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| Cars will be made to look identical because of safety rules?
Is this the future: cars made to look identical by safety rules? Ever noticed it’s getting harder to tell cars apart? You’re not alone. Britain’s top car designer has warned they’ll soon be indistinguishable. It’s not that designers lack imagination but safety and environmental rules have imposed a straitjacket which is forcing designs to converge.
Ian Callum, the man behind the Aston Martin DB7, Volvo C70, Ford Puma and now the Jaguar XK coupé, said the creative process was being swamped.
Legislation in Europe and the United States places limits on the dimensions of cars, adding height and bulk to protect occupants and dictating the position of headlamps, wheelarches, bumpers and the angle of windscreens.
Gone are the days when designers could let their imaginations flow from pen to paper. The giant tailfins that define American classics of the 1960s and 1970s would never make it past the drawing board today — far too sharp — and the Rolls-Royce flying lady is now viewed as a potential death trap.
It took three weeks to design the first Jaguar XK in 1948. The latest XK took three years. Even then, some critics complained that it looked too much like the Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Callum’s reaction is that designing a 21st-century car can sometimes seem like little more than “joining the dots” between one set of legal requirements and another.
“In many ways it’s naive to say the profile of the XK is similar to an Aston Martin coupé,” he says. “If you take where the bonnet needs to be in terms of safety regulations, where the windscreen needs to be to get the right sight lines, where the roof line and tail need to be for package requirements, where the rear roof line has to be for aerodynamic reasons, you end up with pretty much the same silhouette. Because both cars have the same set of rules to adhere to.”
And it’s not just the Aston and the Jag that are similar. Callum says there is only a half millimetre difference in height between the line of the header (which joins the two A-pillars alongside the windscreen at the front of the car) in the new Mercedes SL and the XK.
“The rules are particularly restrictive for a sports car,” he says. “Because with a sports car you are attempting to shrink wrap the body as tightly as possible over its requirements — be they mechanical, safety, whatever.”
But the problem is not confined to coupés. The recently launched Mercedes S-class could be a twin to BMW’s 7-series. Germany’s Bild newspaper accused Mercedes of copying its Munich-based rival and published pictures of the two cars’ interiors, tails and side profiles, asking readers to spot the difference.
“It’s no longer the case that you start out with a pencil and a blank piece of paper,” says Nigel Wonnacott of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. “You start with the regulations, which govern everything from the position of the fuel tank to the shape of the wings. It’s all laudable legislation, but it places limits on how different cars can look.
“Basically cars are having to become smoother and wider as they are required to absorb more of the impact in a crash. The (crash) tests have become increasingly demanding and none of the cars which passed back in 1986 would make it onto the road today.”
The year 1986 marked the beginning of a new era of increasingly regulated car design, with the first Europe-wide construction and use regulations.
They governed, among other things, the position and strength of seatbelt anchorages and the inclusion of head restraints, and put an end to sharp protrusions on the bonnet.
Mandatory crash tests were introduced in 1998 and include a head-on impact at 35mph and a side-on impact at 30mph. Administered in the UK by the Vehicle Certification Agency and known as “type approval” tests they place strict limits on how far the front and side panels can collapse or deform in a collision.
New pedestrian protection legislation is adding more restrictions, requiring manufacturers to introduce a larger gap between the bonnet and the engine or use some form of deployable bonnet — as in the XK — that pops up to provide a cushion above the hard engine block.
For the United States a whole new set of safety criteria must be adhered to. Callum is particularly frustrated by US laws to protect unbelted occupants, which he says forced him to raise the XK’s header by about 1in more than he had intended.
Then there are the independent Euro NCAP tests, which have become increasingly important to manufacturers as many customers now expect at least a three star rating (out of a maximum of five). The Motor Insurance Repair Research Centre, based in Thatcham, Berkshire, which represents insurers and carries out assessments on behalf of Euro NCAP, is developing tests that could be used to judge the impact of crashes between different types of vehicles. Recent statistics revealed a growing number of fatalities as a result of collisions between small cars and 4x4s.
Dale Harlow is head of automotive design at the Royal College of Art, which includes Callum among its alumni. He says it is up to designers to respond to the challenges and come up with innovative designs. “When Chuck Jordan (former chief designer at General Motors) started putting bumpers on cars in the 1960s and 1970s many people thought there would never be another good-looking car again,” he says.
Callum agrees and points to the increasing importance placed on details such as grilles and lights to add distinctive character. “Of course you get frustrated,” he says. “But you just have to accept the restrictions. Design can be an anguish as you try to create something artistic in a real world which is very unforgiving.”
Article: http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/art...825977,00.html |