I’m not exactly sure what it is about pointing out that cars of the same general category tend to have some basic visual similarities. Whatever it is, it’s apparently appealing for the sorts of people you like to keep at the other side of the room from you at parties. Remember late last year and that dumb meme of all the white SUVs? That was a big hit among all those people who don’t know a Corolla from a cruller, and now it’s effectively returned, with another stupid meme, this time comparing a Ferrari Purosangue and a Mazda MX-30. Let’s take a moment to shit all over this stupid meme, shall we?
First, in case you’ve somehow missed this thing which has been all over the damn place, mazel tov, and I’m envious and sorry I’m about to ruin your streak:
Okay, so, yes, both of these red, generally sportily-designed SUVs have sorta similar rooflines and four largeish wheels sorta-similar side windows and if you look at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars or through a wet t-shirt or after a fistful of pills you found in a ziplock bag by the creek, then, sure, they look kinda similar.
Also, Mazda obviously spent many millions developing the MX-30 (a typical vehicle program can cost $1 Billion), but that’s not the point, here. You know what is a valid point? That’s not even an MX-30. It’s a Mazda CX-30. This is an MX-30:
That really doesn’t look like the Purosangue. But whatever, we’ll keep with the CX-30 and pretend like completely misidentifying the car doesn’t already tell us what we need to know about this meme, even though it does.
You know what else looks kinda similar to other things that aren’t really that first thing? All kinds of things. If you’re willing to ignore important visual details like proportion or shape or contour or pattern or any of those clearly insignificant things, then all kinds of shit looks like all kinds of other shit. Here, look:
Do you mix up apples and tomatoes or handsome big cats for Ron Perlman? If so, then yeah, you might try to drive off in a Mazda CX-30 when you own a Ferrari Purosangue because you think that’s your car, you big inattentive dummy.
Let’s just take another look at these two cars, just for funsies, why not?
Aside from being generally SUV-shaped, these two vehicles don’t really look the same, I mean not if you’re someone who actually gives a brace of BMs about cars in any way at all. The stance is completely different, the shape of the windows isn’t actually the same, and the proportion of those windows to the rest of the body is different. The beltline on the Ferrari kicks up far earlier and at a very different angle, the lower body sides on the Ferrari have a dramatic pinch, and the fenders are far more dramatically curved and much larger in width.
The Mazda’s front-end treatment is completely different, as is all of the lighting design. All the details – door handles, wheels, that heat exhaust vent on the Ferrari just under the A-pillar, the hood contours, everything, it’s all different, sometimes dramatically. If you were in front of these two cars, even in exactly the same color, and you still couldn’t tell them apart, I’m taking your keys away, because you would be in no condition to drive.
I asked our own Professional Cranky British Car Designer about this, Adrian Clarke, and he had some very relevant thoughts to add:
“It’s like saying you and me are identical because we both have two eyes, two legs and no foreskin.”
While I haven’t confirmed Adrian’s circumcision, everything else checks out, and he’s right. Nobody would mistake us for each other. If we stand next to each other, we look like Frodo and Gandalf, if Frodo stopped caring about what he wore and if Gandalf was a little more punk. I asked Adrian if he could elaborate, using the full power of his Royal College of Art automotive design training and education, and he did not disappoint:
Think all SUVs look the same? There’s a 14 car challenge in this week’s @Autocar magazine – kudos to anyone who gets them all… but I suspect rather more will reaffirm their belief that the jelly mould is being put to good use… pic.twitter.com/jTpBmBD1qv
— Jim Holder (@Jim_Holder) March 1, 2023
Yes, Autocar, you’re geniuses: SUV silhouettes do look alike! Does that mean they all look the same? I don’t know? Do these look the same?
Hey they do! I guess all male-identifying humans look the same, too when you reduce them to a basic silhouette, huh? How cool! Does it matter that one is Idris Elba and one is Mark Zuckerberg? Would you be able to tell them apart if you saw them parked next to each other in a Target parking lot? Probably not, right, because they all look the same! See, I’m cool because I notice these things! Nothing matters!
