(I'm speaking mainly about things like aerodynamics here, not necessarily EV-vs-ICE etc.)
What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers? Is it: people all actually demand boring white soapbar shaped cars -> companies make boring white soapbar shaped cars? Or is it the other way around: Companies are economically incentivized to offer only a small number of colors and styles -> customer really doesn't have a choice -> customer buys what's available -> companies think that's what they really want because of their purchase choice.
Same with the AirBNB look. Do people really like it, which translates into more rentals copying the look? Or are the landlords just uncreative, all copying each other, and that's all that ends up on the market? Or is something else driving it?
Reminds me a lot of the orange Chevys Cruzing around.
Some luxury or performance oriented car brands such as Porsche and Tesla do allow color orders from a wider palette, sometimes to the extent of even doing custom paint blending to match a customer sample. But those customers are willing to wait longer and pay more. They don't need basic transportation to get to work tomorrow.
Porsche is the leader in paint color choice, no doubt about that, with 14 basic colors plus custom options. And to your point, consumers are willing to wait for the Porsche factory to build their car, rather than driving one off the lot that day.
Actual Porsche prices out the door look like about $100,000 (even though MSRP for the cheapest models are a lot less). Please correct me if Porsche is significantly cheaper than Aston Martin vantage ($150k)… to me anything between $100k-200k seems like the same market segment but maybe I’m just poor.
So even if my favorite color was an easy option when choosing a car, I'd probably go monochrome as long as that's what the majority of other cars are doing, almost entirely for property crime reasons.
On writing this out, I have absolutely 0 idea how factually-based this is, but it is at least a thing some middle-class Americans tell their kids.
Because they are on average driven by people who rate higher risk for other reasons, not because color is part of the model.
Otherwise, a popular hack would be to get insurance first, and then paint a car red/yellow if that’s what you wanted.
Isn't this just fashion?
I've heard it argued that times of popular optimism and plenty tend to favour bright colours, extravagant design and conspicuous consumption. Think Calvin Klein underpants deliberately on show above low slung waistbands, analogous to frilly lace ruffs and cuffs in earlier ages.
Times of austerity tend to be associated with muted shades, and perhaps virtue signalling rather than wealth signalling.
Since the 2008 banking crises I think we've been firmly in the the dull, serious phase.
Natural wood is durable but not hard and cold like metal or glass, nor will it break down and end up permeating your cell membranes like plastic. Exposed beams make ceilings more interesting visually but also dampen echoes and make a space feel less sterile and prison-like.
Humans have been living in shelters made from wood and stone since the beginning. It wouldn't surprise me if affinity toward these materials shows up somewhere in our DNA.
Not sure about the Nespresso machines.
The "AirBnB look" IME is usually engineered wood (aka bits of wood + liberal amounts of adhesive) floor, or even vinyl (tile if they're fancy), not natural wood. Natural wood scratches too easily and is more expensive to deal with generally. So for a rental? Nah. But yeah in actually older places sometimes it's natural wood liberally coated with basically-plastic clear coat. ;)
A lot of the exposed beams are also not "real" structural beams. Often they're plastic too! Stuff like this. Lower maintenance, doncha know. https://www.architecturaldepot.com/BM.html
Empty palatial interiors staged to appear on magazine covers, but not necessarily lived in by actual humans. Sometimes, I wonder if the the AD places are empty investment homes / porn shoot locations.
For previous generations the same effect would've been before hotel rooms had TVs; there would have been a stark difference between hotel rooms that did and didn't have TVs for boomers (and maybe GenX?)
So I think there's some level of marketers adapting to at least what they think works in the market rather than simple volume discounts on white paint.
This also applies to things like computers: A cursory search on ebay shows that a silver iMac generally sells for more than an equivalent yellow iMac, for example. For someone who trades in their old equipment when buying new, this is a big deal.
Dealers aren't speccing them yellow because they don't sell as well as other colors. If people were lining up for yellow Porsches, dealers would absolutely be ordering more yellow Porsches.
Odd colors may be priced differently at the top of the market for used cars (I don't know), but that's just not true for the typical car used buyer.
People will travel for used cars. New car buyers want to pick a car. A few new car buyers do spec out custom orders and wait, but it's very rare. In general, that's atleast how half the crazy colors come into the market.
The problem is that no unusual colors are made in almost all car models.
