Beauty is subjective, and one person's idea of a stylish car may embody another's idea of sloppiness. But there are cars that appeal to the majority of people and those that are disliked by the majority of customers. What makes a car beautiful is told to us by some of the top designers of our time.
Automotive designers have the difficult task of predicting what customers will find attractive in years, decades, and decades. With constantly changing tastes and culture, this is no easy task. But there are certain principles that designers rely on when trying to create something beautiful, and for many, the right proportions are crucial.
“There has to be a beautiful and balanced proportion“, says Brian Nylander, chief designer at Stellantis, who has designed the Chrysler Firepower, the ME Four-Twelve concepts and others. He adds that it's easy to “overdo the style” in the name of design, but “it's not always about the details, it's more about the simplicity of the proportion. I think a little simplicity works great in the long run,” Nylander adds.
Ed Welburn, former GM vice president of global design who oversaw the second-generation Cadillac CTS-V, Chevrolet SSR, Oldsmobile Aerotech and more, also stresses the importance of keeping things simple. “Complex designs may look great for the moment, but they generally don’t age gracefully,” says Welburn. To him, “beautiful designs are clean and simple, but not boring.” They achieve this by being “well-proportioned in every way,” while also having “a consistent character of line and form.” But Welburn acknowledges that the adage “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a misnomer. is true.
What makes a car beautiful may be a simple question, but it's one that Tony Hatter “has no easy answer“. He recently retired from Style Porsche, where he was head of design quality. Hatter worked as an exterior designer at Porsche from 1986 to 2002, creating the 993 and Carrera GT, before becoming design manager. He now works with RUF.
For Hatter, the proportions of a car are just one of four components that can make a vehicle attractive. He studies how the glass connects to the body, the position of the wheels and the overhangs, which he believes are determined by the second component: Function. Hatter considers the car's aerodynamics, engine position and performance, but both proportions and function must follow his third component: Form. Hatter's final component is materials, measuring brightness, color and wheels and how they contrast and complement the body. He also said: "The interior cannot be ignored, especially if we are talking about an open car."
For Tom Matano, who helped design the original Mazda MX-5 Miata and FD RX-7, a beautiful car is one that is “without showy surfaces”, emphasizing that a vehicle should be “Completely cohesive from the overall proportions to the smallest detail, both inside and out. With a quick glance, one should be able to tell what it was designed for. Proportion, stance, attitude, movement, tension, center of gravity, detailing, and choice of materials and finishes” are what Matano looks for when determining whether a car is beautiful. Matano left Mazda in 2002 to become a teacher and is currently the honorary director of the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Arts.
The head of exterior design at Mercedes-Benz, Robert Lesnik, also emphasizes the importance of getting the car's proportions right. "Where are the wheels? What is the stance?" he says. Lesnik then looks at the surfaces and finally the light signatures. He says you probably won't remember what the car's lights looked like, but you would "remember how elegant it was when it was going by at very low speed."
According to Frank Hale, Bugatti's design director who helped design the Chiron, Divo, Bolide and W16 Mistral, a car's design can do more than just look good. "First of all, it has to tell a story," Hale says. "That's what makes it appealing to me is that it has to have a touch of authenticity. Number two, obviously, is proportion, proportion, proportion," he says. "Before I look at any color, theme, line, whatever, the thing just has to fit right." At second glance, we are already talking about certain features or design lines."
For BMW's head of design, Adrian Van Hooydonk, industrial design is “almost at the crossroads of art and engineering“. “We want to create products that add something to our customers' lives“, he said. “For me, design is beautiful when it works really well, but beyond functionality, it offers something that people can connect with in an emotional way.“ But Van Hooydonk is also open about the challenges of design. “We have to find solutions to multiple requirements, problems, etc.,“, he says. “That's part of our job. That's why we call it industrial design.”
Automotive designers balance multiple factors when they create a car; crash standards, costs, fuel economy targets, and more all influence the final design of the car. That's why concept sketches can look so different from the production version. There are rules that designers can't break, because these machines balance beauty and function, and blending the two is an art.
Beauty is also influenced by time and place. Designs that were once ridiculed when a car was first released can find popularity decades later, but that's the beauty of this job. It's an opinion, and opinions change—and cars would be pretty boring if they didn't.