► Stephen Bayley on car design
► Scout relaunch analysed
► What’s with all the nostalgia?
Saturn ate his own children. The motor industry does the same, except it also regurgitates them. When Volkswagen took-over Navistar (which was formerly International Harvester), it inadvertently acquired the “Scout” nameplate.
Scout was a utility vehicle made by International Harvester between 1961 and 1980. The concept was “replace the horse”, but a slow cart-horse rather than the fast race-horse which Henry Ford believed his own customers yearned for.
Designer Ted Ornas created what was essentially a Jeep with softer, more friendly contours. Scout had understated, clean, modern lines and was – you could say – the first SUV. But it did not excite an ungovernable frenzy of consumer hysteria. Nor will Volkswagen’s new Scout EV.
Car design is in a crisis. The rich vein of elegance that once informed the Italians has been all but exhausted. Today’s BMWs look like the result of an anarchic game of consequences, not rational German thought. Mercedes’ product-planning seems wholly randomised. French cars have lost their charm. And of American design, all you need is think Cybertruck.
To explain, we need the Soviet economist, Nikolai Kondratiev. He had a theory that all economic, and, indeed, cultural activity followed a sinusoidal pattern of peaks and troughs, often inspired by the discovery of new energy sources. The theory became known as Kondratiev’s Waves. Alas for poor Nikolai, he was unable to predict his own fall-out with Stalin and was confined to a gulag.
Electricity is that new energy source and dominates discussion of car design today. But this discussion began at precisely the time that we became fearful of the future.
This is why designers are plundering their memory palaces and Ford gives us re-issues of Bronco, Mustang and Capri, feeble travesties of the gutsy originals which cynically exploit consumer nostalgia in the absence of having anything to say for themselves. Ditto electric R5, Volkswagen ID-Buzz. You name it. This is what I mean by a trough.
The conversation about electricity as an intelligent power source is for another day, but there is no debate that electric cars are less interesting than combustion cars. A combustion engine has thousands of different parameters of noise, heat, vibration, smell. Electric has fewer. A big twelve cylinder demands a monumental Packard. A small air-cooled twin just has to be in something as cute as a cinquecento or a 2cv.
The Scout EV is a demonstration of doubt on an industrial scale, the latest car to plunder the past in a process begun by J Mays’ 1991 Audi Avus concept which cleverly played with ghosts of Hitler’s Auto Unions. Mays (who also rebirthed the Beetle and the Thunderbird) called this “Retrofuturism”, the title of an exhibition of his work shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2002.
The year before, BMW had re-imagined the Mini. At the time I was visiting Walter de Silva at Audi in Ingolstadt and – despairingly – he put his head in his hands and said “Repetizione! Repetizione!”
The Scout EV is another repetition and the more depressing because it repeats an original that was, unlike, say, the Thunderbird or Mini, not that exciting in the first place. At least the first generation of electric cars, the ur-Prius and Honda Element, were courageously odd, making explicit their whack-job outlier status.
If electricity becomes the norm, then car design will be progressively infantilized. Actually, I see it as becoming no more interesting than Hot Wheels : with motive power and drive systems all similar, designers will gussy-up platforms with ever more playful parodies of the past.
Good food should taste of what it is. Good design should express fundamental truths about the product. Instead, the Scout EV is an unpalatable fiction …. like tofu made to taste like steak.
But let’s get back to the Waves. Like Kondratiev, I might be wrong. There’s a condition that psychologists call apophenia which means an inclination to see connections between unrelated things. Maybe I am apophenic. Perhaps electricity and retrophilia are unrelated. On the other hand, if Kondratiev was right, when hydrogen arrives, design will soon be out of its trough and back to its peak.
Meanwhile, I’ll tell you one thing of which I am certain : no-one, not even the most demented retromaniac, will be reviving the Scout EV.
By Stephen Bayley
Design critic, guru, cultural watchdog, occasional annoyer of Ron Dennis