Time to shift gears on the approach to design

Audi R8 is the first big revamp of the supercar. Courtesy Newspress UK

It's that time of year again when car manufacturers begin wheeling out their wares at the world's biggest motor shows, their PR teams desperately trying to keep ageing products in the headlines when there's little new to report. At the Geneval motor show this week, there is a plethora of so-called new metal on display and yet, when you take the time to examine what's changed over the outgoing models, it can be extremely difficult to spot anything at all.

Just what do the design teams at these companies do in the years between all-new models? Not much, at least if you consider the examples of the new Audi R8, which is the first major overhauling of a supercar that’s been around for eight years. Under the skin there are a raft of performance and handling improvements, as you’d expect, but what of the physical design, inside and out? It looks almost identical to the first one built in June 2007 and, if anything, it’s arguably a retrograde step.

Is this the best the design studio could come up with? Where is the sense of adventure, of pushing the boundaries like the original did? Or do companies these days take the “Porsche 911 option” of simply massaging an existing design for fear of alienating a loyal customer base?

Then there is Aston Martin, which has been fiddling with its designs for an eternity and, to many eyes, making them less visually appealing. Yet, some carmakers get it right and the incessant messing about with original designs brings about improvements that might be difficult to pinpoint but, taken as a whole, make things more cohesive.

An example of this is Bentley, whose Continental GT has been in production since 2003. Bentley’s designers have admitted they view this car in the same way as Porsche does its 911 – it’s considered iconic within the company and its position as part of Bentley’s range is sacrosanct. So they’ve tweaked it over the years to a point that it now looks stunning. The front and rear ends have both been overhauled and the lines work now, in a way they never before did.

Well at least they did. Because Bentley, too, has not known when to stop fiddling and the Continental GT being shown at Geneva sports an unnecessarily fussy front valance and new vents in the front wings incorporating “B” logos that can best be described as kitsch. The rest of the car, externally and internally, looks the same, so why the need for this constant tweaking?

Of course, it’s easy to become an armchair pundit and cast aspersions on the design teams at car companies, who are under enormous pressure to keep the cash registers ringing.

But what I miss are the days when high-end manufacturers commissioned styling houses to take care of their exterior designs. The world famous Bertone studios filed for bankruptcy last year – the saddest demise for a genius outfit that gave the world incredible automobiles such as the Lamborghini Miura and Countach, Lancia’s Stratos, Fiat’s X1/9 and the Alfa Romeo Montreal. Pininfarina, once the go-to for Ferrari, is also on thin financial ice – another victim of manufacturers deciding to take design services in-house.

Yet, sometimes you can be too closely involved with something and, when it comes to car design, perhaps having everything “under one roof” really does stifle creativity. Perhaps the designers really should be just that: designers, with the freedom to be creative, unconstrained by the demands of accountants and chassis engineers.

We need more beauty in this world. And in an age when the automobile has become little more than white goods with each one looking the same as the last, I’d argue that it’s time to get those creative juices flowing again.