I probably should have posted this earlier for you to watch while you digested your turkey, but better late than never...
I always think of the Toyota 2000GT as a swingin' Grand Tourer with incredibly beautiful lines, but I had never really seen one race-prepped at full song before. Here is some wonderful vintage footage of Toyota's 72 hour speed trial at Yatabe test track, back in 1966. The music is hit or miss, and the editing could be a lot tighter (it's also entirely in Japanese), but there is some truly awesome footage with gorgeous composition in there that will reward close viewing of this 9 minute video. If you don't have time for the whole thing, I might suggest the dream-like night sequence starting at 3:01, and the mesmermizing clip starting at 7:04 which almost looks like a Wes Anderson film!
Crank up the speakers when the 2000GT wails by, looking almost like a Cobra Daytona Coupe on a fish and rice diet! Click here for more info about this car, with photos!
I have spent a fair amount of time soul searching over precisely why the new range of Jaguars just don't have that "IT" factor that a true Jag should have. Obviously the E-type was an incomparable paragon of beauty and line that Coventry never again equalled. But despite many attempts to recapture that swagger, I think even the latest family of Jags have a brutal look that isn't right for the brand. The new XF and especially the XJ look sort of thuggish rather than lithe; more bulldog than jungle cat. They're not bad designs per se. They just don't express the Jaguar ethos, in my opinion.
I was perusing the Tesla Motors website the other day and it hit me like a ton of bricks: The new Tesla Model S is EXACTLY what the new Jaguar XF should have looked like. It's aggressive, yet refined. It's sleek and athletic, and is just straddling the line between a GT and a sports saloon. The grill opening recalls the E-type, but in a modern, abstracted way that feels totally fresh. The gorgeous headlight clusters also capture the right "Jaguar gaze" utterly missing from the XF. I think the car's design is a stellar effort, worthy of a major automaker like Jaguar. I photoshopped a jag badge bar in the photo above to help your imagination, but I think you'll agree there is just something about the Model S that hits the spot Jaguar's designers have consistently missed for all these years.
I just caught an eyeful of the supposed "first new FIAT commercial" aimed at the US Market, via jalopnik. And folks, I almost lost that Tiramisu I had for dessert. Porca Miseria!
FIAT has two monumental challenges in re-entering the American market. Not only must it overcome the fears of notorious Italian unreliability and indifferent service it engendered in older consumers 30 years ago, but it must essentially launch a NEW BRAND for the majority of their target entry-level buyer segment, who are too young and too car-ignorant to have ever known what a FIAT was in the first place. And if this ad is any indication of what they are bringing to the table, Sergio Marchionne may as well stay soakin' in that hottub with Berlusconi until they cook up something sexier.
If have rarely seen such bland, meaningless stock imagery combined with such artless cinematography of the actual car. The first shot where we actually see the product (after 35 nauseating seconds!), the car drives over a distracting manhole cover in the road. Couldn't they have chosen a different snippet of footage to start off with?? Combine this with the computer generated "flower-petal" imagery (at 0:41 and 0:52) which is blatantly yanked from the original VW beetle and iMac campaigns from c.1999, and seems utterly out of place in this commercial.
The messaging touts the car as an expression of the "Italian Way" yet we never are shown the original car or how pervasive and loved it is throughout Italy. No, instead we are subjected to cloying imagery of an archetypal Italian Grandma kissing a child, and fields of olive trees. The only reference to FIAT's history is the parade of badges towards the end, which will bewilder most Americans (who, as I said, have no real idea what a FIAT is) and only emphasizes the fickle nature of the company's branding over the years.
In the end, I am left trying to take stock of what I am supposed to come away with. Where is the "Zoom Zoom" or the "Let's Motor"? "Life is Best when Driven" probably sounded cool in Italian (I have a strong suspicion this ad was done by an Italian agency because the cheese factor reeks distinctively of Parmeggiano) but in English it just sits there in all its inglorious passive voice.
I could rant like this for hours, but I think i'll shut up and let you watch it already!
La Dolce Vita, it ain't!
And the music was awful too, wasn't it? But at least they didn't use Opera...
Last month, Subaru unveiled a series of hilarious videos poking fun at mainstream family sedans. If you haven't seen them yet, you have to at least watch this one, which features earnest, hardworking designers articulating their vanilla-tinted vision of motoring ordinariness. The ads are funny, but they do sort of dance around the hard question of why it is that mediocrity is so pervasive in corporate design culture --even at Subaru. Sorry guys but the B9 ("benign" like a tumor that won't kill you?) Tribeca is nothing but warmed over Alfa 147 design cues stretched to grotesque proportions.
In reality, designers usually don't sit down and figure out how to make an intentionally bland car, but somehow at the end of the process a bland car is what results. If only it were a question of just setting out with the right goals from the start, but in truth mediocrity is a result of an insidious and self-destructive corporate culture that warps otherwise talented individuals into collectively ruining the fruits of their own labor -- a non-process that twists good notions into bad results. What I love about this campaign is to see the truth of it all so perfectly labelled: Mediocrity is the only way to describe it.
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 12:02AM 
