COLUMN April 2014
Good job the animal kingdom’s a tad more sensible about evolutionary diversification than the motor industry. You don’t find bees suddenly deciding they’d work better if they were the size of tennis balls, or cheetahs thinking ‘Hmmm… Fins… Now that’s a pretty neat idea, and clearly a hit with dolphins, I simply must get me a pair of those.’
Yet -headlong dash to fill every market segment with their own take on a new niche model continuing apace- such genetic tomfoolery is becoming increasingly commonplace amongst automotive manufacturers.
Examples of the former, cute-turned-corpulent camp rely heavily on at least a whiff of whimsy surviving the donor car’s lunch-money-taken-straight-to-the-sweet-shop diet. The twice-baked swelling that is the MINI Countryman, for instance, only gets away with it (in some eyes) because, viewed from the top of the Shard whilst circumnavigating the M25, it still bears a vague resemblance to an original Mini.
Not so the hapless Fiat 500L. Much is made of the cute ‘whiskers’ on the bows of the elegant little 500. Sadly, that’s about all that has survived this unfortunate cod-SUV metamorphosis. Make a mouse large enough and, let’s face it, there’s every danger people will simply scream ‘RAT’ and run away.
Examples of the bringing-a-new-sense-of-porpoise-to-the-pedigree latter? Well, it’s something of shame that Porsche (albeit already boasting a masters degree in defying the laws of physics) made such a respectable fist of imbuing an ugly, two tonne box with hilariously adroit handling, because now a whole new shoal of car makers with no off-road pedigree whatsoever have decided that they, too must have a piece of the mud pie. And news that Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Jaguar and Aston Martin are now each to unleash their own take on the SUV leaves me filled with little short of dread.
And even if we’re not specifically talking DNA abuse of Aston Martin Cygnet acuity, it does amaze me -in an era when no one’s supposed to make a bad car anymore and Alfa Romeo is incapable of making a pretty one- just how many clunkers still make it down the slipway simply to satisfy the dubious perception that every marque must sell every conceivable model to succeed.
Building on the above mentioned, my own top-of-the-head stable of the halt and the lame further includes BMW’s horrid X1, the Chrysler Ypsilon, Honda CR-Z, Dodge Caliber, Lexus CT 200h, Maserati Ghibli diesel, MG6, Subaru XV and anything at all badged Infiniti… I doubt your own hit list of the deeply dubious is the same, but I don’t, for a moment, doubt that you have one.
So why, then, does it have to be like this? Why can’t the manufacturers cluster round the coffee and Custard Creams and, rather than each trying to produce a veritable raft of vehicles for all reasons, simply agree to divide up the spoils and stick to what they’re good at?
The standard riposte is that, with platform modularity and parts sharing rife, it ‘costs less than you’d think’ these days to send in the clones. Compared to what? Cinema tickets? A pet cobra? A barium meal for two at the John Radcliffe Infirmary?
If every multi-model manufacturer dropped the least successful specimen from their oeuvre and simultaneously agreed to can the development of their next new niche-nibbler, imagine how much their existing range could benefit from the extra investment suddenly made available.
When it comes to, say, televisions, you’d willingly trade less choice for higher quality. So why not cars? Especially if the focus was on interiors.
Fiat could drag the Panda’s woeful instrument binnacle kicking and screaming into the 21st century; Aston Martin could finally remove all trace of Mondeo from its switchgear; BMW could design a legible sat’nav’ map; MINI could turn the My Little Pony-quality accessories that clip onto the Countryman’s central rail into proper Faberge eggs…
Mercedes could turn their A-class cars’ stalk-mounted, faux tablet console screen into a proper, demountable tablet; Peugeot could afford bigger steering wheels; Maserati could, um, start again; and Jaguar Land Rover could employ a seat designer who shows some signs of actually having once sat in a car for three hours at a stretch…
Don’t tell me your own car hasn’t furnished you with a short-list of long-term ergonomic excrescences and scratchy plastic irritations. Give me a moment and I’m sure I can come up with at least one respectable gripe about even an Audi interior.