Ask HN: Why aren't there middle class cars shaped like Ferraris?
I always wondered why car companies like Mazda or Hyundai or Honda don't produce cars that may not have the performance capabilities of a Ferrari but resemble one in their shape? Thus advancing the way the car market looks now a days. Does anyone have a clear answer?
221 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 60.5 ms ] threadI think sports cars balance their aesthetics as a compliment to their function, whereas a Mazda dressed like a Lamborghini would almost feel "phony" as the aesthetic value would not be in line with functional purpose of the car at all. Thus, they are optimized for their functionality, which is to store stuff and to be safe.
You are correct...they do:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pontiac+fiero&espv=2&source=...
https://www.google.com/search?q=opel+gt&espv=2&source=lnms&t...
The new Camary actually looks desirable IMO: http://toyotanews.pressroom.toyota.com/album_display.cfm?alb...
2018 Accord also looks nice http://www.accordrelease.com/2016/03/2018-honda-accord-full-...
The new Civic hatch looks like some kind of military vehicle http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-hatchback
So, at least they're trying to make the econoboxes somewhat sexy.
Edit: yes it is http://www.caranddriver.com/comparisons/2017-fiat-124-spider...
Thanks for this concise answer. If this were Stack Overflow, you'd get checkmark!
On the other hand, a lot of supercars are mid engine (or depending on your definition of 'supercar' sometimes rear-engined) and this dictates some of the features.
Something that looks the part but doesn't have the gravitas just doesn't appeal to a large enough audience.
Pantera tried to make something like a cheap Ferrari in the 1970's. It was about $10k when average cars were $3k, and a Ferrari was $20k+. It did okay, but not a spectacular success.
And, there have been a few cars that tried to look the part, without the performance, but they did about the same. Pontiac's Fiero, for example.
Basically, the people that want that look also want you to think they paid a lot of money.
The Mitsubishi Evo has been highly successful, and keeps up with much pricier cars...even bone stock, with no performance parts added. It looks like a typical 4 door economy car with some spoilers added. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ees2aZcDUn8 (BBC's Top Gear: Evo on a track versus a Lamborghini)
Add a bigger turbo and these things are scary fast.
Edit: That golf below is hilarious, but wouldn't fare well on a road that wasn't straight.
The opposite question is equally interesting; why doesn't Ferrari produce a relatively cheap car, so that they can offer the Ferrari cachet to a broader market? Presumably as to not dilute their brand. But it means we might see such a thing if the company starts having problems (e.g., finds itself competing against superior electric vehicles or similar.)
But for basically any given designer handbag I can find dozens of bags at a fraction of the price which are largely indistinguishable from the original if you're standing across the street.
Sporty-looking cars that are low-to-mid priced really can't afford to handle like a sports car, since it is likely to be someone's main car - or back up when a car is in the shop. The expensive car is likely to be difficult to handle, especially in city driving and on the snow/ice. In addition, some of the cars perform poorly in city landscapes with potholes and speed bumps. If you've the money for the high-end car, those thigns are likely less of an issue.
In other words, the customer's needs are different with the cars. Now, I'm not an expert, but I don't think you can get the same sort of look/feel while still making it a practical enough car for the lower end market.
I drove one after having owned other Jaguars and the cheap switchgear, loud engine, excessive road noise, and poor performance put it in sharp contrast to the rest of their line.
They could have produced a car equivalent to their full-size sedans, but they couldn't have done it for that price point.
Undoubtedly part of the appeal for the corporate parent was the sharing of (IIRC) the Ford Mondeo platform, saving them the development costs of an entirely new vehicle.
The problem with that approach is that people who like a brand for the brand's sake don't want the 'Cheap' version, and people who can afford the expensive version as a status symbol don't want their prestige reduced by sharing the same marque as someone with the less-expensive version.
It's human psychology, and part of the reasoning behind 'Lexus' being a separate brand vs. just an expensive Toyota.
IIRC manufacturing numbers have gone back and forth on several lines of Ferrari more or less on this sort of need. While Enzo Ferrari was alive, Ferrari produced cars only to fund the racing team; it's probably not a coincidence that the most famous and best-selling Ferrari model ever, the Testarossa, was in production at a time when the team had no answer to the domination of Japanese turbo engines in F1. The team needed money to fight, and more and more Testarossa were made.
