Editor’s note: Aaron Robinson is a time-served motoring journalist and Editor-at-large for Hagerty Media in the US. He spends an unhealthy amount of time messing about with old British and Italian cars, but as you’ll read, he doesn’t appear to be learning his lesson…
In late October, an old Land Rover Series III station wagon that I bought in the UK sailed into a California port on a vehicle carrier after three weeks at sea. It was parked in the sun and salt air of the dock to wait out what I believed would be, based on five previous imports, a couple of days of Customs clearance. A week went by. Then another, with barely any information despite repeated inquiries. My temperature began rising. I went around telling people that Customs adopted a new motto: E Screwitus Younum.
So perhaps I wasn’t in the best mood when pics of the new Lotus Eletre SUV dropped in my inbox. I like Lotus and I’m not opposed to luxury SUVs, but the styling did strike me as just another angry face in the crowd. The Eletre has pinched headlights and a scowling grille, and one imagines that Lotus’s designers were evoking a fearsome cobra. Or a warrior chief in the throes of doing his taxes. Or five-year-old me tasting gefilte fish for the first time.
Thanks to relentless copying and the auto industry’s deep fascination with fads, cars today are almost universally unhappy. They fret, they glare, they scowl, they stew with festering grudges. They are at risk of developing deep and permanent worry lines.
For decades, the Toyota Crown has been the upright and understated flagship of Japan’s taxi fleet as well as legions of sensible salarymen. Toyota recently released pictures of the new Crown: slit headlights, a jutting chin accentuating an acute underbite, and a wall-to-wall grimace for a grille. Toyota has become enamoured with inking its creations with random blackout panels, and the Crown is so thusly tatted that it looks like a gang member out on an assuredly brief parole. The new Crown is not here to provide safe, reliable transport – it’s here to swipe your watch and wallet.
Cars seem to reflect our mood. Columnist David Brooks wrote in The New York Times recently that “the negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life,” noting that researchers who analysed 150,000 pop songs released over 50 years determined that the word “love” appeared half as often in later years, while the word “hate” had an uptick. From the endless downbeat headlines to the repeated surveys that say more and more people rate their lives as terrible, the world is in a funk, and it apparently wants its cars to be sad and angry, too.
This wasn’t a problem when most of our classics were built. They were given regal, technical, and forward-to-the-future faces. It helped that one industry standard from the 1930s to the 1980s was a 7-inch round headlight (followed by a 5.5-incher), because round lenses backed by semi-hemispherical reflectors did a good job of concentrating light, especially from 6-volt bulbs. Darkness, both literal and figurative, was thus banished to the shadows. The ultimate happy car, the frog-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite, was born into a Britain mired in empire collapse, currency drift, nuclear threat, and increasing social disorder. Yet it keeps smiling (and making smiles) to this day, reminding us all to stop clenching and maybe lighten the hell up.
I waited out Customs with scant information, which sent me to black, enraging places where uncaring bureaucrats lounge through long coffee breaks and slow-walk approvals out of unwarranted spite. Finally, I talked to someone in the know and learned that old Land Rovers get extra scrutiny because theft and import fraud has become so rampant among them. The thin blue line was merely doing its job, and two weeks was actually pretty good – some Land Rovers have taken six months to clear.
And there it was on the dock, filthy, spotted with seagull crap, but still bright-eyed and chipper. Old Land Rovers have a simple face – just a cube, really, yet a welcoming and competent one. It’s a face that says, “Keep calm and carry on.” And, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Apparently, from all the thefts, it’s a face loved the world over, perhaps proving that we’re ready for some happier cars to take us to happier days.
Via Hagerty US.
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The original triumph herald always had a ‘smiley ‘ face in my opinion .
Come on, the Frogeye Sprite was daft. So daft, the whole phenomenon lamented here could quite reasonably be a reaction to it.
I have a Land Rover similar age and same spec although different colour.
I had never looked at it and thought it had a smiley face before.
The dealer i bought it from described it in their advert as being a handsome truck.
And i would not have used that description myself about it either.
Although it does leave me with a feeling that reminds of happier times.
Simple and dare i say depicts a certain life style from the era.
For me, the Mazda range seems to have the most smiley fronts.
I’ve always chosen cars with happy faces – my first car was a 1966 Fiat 500, followed by 3 Citroen Dyanes over a few years, and these days a Peugeot 304 Cabriolet and a Peugeot 205 Junior Diesel. All of them wonderful cars with lovely faces.
I think the new Toyota RAV 4and Yaris have very grumpy looking grilles, why do they style like this?
One vehicle that comes to my mind is the Transit that is referred to as the ”smiley face” Transit. Another vehicle that is definitely not happy is the recent BMWs with, what I call the ”scream” face!!
I agree wholeheartedly. My wife owns a happy looking Mk3 Mazda MX5. I won’t let her renew it with a Mk4 because they are so ‘sad’ looking – a shame, because I’m sure the newer version is a ‘better’ car. BTW, IMHO the Tesla’s are all ‘sad’ looking as well.
The original Twingo was very smiley – and, of course the original Beetle 🙂
And I thought it was just me! The inspiration seems to originate from angry Samurai masks fuelled by designers raised on comics and “liberated” by CAD. At least, that’s what they all remind me of!
What could be more cute than the front of a Herald 1200?
A Morris Minor!
Well said! But even more worrying are the Peugeot’s new faces. They’ve gone awry abruptly. The 308.2 mk1 and facelift used to be wonderful. The mk2 or is it mk3 is awful. New Pugs don’t even scowl, they threaten you with their new T-rex look. To me the Sprite had always looked somehow stupid, it looks cute and fun now compared to what we see: the “threatening face in the rear-view mirror”. Buyers want to cars to look like toys of their youth, oversized wheels and madmaxian menacing faces, aggressive styling. It is just pure nonsense, doesn’t make environmental sense either. People want cars in which they want you to feel that they can bump you off the road. Let’s have the 1960s 1970s’ elegance back, anytime. But we won’t. Safety standards, industrial constraints and consumers madness prevent this, forever, and have put me off cars. Forever, too, maybe.