Modern Japanese car styling has gone almost completely off the rails
“Success breeds excellence” is what I’m sure a management consultant once said before chortling along home with five Gs for their day’s work. What actually happens is success usually breeds laziness and the desire for a profit spiral that ultimately extracts anything of value from a company. Sometimes, it also breeds mutants.
A successful company can become very inward-looking, finding all the affirmation they need in sales—“If we’re selling a lot of cars, then whatever we’re doing must be right, so let’s do it even more!” Seldom does this lead to greatness.
There is no other explanation for what’s happened to Honda and Toyota (Nissan used to be a leader in this category, but their lack of horrible styling innovation has left them looking relatively tolerable).
Toyota started the circle of awfulness off in 2010 when the Lexus debuted the “spindle” grille, or what most autowriters have called the Predator grille (as in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, 1987). They knew it was ugly at the time: “We [previously] tried to please 10 out of 10 people,” said their design chief Tokuo Fukuichi in a 2014 Automotive News interview. “Now we’re trying to please one of ten people out there with Lexus.”
The 2011 Lexus CT 200h had a less extreme version of the grille than the 2010 concept car, but that wasn’t what people liked: it was spending money. Sporty premium hybrids weren’t common and for the year, gas averaged over $3.00/gallon, hitting almost $4.00/gallon nationally in late spring.
The relatively affordable $32,000 Lexus sold about 14,000 units over the 10 months it was available in ‘11—not huge, but more than enough for a special interest car like this and 40 percent over their goal.
From there it was history. Toyota assumed it was the styling that sold the car, as opposed to engineering that was almost identical to other cars in their lineup, and let the designers loose. Five years later they had the 2016 Prius, a car which literally looks as though it’s been in an accident that shattered the front end.
I do mean literally—that’s what I thought the first time I saw one. Archrivals Honda were slow to respond but have more than caught up with the current Civic and surprisingly, Accord, a car once known for understated elegance that now sports a chrome rodeo champion belt and buckle on its nose.
Toyota has trickled the spindle down into their Camry and Corolla and like a finch evolving on an isolated island for a half-million years, it’s becoming ever stranger and more ungainly without the constraints of competition.
There are those who swim against the tide. Traditionally gawky Subaru has built a slick and distinctly sophisticated Legacy sedan in the vein of one of the big new Fords or European car. Mazda’s Mazda6 sedan is a symphony of flowing lines inside and out.
What they have in common is hunger. Honda sold almost 1.5 million cars in America in 2016, and Toyota had 2.1 million. Subaru had a little under 600,000 and Mazda around 300,000—an eighth of Toyota’s.
The little guys can’t afford to sit around looking only at themselves. They have to do everything they can with moderate resources and take a path that makes sense outside their own little world. And sooner or later, they’ll end up eating the big guys’ lunch.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who recently quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.