This said, Ferrari has been substantially bankrolled by FIAT "sight unseen" since the '60s. Things might change now that they are a public company. We'll see.
More previous cars in this category include the Toyota MR2, the second generation of which looked extremely Ferrari-like, Pontiac Fiero, Pontiac Solstice/Saturn Sky/Opel Speedster, Fiat X1/9, Mazda RX-7, Mitsubishi 3000GT.
The Pontiac Fiero had a tendency of catching on fire, in the rear, because of engine failures. Specifically, the 1984 Models with the 2.5l 'Iron Duke' 4 cylinder engine. The connecting rods in the engine would fail, blow a hole in the engine block, leak oil onto the hot engine/exhaust components, and then catch on fire.
Don't know when the release will be
(Ferrari have since moved a bit more upmarket; the replacement for the 456 is the 612 (so says Wikipedia), which I think looks a bit more like a Porsche Panamera.)
http://blog.caranddriver.com/supra-man-toyota-trademarks-ico...
People who have sports cars tend to have a second (or third or fourth) car because they have the funds available to afford being able to have other options available. Some Porsche sports cars are tremendous daily drivers -- a 911 Turbo is simultaneously a race car, a Toyota Camry, a snowmobile and a Bentley.
Sold Porsches in a former life. Third car was most typical, with it only being used for pleasure and special occasions. 911s were usually used most often as daily drivers, as opposed to the mid-engine cars, even though the MR layout cars have more cargo space (10 or 15 cubic feet). I'm a very rare breed, considering I live in New England and mine doesn't even have a proper roof (manual "procedure" to remove/install instead of a single button, and is always driven top down, regardless of weather).
Many people on the street owned Porsches, Ferraris, and there were two Lamborghinis, most were used daily. But, I think there was a restriction of one car per household parked on the street, and most would only have been driving a very short distance through central London -- usually at about 5-6am, before there was much traffic.
BMWs, Mercedes and Lexus cars were more common than the sports cars, and Porsche cars more common than Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
[1] https://www.google.dk/maps/@51.488953,-0.1788157,3a,75y,230.... (take left turns, I think there are five Porsches, and something I don't recognize. But this is probably the weekend, when most of the rich people were away, and normal people "borrowed" the parking spaces. A Porsche shop is 2 minutes walk away, the Lamborghini shop about 5 minutes.)
There's a retired F1 driver who uses a Ferrari Mondial as a daily driver. That's the opposite of the concept in the op question: A Ferrari that looks somewhat more conventional, yet is a true Ferrari under the bodywork. (It was also quite a bit more reliable than its peers.)
Last year Porsche made 230K cars. In their history Ferrari have made 130K. Lamborghini made 3.2K cars last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche#Production_and_sales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari#Road_cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini#Products
Porsche are pretty much a normal factory car. They have low volumes and go fast. But that is pretty much where they stand. Ferraris and Laborghinis are far closer to being hand made.
Factory made cars are more reliable than hand built cars. People who have owned these cars have told me using a Porsche for a day to day car is doable. A Ferrari or Lamborghini probably isn't reliable enough.
Nice looking car (for the time), underperformed, had a habit of catching on fire.
GM refused to budget for a new engine for the car-it never really wanted to have a two-seater outside the Corvette, but after the second gas crisis, the turkish engineer who'd been agitating for what would become the Fiero sold it to management as an economic commuter car.
The idea was to save money by using components (including the existing engine) from GM's A-body front-wheel-drive sedans, amongst others. The Pontiac 2.5L engine was too tall to fit properly in the mid-engined Fiero, and with no money for a complete redesign, the solution was to install a shallower oil pan, making the whole engine run a quart low (at least) at all times. That four was also not especially resistant to burning/leaking oil; so it was always a risk that the engine would be starved of lubricant, overheat, seize and catch fire.
I also understand that there were problems with the factory wiring on the electric radiator fans, such that airflow was never properly managed in the engine compartment, leading to... overheating and fire.
These problems were eventually fixed, but a reputation for burning up at stoplights is a hard one to overcome with normal consumers.
(I say 'normal consumers' here. Lamborghini has made many fire-prone models, but Lamborghini buyers are Not Normal.)
Most middle class cars are highly optimized shape wise for MPG as well as handling all types of road and weather which is why tires on performance cars look so different than middle class cars, because their goals are completely different.
