Has the world gone mad? We’ve all been there – looking at the supernumerated types on the late train back home. We’ll take a surreptitious glance at them working away on their laptop or iPad. We see them open a few spreadsheets. They’ll spend a cursory few seconds ostentatiously scrolling through a few figures. Another corporate lamp post marked.

Then, five seconds after a brief period of “work”, in between catching up with The Ashes and the latest Star Wars film, you see the logo of a premium car manufacturer pop up on the screen. The email header says “We value your feedback”. Goodness. The guy in the row in front, who can’t concentrate for more than 30 seconds, is being counselled for his opinion on a £1 billion project? Whatever next.

Welcome to the world where nothing gets done without customer validation. I can remember a time when car design clinics were a hoop that was jumped through but weren’t the be-all and end-all. I remember the success of the first generation Twingo and the inordinate amount of quizzing from OEMs it generated – but how had something so quirky been so successful they asked? Patrick Le Quement – Renault‘s head of design at the time – was unequivocal. The Twingo clinicked badly with 90%, but the remaining 10% were so passionate about the product that Renault saw that they just had to build it. And the subsequent sales success of the first-generation Twingo spoke volumes.

So what does this tell us? Don’t think the HNWI on the 9.00pm from Paddington is any more worthy of your product development time than anyone else. Sure they’ll buy your product, but will they sustain your business in a way that the good old fashioned hunch won’t?

It’s why car design has now entered a period of being as risk adverse as possible. We’ve been here before; the CDW27 Mondeo heralded an era of jelly-mould design that saw anything that deviated from the norm shot before dawn (cf. Twingo). But we escaped that.

However it seems to me that we’re in another era of “designing to the mean” where cars are only discernible via their nighttime headlight profile. Given this, and the sense that we’re about to head towards a time where a vehicle’s brand equity is going to be tied more to the total value of the monthly mobility service package rather than how good does the car look on my driveway, isn’t it about time that we allowed car designers one last hurrah? I’d rather this than being subject to the cursory input of city types who afford car design little more time than they do the profit contribution of a warehouse in Wrexham. Ironically, it seems that Honda, a company that’s always relied extensively on clinics (its vehicles scream designed to the mean), is allowing its designers a bit of fun at last. I mean what sort of system would give us the glorious Urban EV?

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