The Cars That Made Me Question Everything
Something has shifted in the last twelve months and I am not sure how to feel about it.
The Ferrari Luce. The Audi Nuvolar. The Jaguar Type 00 and Type 01. The Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe. The Cybertruck. The Kia Tasman. These are not fringe concepts. These are production cars, sold and driven, and a lot of them look nothing like what any of us grew up idolising.
So I have been sitting with a question that makes me genuinely uncomfortable. Are modern designs bad, or am I just getting old?
The Case Against Us
Here is the hard part. The Ferrari Luce is already sold out for two years. Two years. Before a single customer has driven one home. Is that allocation playing tricks, or do people actually want it? I think it is both. But you cannot dismiss two years of demand as a fluke.
The Audi Nuvolari is limited to 499 units. Rarity will sell anything. We know this. But someone at Audi signed off on that design believing it represented the brands future. Lots of very highly paid people gave it the green light. Are they all wrong? Or are they reading a market that has moved and we have not noticed?
Jaguar is the most painful one. There are people in England who will spend serious money just to make sure that heritage is buried with dignity rather than handed off badly. But Jaguar is also fishing for new money, new markets, younger buyers who have no emotional attachment to the XK or the E-Type. For them, the Type 00 is a clean slate, not a betrayal.
My Four-Year-Old Broke Me
My son Aksel wants an EV. Specifically a BYD.
That did not come from me. I promise you that did not come from me. But his kindergarten brain lit up looking at BYDs and I sat there wondering what was happening. If I remove twenty-five years of automotive baggage from my head for five seconds, I can see why a four-year-old with fresh eyes would point at one and say yes.
Mercedes knows exactly what it is doing with the AMG GT 4-Door. I hate it. But Its biggest market is China. The proportions, the presence, the way it sits: that car was designed with a specific buyer in mind, and that buyer is not me.
So Who Is Actually Wrong Here?
I do not think the industry is lost. I think the audience has fractured and design has fractured with it.
The Cybertruck is absurd and it sold. The Kia Tasman is fugly and it sells. The Luce is not a Ferrari and it sold out. None of that follows the old rules.
We grew up with a shared language around what a great car looked like.
That language is not gone but it is no longer universal. New buyers with new money from new markets do not owe us their taste. They never did.
Maybe the question is not are modern designs bad. Maybe it is whether we are willing to let the definition of great car design grow beyond what it meant when we fell in love with this stuff.
I am not sure I am ready for that. But Aksel probably is.
