Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Cars mostly look the same now because they're in the final stages of commoditization, the same as with phones. They converge as their designs reach "peak appeal" of 80% for maximum profits. Then the niche producers carve out from the remaining 20%.

Airbnb apartments are tending towards the "hotel room" look because that's what most of them essentially are. However, every Airbnb I've been in over the past few years has not looked anything like that, so I suspect some bias from places the author goes.

Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same. I think this is just the author extrapolating from their Airbnb experiences. The middle class homes will definitely look similar because they all use the same source material (same as they always have - just websites now instead of interior decorator magazines).

Consumer brands are all over the map, just like they've always been. And it's not like we haven't had bland brands like General Mills and Polo and Sears for ages.

Apps and websites follow the trends because that's what you do in the media space. Nothing new there.

Why do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping... It's like car designers all got together and decided that aggressive-ugly is a good look.

I wonder how much that contributes to road-rage?

It's not the car designers, it's the consumers that voted with their wallets by mostly buying angry cars. Apparently car drivers feel a need to intimidate the road users around them...

Or they think it looks cool.

Bullshit. If the designers didn't go there first the consumers would have had nothing to vote on.

Crash safety standards

Complete nonsense. Smart cars (to pick just one counterexample) meet those standards without being big or looking angry.

They match the standards, and do the best which can be done, for their size.

But double the size of the car, and you have double the crumple zone.

An 18 wheeler is nigh invulnerable to hits by another car, even if both meet safety standards.

I feel safety standards should not only take into account the damage done to occupants of the vehicle in case of accident, but also the damage done to occupants of the other vehicle (and pedestrians, cyclists, ... ). To a certain extent this is probably already the case, but I think it should be much more important.

My buddy bought a Miata some years back with an "active bonnet" specifically designed to react to hitting a pedestrian. I believe it was only installed on the American version because it's an EU requirement.

https://forum.miata.net/vb/showthread.php?t=758082

So you are correct that it is already the case to some extent.

It is already the case but it's a process full of massive compromises. There's not much you can do to stop an F150 from annihilating anything it hits.

I think the best defense for pedestrians, cyclists and even other cars is the design of our roads. Stroads are a great example of the worst possible outcome: deadly, fatal speeds, poor separation of different traffic flows and zero defense for pedestrians. Where there's conflicts of interests between cars and other users of the space we should be deferring to those other users, not letting cars fly through city streets at 30mph with naught but a bump of concrete protecting everyone else.

There are 4 sections in the EuroNCAP tests (European safety standards). One of them is about damage done to pedestrians and cyclists. The others are: adult occupant, child occupant, and safety assist features.

The latter includes the annoying seatbelt warning, that's why most (all?) cars sold in Europe have it.

Which is what's caused a size-war with cars. Your own safety by being the bigger car comes at a detriment to someone else's safety, and as cars, especially trucks, have gone off the deep end in this regard they've become downright negligent.

I say this as a benefactor of the bigger-car-wins situation, as my father is still with me by virtue of being in the bigger car recently. It's selfish but it's also sensible if everyone else is going to be in a bigger car, and so I think it's something that could only be curtailed by regulation.

To be fair, cars used to be massive compared to today.

If you're comparing a new Camry to a 1970s Cadillac, sure. Sizes have increased within each product line (see original mini -> modern mini, porsches) and the types of vehicles available in each niche have also grown larger (Scion xB -> kia soul, Toyota pickups -> f150s). The overall trend has been for increasing sizes.

Thinking on this, I think what has changed is what people buy, vs what they need.

Let's take the late 60s, early 70s before the oil squeeze. Families were larger. More kids.

People would buy station wagons. Large, lots of seating.

But I think people would buy more what they needed, not just big "because".

Now I see modern families, with one or at best 2 kids, with huge SUVs.

Hmm.

The standards only take into account collisions with cars in the same size class. That's why tiny cars can still have perfect crash test ratings but be absolutely destroyed in a collision with anything significantly larger. You can look at driver fatality statistics for various makes and models and the numbers for smaller cars are like 10-50x higher than larger ones.

I don't get how it's safe for a pickup to have a hood at my eye level

The original was about cars, not pickups. For pickups the standard was magazines started pulling the max weight trailers up pikes peak (a long steep grade) on a hot day with the AC on (I was going to write at the speed limit, but I suspect they are going faster than legal speed just like everyone else). Without those large grills there isn't enough cooling and the engine will overheat forcing you to slow down. Older trucks could handle this grade and drivers just slowed down a bit - which is the safer thing to do anyway. (either that or you should have a semi-truck - including the additional training required to drive one)

Because that's what appeals of American customers. Big, angry, intimidating, and aggressive.