Cars like Hyundai are building their own brands based on great technology, reliability, strong MGP etc. If they attempted to simply through that out the window and look like a ferrari, they would lose their core customer base and also not attract ferrari's customer base because they don't want a something lat looks similar on the outside but has lawn mower on the inside.
But then there are sports cars that are meant as daily drivers, like the BMW M5. The former CTO of Intel said he owns one and uses it as such.
Also I don't think the M5 is actually a sports car? I mean don't get me wrong, it's completely awesome and I would absolutely love to have one, but it's also nearly 4400 pounds and a sedan.
Origins of the term "sports car": http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28225/sports-car-de...
BMW 5 series is the Accord for rich people. An M5 is your "I like cars" model.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Econo...
http://www.unep.org/transport/gfei/autotool/case_studies/eur...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/07/eu-state...
Hyundai actually seemed to break with convention a few years ago and make their cheap cars resemble more expensive competitors, presumably because they didn't have anything in that market to devalue.
Ferrary body and a cheap car underneath
Also keep in mind that the 3 series isn't exactly for the mass market. Its price range is more like a BMW 3 series with some bell and whistles.
And before you quote 0-60 times: they are a tiny, tiny part of performance; if you look at actual racetrack performance, even the Model S P100D is miles behind a Ferrari, it's behind the top-spec Honda Civic in Nurburgring lap times. Which Tesla don't even measure nor publish, unlike all other sports car manufacturers ever. The Model 3 will be even worse off.
Come to think of it, we used to have a word for big, heavy American cars that go fast in a straight line and not otherwise: muscle cars.
Benchmarking has been on my mind this morning. I think you're pretty clearly off base here with your "tiny, tiny part of performance" comment.
0-60 times roughly reflect what people will see when they're getting on to the freeway. It's a useful exercise to contemplate how often people get on to the freeway and how often they drive around Nürburgring, or any race track.
This point pretty much holds true even among sports car owners. Guys who track their cars are very much an exception. (and for the most common case of that, drag racing, the Tesla you were putting down actually performs quite well)
No space for grocery
Can't put carseats
Therefore, my theory is that mid range car companies don't want to build complex designs as they will increase the price of their car needed to satisfy their tolerance specs.
In simpler terms: You can't build a "Ferarri shaped car" at the same price as an Chevy Impala because the shape is a part of the cost.
Mid-engined layouts are just a pain to do maintenance on, generally offer reduced cargo space and interior room.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/19...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Fe...
They build 3,500 of 'em per year. That's very high compared to say, any given Ferrari or Lamborghini model.
http://mediaroom.kbb.com/record-new-car-transaction-prices-r...
In EU, a Volkswagen Golf for instance is middle segment, but perhaps in the USA is considered lower segment and therefore the difference.
Small cars do not really sell here.
(For reference, I actually bought a new VW Golf R about 2 weeks ago... for roughly $41,000, just as a single data point).
In my case, the price premium isn't really that much to even think of, as I would have been going with a fully loaded GTI, which would have sticked around $35k or so, so it's not even _that_ much of a price bump.
[1]http://ecomodder.com/wiki/index.php/Vehicle_Coefficient_of_D... [2]http://www.autozine.org/Archive/Ferrari/old/458.html
Modern cars are apparently 'very curvy' but if you look closely you will see that the curves are done in plastic, not metal. The metal parts have relatively simple curves to them, when painted the same colours as the plastic bits it all looks good and far from 'boxy'.
As for tolerances - 'fit and finish' - there is more to it than the gaps in the panels. There has to be some tension in the panels for them to hold their shape. A bit of curve is important for this. Compare with vehicles that have totally flat panels, e.g. a Land Rover, where the panels are 'wrinkly' and far from smooth, even if fresh out of the factory.
There is also the matter of platform engineering. In the VW group the bolts that hold the engine in place are the same no matter what the model or the engine size. The Golf has dozens of same but different variants on the same 'platform' : Audi A3, Audi Q3, Audi TT, VW Golf, VW Jetta, VW Eos, VW Tiguan, VW Touran, VW Scirocco, SEAT León, SEAT Toledo, SEAT Altea, Škoda Octavia and so on...[1]
All the other volume manufacturers have the same platform based approach, the fundamentals of the car are worked out for the 'Golf' version and then after that the marketing folks and some kids with clay put together the 'remixes', e.g. the Audi TT for the 'hairdresser' market, the Jetta for the 'minicab driver', the SEAT Leon for the 'younger sporty buyer' and so on.