There are a very small handful of models that have a few particular colors beyond the basic black/white/red/silver/dark blue options, but otherwise manufacturers have decided that because fewer people want yellow (or bright blue, or pink, or orange, or magenta), no one gets those colors. Ever.
Getting creative, if you're not a specialist in the field, would yield horrible results 95% of the time. Which is okay if you're doing it as a hobby, of course. But as a customer, I really don't want to be subjected to this.
And Airbnbs where landlords have actually hired a competent interior designer usually have "Luxe" brand and are clearly targeted towards people in a completely different tax bracket.
It's certainly not millennials that are renting out these airbnbs, but I'm sure are heck we're mostly the ones staying in them.
they do have to, though. updated standards to fuel efficiency and crash safety.
there are only so many ways to make that happen -- an aerodynamic, fuel efficient bumper that also meets safety requirements -- and still be cheap enough for the average person.
Blue and red are common favorite colors, so it's not surprising you get a little of those. Brown and tan used to be very common up until the late 80's or so; I'm not sure why that went away but that's the only one that seems surprisingly absent.
If someone likes a car in general, almost anyone will accept either black or white or grey, even if you would like red (rare).
If you like a car, and all they have is red, while you dislike red (very common), you don't buy it.
Dealerships have been around for 100 years and make millions of dollars for their owners. They're not operated by stupid people.
It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.
I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.
Interesting to see worldwide research (PDF) https://www.axalta.com/content/dam/New%20Axalta%20Corporate%...
The “soul” of something that is inanimate is the qualities that make it memorable or stick it in our mind with some manner of tactility. Not literal tactility but the nature of how you can visualize something so clearly it’s almost like you can touch it in your mind.
I’m getting a bit spacey here but let’s get concrete: Jeremy Clarkson often posited that a car tended lacked soul if it was refined and well put together. Often, he felt like older Italian cars, with all of their questionable design decisions were very soulful, because they reflect the fact that people, fallible human beings built it. It was a product of them, as much as a piece of art is purely a product of its artist. It’s why a Van Gogh has soul but a Van Gogh replica does not.
The effort to make things perfect and completely refined with no strange decisions removes the humanity from them. Renders them soulless.
People tend to think of cars as an old technology but cars are under intense regulatory (and commercial, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highwa...) pressure on issues like safety, emissions, noise, and fuel economy. A narrowbody airliner today can be based on a 1967 design with almost-state-of-the-art engines and nowhere-near-state-of-the-art avionics and control systems but there is no room on our roads for a new car based on a 1967 design.
With all of the requirements acting on cars it is little wonder that looks go by the wayside.
Poor quality can give a car a kind of personality, but that's not the soul of it. The same car could be reliable and have the same soul. The main difference is whether it is developed to a specific vision, or if checking boxes and aggregated by committee.
I'm saying it can also be driven by something else. There are probably only a few major players in the automotive aerodynamic software design space. Unlike the days when the design was driven by an artist with a block of clay, I suspect modern designs are often based on the same computer driven models with the same underlying physics. The software is probably a more refined and optimized approach, but this results in a convergence in looks and a lack of that idiosyncratic "soul"
I’ve only worked in body panel stamping in automotive assembly as a controls engineer, so I may be taking a bit out of school here.
Sure these vehicles make sense in a cost vs aerodynamics for a base set of functionality. But taking a step back, not everyone want the same base functionalities, nor have the same need or desire of cost vs aerodynamics.
At an extreme some people want a golf cart that have some trunk capacity and is road legal. At another extreme some want a practical but "fun" to drive car. Others want a mid-sized car that can somewhat fit two mountain bikes without being too much a trouble to use as a daily commuting car.
These could all have optimized, wildly different designs, but it's more cost effective to cut off the minority cases and aim for an average that somewhat pays lip services to each specific case. And the more the cost effective average option is prioritized, the costlier it becomes to have a custom design for a niche use case, creating a vicious circle.
To take another industry, we're seeing that in laptop computers: Macbooks nail the average with perfection, and that also means there's no way to get a big screen low power laptop from Apple, for instance. In comparison smaller makers have more niche models, Lenovo or Asus have wild models that are probably commercially possible because they don't try to catter to everyone with a single laptop line in the first place.
Cars keep growing bigger, for no sensible reason. That demand was created by aggressive marketing (encouraging Americans to attach their egos to their cars) and fearmongering (people feeling the need to get larger cars to protect themselves from other, ever larger cars).