Sad to see this downvoted. There's a real core of truth there. The fact that millions are salivating over cybertruck, which design is a celebration of dystopian sci fi warfare aesthetics, proves your point.

Technology creates the conditions of its use. Aggressive looking cars nurture a culture of aggressive posturing, which in turn drives people to buy even more aggressive cars.

I'm interested in the cybertruck not because it looks agressive but because it's the ultimate "function before form."

99% of cars on the road are ugly anyway, why are we compromising efficiency for the sake of making slightly less ugly cars? I don't want to car to have nice curves, I want it to be cheaper to make. I don't want the paint, I want the frame itself to be rustproof.

What do you consider the function of the cyber truck?Isn’t it the opposite? I would consider an extended bed single cab pickup truck to be the ultimate functional truck.

The function is a bit more meta that that. It's easier to manufacture because you just fold a giant sheet of metal. You also get rid of all the work and costs associated with painting. In theory this should bring down the price.

In terms of user function, the idea of a rustproof car really appeals to me since I live in Ontario and cars get literally covered in a thick layer of salt in the winter.

The exoskeleton also allow you to have more room inside.

As you probably noticed, I don't care much for it as a truck. I would prefer the same thing as a car, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. Hopefully this will tricked down to cars someday.

Wonder how much of the appeal varies by generation. For me, it has a 90s nostalgia feel to it. I had lots of fun during the 90s playing early 3D games, which for technological reasons, had low polygon counts. The Cybertruck very much looks like it would fit into games like Descent and even further back, Battlezone. These are fighting games but having fire buttons on the steering yoke doesn't come to mind, the good times I had with friends playing 90s games is what it make me think about.

The anger is cultural. For some examples, look a sporting team logos - from school-age teams all the way to professional. Half look like they are about to bite your head off and the rest look constipated.

I think a significant part of road rage is due to conflicting metaphors. Children are taught to "wait in line" and "take your turn". The lanes on roadways emphasize the "wait in line" - but there is no line. So when people pull in front of you, they're violating a deep-seated upset-ness that they are cutting in front of you. But there is no line - so it is impossible for them to "get to the back of the line". I could write a very long essay on these conflicting metaphors and how our tricksy monkey-brain and lizard-brain are perceiving and sending conflicting messages.

Additionally, the semi-anonymous nature of driving has the same lack of feedback that posting on the internet gives. You will say and do things that you would never say/do to another human in front of you.

Add to that an appalling lack of driver education/training in the US and the question should rather be "why is there so little road rage?"

Finally, the public policy has been to make things so spread out that car ownership is mandatory. Zoning requires f(X) number of parking places if your business location can handle X number of customers. This is why all businesses (both retail and office) look like a box in the middle of a parking lot.

Some combination of "angry" grilles and the pseudo-anonymity of driving makes people act like complete animals. A fun one I noticed was driving to the beach this summer. In the parking lot, there was a tension in the air that a fight could break out at any second for a parking spot. People were driving aggressively, cutting each other off, honking, having their passengers get out and stand in a spot to "claim" it, etc.

Then, they got out and walked 50m to the beach. Instead of fighting for a "spot" people just move along peacefully. There was no tension, no aggression, just a few thousand people getting sunburnt in peace.

I'm not sure what the point is, but it really made me think about how strange our behaviour is. As soon as we're back in "human scale" environments, we go back to behaving like humans.

When I'm driving my car, if I feel myself getting angry at another driver, all I have to do is get close enough to see them, and the anger sort-of melts away. It's like it suddenly dawns on me that there are actual people in there, and that my anger was misplaced.

I don't like tinted windows for that reason.

Japanese manufacturers make a lot of cars that don't see any markets outside of Japan, and some of those are just delightful. There's also a level of pragmatism for some of them that doesn't make it to markets like the US or Australia. Kei cars, oh my, that's all I need!

Fiat Panda. I wish the US had the Fiat Panda. Small footprint, AWD, ugly enough not to get stolen, dependable. It's literally my perfect car.

(the 18 year old that lives in my head is screaming so hard at me right now)

I have to believe there are more people like us, that want those regional cars, but can't get them.

