I can vouch for this. He complained about the bumper from day one!
He want's this one. Have to admit it is loads better than what they did.


https://cdn1.evo.co.uk/sites/evo/fil...?itok=klyEGat3

To be fair it was marketed to females so that's probably why people call it that.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I think focus groups produce some of the worst or most boring designs imaginable. They signal to your most visionary designers that you don't trust them to do what you hired them to do.

Put a dozen people in a room and show them pictures of your designs, then ask for their thoughts. Maybe they really don't have any strong opinions, but now that you've asked for them, they feel obligated to say something. So they say vague, wishy-washy stuff about the design. Sometimes one girl will express an opinion, and several other people will glom onto her viewpoint so that they don't have to come up with their own. Someone else may disagree with her just to play the contrarian. Or maybe there's genuine disagreement. People will entrench in their opinions and express them more forcefully, not because they believe them, but because they're being encouraged to express themselves.

You take all this contradictory bullshit you gather back to your visionaries and say, "I know your design was really nice, but the focus group didn't like it. Change it to make it fit more with what The People want."

So your designer dumbs down the design. It's a snoozefest. But it's deemed safe, so it goes into production. It doesn't sell in the numbers you hoped, not even to the focus group members who said they wanted it.

You have to do something to sell more cars and justify your large management salary. So you blame the designer and call for more focus groups to steer your visionaries away from taking any design risks in the next version of the car.

GM makes some of the blandest, most boring designs of any manufacturers except maybe Toyota, mostly because they focus-group the hell out of everything until it's just generic. The one place where they don't do that is with the Corvette, with that team getting a much longer leash. Predictably, that's the one group producing something interesting.

Zora Arkus-Duntov wasn't beaten senseless by focus groups. Neither were Giovanni Michelotti or Brooks Stevens. Those guys were hired to deliver, and they did.

The way you get interesting cars is you hire very bright people on the basis of their vision, set them loose and take what they design to market. If it sells, you keep them around. If it doesn't sell, either they learn from it or you let them go. Auto manufacturers generally are too risk averse to do that today, and the visionaries get all their creativity beaten out of them.

I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think Toyota/Lexus makes some of the best looking new cars compared to its competition and I think the new Corvette is the worst looking Corvette ever produced.

I was going to go find some pictures to prove you wrong, but I got so bored looking at Camrys that I fell asleep.

Toyota's recent designs are much more daring than before. They're still overdesigned but they are far better looking than before imo. A lot of their old cars were just plain conservative. They were there and you saw it and that was it.

Lexus on the other hand turned their design dial way up and it brought us designs centered around the spindle grille, which is still polarizing today.

I quite liked how aggressive and different they looked. The LC inspired design direction they're going through now is much better than when it started (far more cohesive and not 'predator grille face slapped onto body' look that a lot of the early spindle grille had.)

its still in your face and polarizing but they're definitely distinctive and clearly lexus.

With everyone jumping on the gigantic grille trend, a lot of cars are starting to look the same. Grille shapes and headlight shapes are really starting to look like derivatives of each other.

How about you try looking at this instead? I think you'll go into a coma if you look hard enough. :bellyroll:

https://www.chevrolet.com/content/da...g?imwidth=1200

....in short it is impossible to please everyone being a car designer, especially for an economy brand..don't know any car design that has had unanimous appeal..


the folks who cry about designs should put their money where their mouth is and go mold their own bumpers and let us see the final result for us to judge ^^

And that right there is exactly the problem with design by focus group. If "the focus group" didn't like it, they dumb it down until nobody has any complaints. But then nobody's even remotely excited about it either.

Oh I agree, I guess I forgot the tongue-in-cheek emoji with my message...

That said, I'm not 100% in agreement with your criticism of GM. I like a lot of their designs. (Camaro, Corvette, which you mentioned, most of their trucks, the new Caddies, even some of their lower end cars). On the lower end you can definitely see where they go with build cost rather than looks, but that's expected.

What the most recent series of Camaros says to me is that Chrysler revived the Charger, then took it a step further with the retro style of the Challenger. Ford answered with the retro Mustang, and the reception was good.

GM noticed, so they made some neat sketches of a '60s timewarp Camaro, then focus-grouped them into something safer and a little more corporate-looking. Then, when Chrysler went the opposite direction with the Charger refresh and started making that car look more futuristic instead of retro, some GM executive ran down to the studio with a copy of Road and Track, pointing frantically to pics of the Charger and babbling incoherently to the designers something about making it look old and futuristic but not futuristic in an old way and angry, but like a robot with no feelings and likely to test well in marketing so give me something like that pic in the magazine but only a Camaro instead.

