g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Saturday, March 3, 2007
18:32 - Hey, Butt-head. You know what sucks?

(top)
Months ago, Chrysler put this special fold-out ad section into various car magazines, showcasing the developmental sketches for the new Sebring:



It's all abut "twenty-something, Viper-driving Todd Rabinowicz", the youthful design genius who penned this striking new concept. It discussed his vision from the exterior to the cockpit details, and I thought these drawings looked pretty frickin' sweet. A mid-size, sporty sedan that actually looks futuristic and breaks the three-box mold, actually managing to look fast and inspiring? Amazing!

... But of course it wasn't to last. Long ago I realized that automotive concept art was not a career for me, because this is the sort of thing they always seemed to turn people's visions into:



Gone is the road-hugging stance, which is always the first thing to go when a concept drawing is made reality and the 36-inch, ultra-low-profile wheels that people always draw filling out the wheel arches are replaced with regular consumer-grade tires. Gone are the low-slung proportions and tight greenhouse, probably in the interest of crap like "headroom". And to compensate for the sudden drop in visual interest, the design team added another side strake across the doors, at a seemingly random angle against the other creases that are already there, which makes the side look roughly like what happens if you T-bone a Ferrari 348.

Car magazines were cooler back when the only things they could show as illustrations of rumored upcoming designs were sketches from people who could make things like the first-generation Saturns look like vehicles out of Blade Runner. Nowadays, half the pictures of upcoming cars aren't drawings or official PR shots—they're computer renderings, done with such attention to detail and Internet-age movie magic that you can't tell one from a real photo without peeking at the credit caption. Now there's no more of the fanciful, blue-pencil concept sketches, because the 3D CG art has to look a lot closer to reality. And that's even more misleading than before, because the pseudo-photos had led us to believe that we'd be getting Murciélago-lookalike Lamborghini SUVs and the like, whereas if they'd just been drawings we'd have known not to take them too seriously.

Silly me for having forgotten that in the case of the Sebring.

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© Brian Tiemann