If you shared that meme, and indulged in a smug little chuckle, then I hope you enjoyed that, because now I and so many other people who are actually able to look at cars think you’re a ninny. Yes, car types have generally similar designs, but if you think that means car design is dead and everything looks the same, that’s because you’re not really looking.
I hope this is the last time we have to talk about these stupid “cars look kinda the same sorta” memes, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Because if I did, I could give myself brain damage and come out thinking all cars look the same.
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I generally think of mid size crossovers as mostly looking like a Mazda CX-5. The Hyundai/Kia line is noteworthy for going both ways, the 2015 and up Hyundai Tucson looks a lot like a Mazda while its Kia Sorrento platform mate looks nothing like a Mazda.
These comparisons so heavily rely on a specific angle and the suggestion of similarity, and people fall for them because they aren’t going to be bothered looking into it. It’s the same reason misleading headlines convince people of things not supported by the article–people take a quick glance and that’s it.
Anecdotally, I note that my girlfriend is ridiculously bad at car identification when she isn’t super interested (most of the time). I have a Kia Niro, and I was looking at potentially getting the new Sportage PHEV. After 3 years of riding in and being around my car, she thought the two vehicles were identical and didn’t understand why I would want to change. (I didn’t buy it.) But when she was shopping, she certainly noticed which vehicles were taller, shorter, sleeker, more stylish, etc.
I think the meme relies on the reality that people aren’t cross-shopping these. So most won’t care enough to notice. They won’t have looked at both, so they rely on the person presenting the photos to decide for them.
The CX-30 looks about as much like the Purosangue* as the Ford Granada looked like a Mercedes Benz, or the Chrysler 300 looked like a Bentley, or the outgoing Ford Fusion looked like an Aston Martin (well, the front fascia at least), or the X150 XK looked like a Taurus (from the front fascia at least) or the Aston DB7 looked like an X100 XK, which is to say enough to be kind of funny, but not enough that anyone sensible takes it at all seriously, and also damn Ford’s got a problem with stealing from themselves. The CX-30’s a plenty attractive affordable crossover, although the one I tried felt a little chintzy, and I’d rather just get the CX-5 and its proper sized windows.
*I know we have to dress it up for rich people, Ferrari, but just call it the Inbred. You know, like a lot of old money rich people.
thank you for putting so much rational thought and effort into something I would have just yelled at.
Morons posting “for the clicks” need a smack upside the head sometimes (all the time?).
Drop a pair of 3800s into an old Aztek and POOF! Instant Purosangue.
Bonus thumbs because I love the 3800
If someone doesn’t like the 3800 they are wrong.
everything I have learned about Jason’s and Adrian’s penis’ has been against my will.
Reminds me of my college roommate. He just bought a cool used 87 red Porsche 944 S. He drove through a fast food drivethru and the employee (teenaged girl) just went crazy over his car. He beamed. Then as she passes out the food she said “is that the NEW Geo Storm?”
He was soooo pissed that he couldn’t eat his lunch.
Corollas and crullers? No man, coffee and crullers will hold back the honk! Get them to Ramparts!
So Ron Perlman did play The Beast at one time. Maybe that cat IS him. Is the dress blue or gold? The Ferrari is sexier, but not 10+ times sexier. The Mazda would a LOT better without those awful blacked out rims and big slab of plastic along the wheel arches and lower doors.
**Also I suspect this will get moderated for use of sexier in a sentence.
If Mazda was smart, they’d play this up as a feature as loudly as they could
The new Mazda CX-30: Can You Tell It’s Looks from a $398,000 Ferrari?
When the world needs a better idea – Mazda Division, Mazda Motor Corporation
Ford already tried that between the Granada and Mercedes Benz.
It’s funny, advertisers seem to both under and over estimate the consumer at the same time. Ford tried that shit with the Granada, and now it’s just cringe.
