meant to most people—a diminutive one- or two-passenger “commuter” car—I attached conditions: It had to be a taxi, the only truly urban car, especially in places like New York City; and it had to be an ergonomic tour de force that made the driver and passengers—including one in a wheelchair—as safe and comfortable as possible. I offered to research objectives and specifications and to seek funding and contributions of components from the industry.

I began my contribution with a trip to New York for meetings with representatives of the Taxi and Limousine Commission of New York City, the New York City Taxi Drivers’ Union, and supervisors of taxi maintenance. I also went to Kalamazoo, Michigan and met with the chief engineer in charge of product development at Checker Motors Corporation, the nation’s only specialized taxi manufacturer. 

 The boxy design of the bright yellow taxi that resulted was iconoclastic at the time and aesthetically controversial. It became more fashionable over time, however, and rather hip. The boxy form became inevitable when Checker’s situation and requirements were taken into account. No new Checker would resemble anything from Detroit as previous models had (the last was inspired by the 1955 Chevrolet) because they couldn’t be made using conventional Detroit methods. The company could continue using engines, transmissions, suspension components, and other critical underpinnings from mainline manufacturers. But the costly tooling for stamping uniquely designed bodies from sheets of steel was far too much for Checker’s strapped coffers and facilities. Instead, the company would have to emulate methods used by the motorhome and recreational vehicle industries: A new Checker most likely would be manually fabricated from straight lengths of metal framing material and flat panels devoid of curves or sculpted surfaces. Finessing the design aesthetically would be limited to matters of proportion and orientation of lines and surfaces.

A body without curves would also promote easy, low-cost repair and maintenance. With flat windows, instead of fashionable curved ones, maintenance garages would need to store half the usual number of replacement side windows; whereas there had to be special windows for or the left and right sides if they were curved, the same piece of flat glass could used on either side. Better yet, if windows had only straight edges and were made of the same laminated glass as the windshield, technicians could cut their own windows and windshields from standard blanks of laminated glass.

The air conditioner was housed in a separate roof-mounted unit like those installed on trucks and motorhomes. Instead of tying up a taxi while a failed air conditioner was fixed, a mechanic would simply replace the faulty unit with a good one in minutes.

Advisors emphasized that, while a taxi should be as light as possible to save fuel, it had to be extraordinarily tough to survive New York’s fractured pavement and vicious potholes. So the brawny transmission and driveline components that delivered the Continental diesel engine’s power to the front wheels were taken from an Oldsmobile Toronado. They were so robust that General Motors also used them in its 23-foot motorhome weighing 11,500 pounds. The taxi’s light but rigid structure began with its flat floor structure comprised of a two-inch thick core of aluminum honeycomb sandwiched between faces of fiberglass-reinforced plastic. It could absorb bumps and potholes without bending or twisting, even before the body’s superstructure was added.

Inside, a bench seat across the back of the cabin provided spacious, comfortable seating for three passengers. The seatback extended high enough to act as a headrest for all three. A fourth passenger could sit in a rear-facing jump seat beside the driver. The driver sat eight inches higher than the passengers so that he could see over their heads (especially important for pedestrian safety in crowded city environments). The resulting eight inches of additional headroom in back was reminiscent of London cabs. That and its long door made It much easier to enter and exit than New Yorkers were used to. When no one occupied the jump seat it could be folded up to expose a generous space for luggage on the flat floor, again as in a London cab. Despite the cabin’s roominess, the taxi turned on the proverbial dime because it was two feet shorter than today’s Prius, which increasingly sees service as a taxi.

As Washington contemplated side-impact safety standards (before air bags) the taxi’s designers padded the cabin’s sidewalls with four inches of the same energy-absorbing foam as wrestling mats were to provide side-impact protection. The padding extended to head height for rear seat occupants; for reasons of visibility, the pad on the driver’s door went only to shoulder height.

Taxi drivers noted that passengers in wheelchairs presented the most daunting problems. Although they were required by law to stop for someone hailing a cab from a wheelchair, many drivers looked away and went on by. They abhorred the close body contact of lifting and transferring someone from a wheelchair, through the tight opening of a standard sedan's rear door, into the back seat, and then folding the chair and hefting it up and into the trunk. They faced the awkward situation again, in reverse, at the destination. Nettlesome rain, snow, and slush exaggerated the unpleasantness.

The flat, wheelchair-friendly floor was just nine inches above the ground. Parked close to most curbs, a wheelchair rolled easily in or out of the cabin. The designers considered ramp concepts that would bridge the gap but didn’t have time to execute any. Today, the cab would have adjustable-height suspension, as modern buses do, so the driver could raise or lower the taxi to align it with any curb. The jump seat and two-thirds of the bench seat folded up to clear enough room for a wheelchair, with its occupant, to swivel 360 degrees and park facing forward or backward. A third of the bench seat remained fixed and provided a place for an accompanying passenger.

Facing off against entries from 65 schools and colleges of engineering, the Arts and Crafts taxi won a trophy for "Drivability," awarded by automotive editors and journalists from prominent automotive magazines who drove it briskly through a convoluted obstacle course at General Motors' proving grounds. They liked driving it so much that several got back in line for seconds and thirds. Its rugged, no-nonsense bumpers, made of standard aluminum extrusions mounted with rubber blocks normally use as trailer springs, passed the Federal 5-mph barrier crash.

John Dinkel wrote in the November 1972 issue of Road & Track that it "afforded the driver an excellent driving position and visibility and incorporated a passenger compartment more spacious than any taxi currently in use in this country." Chris Packard wrote in the November 1972 issue of Motor Trend that "the real prize may have been won by the Arts and Crafts taxi. A trial run in a real-life urban situation … may go further toward convincing automakers to build urban cars than any award. And that is what the competition was really about."