I’d love a stupidly happy looking car such as the Microlino: https://microlino-car.com/en/microlino Driving is ruined for my by aggressive looking huge cars.

> It's like car designers all got together and decided that aggressive-ugly is a good look.

It’s called market research. Marketers will influence designed based on surveys. The outcome in the past tended to be terrible until the rise of Japanese brands

> Why do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping

I am convinced that the omnipresence of this style is going to make the rounded and friendly cars of the early 2000s increase in value in the coming years. Heck, they're only a few years from being eligible for historic plates at this point. My flaming hot automotive take is that the much derided "fried-egg" headlights of the late 90s and early 2000s era Porsches are actually great, and offer a nice contrast to the super-angular headlights we see today to create that aggressive look.

Probably for a similar reason why Kirby gets angry eyes added to his art when the games come over from Japan to the US.

https://www.eurogamer.net/why-so-serious-nintendo-explains-a...

> Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same.

I like to watch real estate videos. In the high end certainly everything looks the same. You cannot even tell them apart if they mixed up the videos, zero local aesthetic, and generic contemporary grey minimalism seems to be what people want

You don't want to have opinionated decor when selling a house - it would distract from the product.

Contemporary is opinionated

Not when the vast majority of the market looks that way. What is opinionated will change with the times.

But you don't want to be too drab. We almost passed on our current house because the newly applied paint was boring grey. We did buy it, but only after deciding it would be painted before we moved in. If they had put in some color - any color we would have lived with it.

I want to replace the grey vinyl floors, but it is hard to justify that cost.

Paint is cheap, relative to the probability and cost of finding a similar house you like, where you like, in the timeframe you want it. Flooring is relatively cheap too.

I would never pass on a house for those reasons, at least not where I live since supply of alternative houses is so low.

Then there is a net loss of an extra redecoration: one to prepare it for sale and another to prepare it to be lived in, rather than just one by the new owner.

I am so done with open concept kitchen/dining/living rooms and grey vinyl flooring...

>Cars mostly look the same now because they're in the final stages of commoditization

Consolidation, not commoditization. Cars aren't barrels of oil or truck cars of coal.

It's just impossible to compete as a car company unless you are very niche, a billionaire or a state. The big 3 vertically integrated to the hilt and erected monumental barriers to entry and then became very, very conservative.

What big 3? I can count at least 8 brands off the top of my head which sell a variety of vehicles. Tesla started relatively recently, and I have seen a few Rivian around. Kia and Hyundai made large gains in the last 30 years.

Most car brands you know of are owned by just a handful of the others. A perfect example is that Kia is owned by Hyundai Motor Group, who also own Genesis. There are definitely more than three though, I will give you that, but it is definitely a story of consolidation over the past 30 years.

https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-advice/car-manufacturer-bran...

And yet Tesla is out there with the highest market cap of them all, which contradicts the person I replied to that there is no variety or an impossibly high barrier to entry.

We have numerous Korean, Japanese, German, and American vehicles on the road with many varieties of sizes and performance.

And obviously you will need to have deep pockets to enter the car business, why wouldn’t you for such a complex machine? That does not mean there is excessive consolidation in the market.

Tesla and Rivian are small fish.

"The big 3" is a phrase referring to the US automakers; Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Fiat-Chrysler).

On a global scale you also have giants like Toyota, Volkswagen Group, Hyundai Group, Renault–Nissan Alliance, and Geely.

These companies make most of the brands you've heard of.

I know, but that is far more than 3. And the small fish Tesla’s market cap is $584B.

Obviously the barrier to entry to manufacture a hugely complicated machine will be high, but the data indicates it is not impossibly high.

Automakers are measured by units sold and Tesla ranks very low on that list.

When Toyota sells 10 million cars a year it's not news, they have basically reached peak growth. Tesla's valuation is higher because they keep selling more cars and still have room for growth (and because of Elon Musk himself).

Commoditization is the right word to use imho. I think OP is using it here in more broadly philosophical (marxist) sense; a reductive process which makes mass manufactured products essentially interchangeable in the market.

The only differentiation that can arise then in is in terms of branding. That's exactly what cars are now. Identical metal boxes, captured by marketing, purely differentiated on intangibles like brand identity.

And even this differentiation is becoming less and less relevant. How many people still really care about their cars? (mostly men do, and even that's waning). They're basically washing machines now.

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