What happened to all the weird cars? Once, our roads were dotted with Fiat X1/9s, Saab 99s, Lancia Fulvias, and even the occasional Citroën DS. But rust has claimed most of them, and from rust nothing comes. There are no everyday replacements for the oddball, the eccentric, and the daffy. Look out onto your office parking lot, and all you’ll see is blandly uniform, grayscale, not-quite-a-car-not-quite-a-truck homogeneity, to the extent that it’s getting hard out here for the nonconformists among us to express ourselves.
This story originally appeared in Volume 35 of Road & Track.
Makers of off-kilter cars have had to self-censor to survive in this colorless, odorless autosphere. You’ll never see Subaru make another XT or SVX. The original BMW i3 and the Hyundai Santa Cruz were optimistically launched, then mercilessly culled. The weirdest thing on sale now is probably the Ineos Grenadier, but even that’s a reboot of old strangeness. There’s a pickup version, but it’s primarily offered as an SUV, mostly gray.
Did we all grow up and get boring? Or are we just not rich enough to commission a mutant from Sbarro, Mansory, or Ferrari? There should be some fanfare for the common person, some sufficiently roomy corners of the car market where we can let our proverbial freak flags fly.
But many massive forces conspire against us: Vehicle safety standards mandate specific structural designs such as large crumple zones up front (sorry, BMW Isetta) and a rigid passenger cell that all but guarantees bank-vault-thick doors, pre-GLP-1 A-pillars, and beltlines as high as your Shriner uncle’s. And since car design and engineering are increasingly global affairs, the worldwide pedestrian standards that push hoodlines higher and sand off noses are all part of a bigger problem of designing for generic tastes and use cases. The painter’s brush grows ever broader.
Crash safety has forced kayak-loving couples to choose more conventional oar haulers than the BMW Isetta.
Then you’ve got the sheer cost of developing a car for these scenarios. Actually, that should read cars, plural: There are almost no one-off cars these days—they are all part of larger, integrated platform families. Many of these families, like Volkswagen’s MQB, offer high degrees of dimensional variety, but the structural restrictions remain. And for the billions spent developing a new vehicle platform to pay off, it must meet consumer expectations, not drop jaws with mind-bending experimentation. No carmaker is unaware of the 75 percent dominance of utility vehicles in our market.
And don’t get me started on EVs. You take out the engine, you cut out the heart. Every EV offers, essentially, the same linear, quiet, and effortlessly quick driving experience. It doesn’t matter what the brand’s highfalutin engineering philosophy might be—all EVs feel the same. Even when battery-can-be-anywhere packaging and new proportional possibilities presented EV designers with the opportunity to do something properly odd, no one managed it. The safety cell prevailed.
And to be honest, car journalists are to blame too: We’re engaged in an ever-escalating measuring contest, pitting one car against another in a journey to the far end of the asymptote. As a result, carmakers rigorously benchmark one another for half an additional cubic foot of marketing and an extra tenth of a second of public relations while entirely missing the end goal: differentiation.
The front-engine Porsche 928, while laudable, never gained the loyal fandom that made the 911 endure.
All of this leads to a flattening of the picture, a 2-D rendering of what used to be an almost Himalayan landscape of peaks and valleys.
Is all hope lost? Thankfully, no. There is at least one car from the weird era that slipped through the security checks. It was nearly killed off about half a century ago by a fitter, more mainstream, and more powerful successor. But the people who built the old, weird one said no—we still love it, it’s not like anything else, and it’s the soul of our little company. We’re going to keep it running alongside the new one and see what happens.
You probably know what happened: The old, weird rear-engine Porsche 911 eventually killed the new, Mercedes-fighting front-engine 928. That’s why you see all manner of 911s everywhere and 928s mostly just on Bring a Trailer. Weird works, but—note to carmakers everywhere—you’ve got to stick with it.
Eddie Alterman is Hearst Autos chief brand and content officer, having served as Car and Driver’s Editor-in-Chief from 2009 to 2019. He enjoys decrepit old German cars, high-output American V-8s, and long walks on the beach.