The result is not really a Camaro. It's an anti-Charger/anti-Mustang jammed into a Camaro-shaped hole.

It surely is, because the 2018/19 Toyotas spare me to death, and I think the newest Corvette is great. It finally looks like it belongs in the performance car discussion.

Overdesigned for sure, but I don't know about better looking. They seemed to haphazardly toss a bunch of swoopy trash on it. Honda is doing the same thing with the Civic. I mean, they fattened the Civic and Corolla and added fake fins and "performance inspired" bits everywhere. It's like they got a new design team that idolizes Chris Bangle, but don't understand his work.

"Better looking" is subjective and therefore non debatable.


I do like the Bangles work though.


[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv6tuzHUuuk[/ame]

There was a Civic RS parked near me. Every vent and scoop on the thing was fake. If only Toyota had tossed some "swoopy trash" on the front of the 86 instead of the crap they hung on it.

If there is a next-gen 86, it's going to look like shit. You can't have a Prius be more herp-derp-agressive than your dedicated sports car. At the risk of arousing Tcoat's anger, if it had not been for Scion the FR-S/BRZ would never have seen the light of day. Yes, I know Scion is Toyota, and Toyota still has no idea what to do with the thing.

"Performance inspired." LOL.

Huh. The "face" on that car sorta resembles Stewie's squashed face. Did they throw that car against the ceiling?

AGAIN. The FRS was the same as the Toyota everyplace else. It was not a Scion design it was a Toyota one. It would have changed even if Scion was still around. Scion had no designers or engineers and if it hadn't existed it would just have been a Toyota here as well right from the start. The whole branch consisted of 30 people in a marketing center.
Dumbass

Just in time for this thread, oh look, GM focus-grouped together design cues copied from practically every other manufacturer to hack out a new Blazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........ .............................

Chevrolet Confirms the Return of the Blazer

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RjHfi9S3EM[/ame]


Oh. Sorry. Watching a Chevy reveal is like having narcolepsy.

This guy despises Chevy

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...ERyImjrTb1vc7G

:bellyroll::bellyroll::bellyroll:

Brilliant. I shout really offensive insults at the people in those commercials whenever they come on. Glad I'm not the only one.

The spokesman looks and sounds like he's in pain. He always looks like he's thinking, "I was gonna be in the movies. My parents put me through four years of theater at NYU for this? Somebody please just kill me. Kill me now."

https://i.imgur.com/WaokiYz.jpg


And yet he's the PERFECT spokesman for boring Chevy.

That's, like, your opinion, dude. Relax a little, maybe? Weed's legal up there, no?

I mean, it's not actually an opinion. Scion was a marketing team. That's it. They had no engineers or designers. OK, maybe one person to figure out how to economically swap badges. But that's it.

LOL I was relaxed. You asked for angry so I gave it to you.

I can verify that because I met them all (or at least saw their workspace if they weren't there) during the First86 Long Beach event prelaunch.

I hope all the GM workers from the closing plants ban together and torch the corvette plant.

Seems unlikely. The Corvette plant is in Bowling Green, KY and its about the only industry there. I'm guessing the employees at the plant like their jobs better than they like their union, and having spent a lot of time in KY I can tell you they are most likely well armed.

I'm always well armed when I'm in KY.

BTW, it followed me home.

https://i.imgur.com/cNJ8HDk.jpg

https://media.giphy.com/media/kUFlw7XaGE36w/giphy.gif

More pics. Good deal? I am probably the only one that cares though.

No more pics at the moment. I think I paid a fair price for a running, driving 37-year old vehicle. The most serious thing wrong with it is that the gas gauge doesn't work.

I also found a set of vintage louvers for it that hopefully went into a UPS truck today. They have me thinking how good louvers would look on my BRZ.

injector seal tokay?

wut.

herro.

SX4? I want one...

CONGRATULATIONS!

What is it?

:confused0068:


humfrz

Thanks!

It's a 1981 AMC Eagle SX/4. It's basically an AMC Spirit, only lifted 4" and 4WD. It's a Jeep sports car.

Thanks for posting that, I've had a look on youtube and they seem to be able to handle themselves.

I had flash backs to when I had a Rambler Hornet, they delivered them to Australia new, only issue I had were the axles, maybe it was me doing skids with big rubber.

Stupid kid I was. Edit: still am

Enjoy your new toy

I will have to dig through the basement but I may (just may not do) have a service manual kicking around for it.

Shit! The jig is up!!

Thanks, but I have one. A 1981 service manual and the technical supplement for the transfer case came with the car. It's an original print but apparently has never been used. It's so clean and greasy-fingerprint-free it's almost a shame to use it.

LOL well mine would be the total opposite! It was well used.