I believe a trip to the paddock at Silverstone is probably the best place to get appreciation of the Ferrari grade cars. The fit and finish on them is not what you would expect when inspected close up. Furthermore, the actual engineering is quite crude compared to the 'Golf'. But, if you are racing and need to fix the car between races then 'crude' is pretty good. If you are going to be rebuilding the engine all the time anyway then who cares that the bushings are primitive and prone to wear out after a few hundred miles? With the 'Golf' there will be rubbery bits mounting the engine, on a Ferrari it is bolted straight onto the chassis with no effort made to damp the vibrations, again not important if you are setting lap times around Silverstone.
Ferrari cars were styled by Pininfarina and the coachwork built by Scaglietti back in the 60's, Fiat subsequently bought the coachworks bit (as per Rolls Royce and Park Ward). Those panels on a Ferrari are very much 'coachworks' built, even if nowadays with carbon fibre composites etc. This is a very different way of building a car to the mechanical press + bits of plastic approach that mass produced cars use.
So yes, the shape is part of the cost. Personally I would prefer the 'Golf' to the 'Ferrari' and this comes down to childhood experiences of visiting car plants. The mass produced cars (MINI) fit together PERFECTLY every time. In the olden days, next to the MINI production line a smaller amount of panels were made for the Jaguar and other brands that used the same body shop for historical reasons. These panels for the deluxe cars had teams of people hammering them into shape as the tooling for them wasn't any good. They didn't fit perfectly!!! Sure the posh cars might have had leather seats and other fancy things but the basic shell was not good - 'lipstick on a pig' is the phrase that springs to mind.
As mentioned it is worth visiting 'the paddock at Silverstone' to look at some of these Ferrari type of cars close up. Also on the track. The Porsche 911 is a relatively tall and 'road car looking' compared to anything that it races against, e.g. the Ferraris, Mclaren things and what-not. Cars for the track are a very different breed ...
I don't know how it compares to the cost of a Chevy Impala, but it's definitely possible to get the Ferrari look on a budget, here's one example of a kit to convert a Toyota MR2 to look like a Ferrari F360 (similar kits exist for other cars):
http://www.kitcargrp.co.uk/
Seriously though, advances in composite materials science/ manufacturing techniques shouldn't put this too far off.
I have a Nissan LEAF and have owned it since new (so I know it's never been hit). Looking at the panel fit between the rear bumpers and the quarter panels, that car looks worse than some cars I've seen that have been hit.
>Tesla forums are littered with complaints about fit and finish. Have a look at the .pdf in this thread, which shows bad sealing, poor parts fitment and even rust on the rear seat brackets. [0]
And that is for the Model X, from what I've heard, the Model S was even worse.
http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-x-is-suffering-from-qual...
It's economics and marketing, in my opinion. Car manufacturers find it hard enough to make money that I don't see them mass manufacturing risky designs that only a small number of people want to drive.
As you reduce the purchase price, you need to increase volume to ensure profits. Similarly, you want to absolutely minimise construction cost to maximise said profit.
As you increase volume and minimise construction cost, you rapidly reduce the scope of possible manufacturing techniques. You narrow down to tried and true methods of fabrication and assembly. Now the parts must be readily handled by robots, reproducably accurate between the same parts, parts must be able to swap between mating parts without bespoke tailoring (ie: the opposite to Apple's vision system to pick the right set of parts to assemble together), it must reliably assemble and stay assembled, it must be easily and quickly maintainable by cheaper labour for aftermarket cost minimisation, it must perform well in the battery of safety tests yet not become structurally complex to pass them, it must be light to minimse raw material costs, etc. etc. Deviating from this essentially adds cost, and even a small additional cost adds significant burden due to volumes and small margins.
With all of those constraints in place, you then consider a middle-of-the-park design that isn't polarising in its appearance or function to maximise market share. Thus, you converge towards a relatively inoffensive sedan shape that Just Works for all parties and still satisfies that litany of constraints on the design, manufacture and maintenance.
I feel like you've encapsulated the essence of Toyota.
They use the same design chops, technology and factory to make the similar looking cars with less performance than Ferrari.
Also owned by Fiat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuoka_Orochi