American adverts very much concentrate on features and value, and numbers comparisons, because that very much the way Americans shop. In Europe, and ESPECIALLY the UK, adverts were much more about mood, image and emotion. In the eighties and nineties some of the best car adverts ever created were done in the UK, before the directors fucked off to Hollywood.
The DDB VW ads were pretty universal and absolutely groundbreaking, but interestingly David Ogilvy hated them.
I was today days old when Torch inadvertently (advertently?) confirmed he was circumcised. What isn’t not confirmed is confirmed:
“While I haven’t confirmed Adrian’s circumcision, everything else checks out, and he’s right.”
Well, Jason has previously confirmed that he’s Jewish (at least culturally, I don’t recall a deep dive into his religiosity), so if I were a betting man…
Touché..I’m not that observant.
Plus, pretty much every male… Jewish or not, who was born in the 60s/70s/80s got circumcised as a matter of course. (At least, in the US…)
I’m sensing a merch opportunity: a t-shirt with Adrian and Jason dressed as Gandalf and Frodo, both looking stern, with the caption “Stop being a butterfuck.”
I keep suggesting ideas for mercy, and I keep getting the same answer.
Still too many upturned crosses.
I’m upset we didn’t even get an image of the two of them as Frodo and Gandalf. Maybe they can reenact the scene at the beginning of fellowship of the ring where Frodo jumps into Gandalf’s arms.
If only I was a Rich Corinthian Leather subscriber.
If you are a Rich Corinthian Leather subscriber, you get Adrian as Mr. Rourke and Torch as Tattoo. The rights are to expensive for Tolkien.
At what level can I get Adrian and Torch tattoos?
That’s like an Amex Centurion level. If you have to ask, you ain’t getting in.
* not available as turtlenecks
Jason, keep up the good fight. All of us at this site love to read your rants. We do care about and deeply understand our passion (cars). It’s insulting when people trivialize automobile design and construction. Especially true when a complex thing like a Ferrari is judged in one tiny meme.
Paraphrasing Ted Lasso who allegedly stole it from Walt Whitman…
“Be curious not judgmental”
Or better yet Forrest Gump:
“Stupid is as stupid does”
The same-ness of crossovers is a bit eyerolling, but not nearly as annoying as having to spot which of the 7 black F150s in the Meijers parking lot is the one you are looking for based off of the mud splatter pattern.
Lol, tell me your from Michigan without telling me your from Michigan.
I always hate these “x looks like y” comparisons. They never do, and this is a even more egregious example of that stupidity.
– Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture
– They are the same picture
Back in the day, my father ranted a good bit about all the sedans looking the same. It was when car design shifted from straight lines to soap bars in the late 80s. I have to say my wedge 82 celica was a lot more distinctive than his 85 celica was.
You are never going to “win” this argument because the people you criticize are not you. They are most likely not car aficionados, they do not have your formal training in art/design, they do not see detail, nor nuance. Their whole context for viewing an automobile is unsophisticated. They mostly just perceive general shape and color and, as you pointed out, SUVs do share a similar profile.
There seem to be two broad categories (I’m generalizing here, which is never good, but, whatever) of people in the ”they’re all the same” category. The first group simply doesn’t care enough about cars to be bothered with making distinctions. You can show this group what they’re missing and you might gain some converts, but most still wont care. It’s the difference between looking at pictures and art appreciation.
The second group, however, does care, but actively dislikes SUVs and, as with most prejudice, denigrating a stereotype takes less thought and is, therefore, the ready arrow in the bigotry quiver. You will most likely never convince these folks because they dismiss the entire SUV class of autos.
I’m generally not a fan of SUVs myself, but I sympathize with your arguments. I just think they’re going to fall on deaf eyes, so to speak. But what the hell, it’s Monday, so rave on, dude.
I generally don’t get into arguments – I actually replied to the Autocar tweet because I thought it was fucking asinine and the so called ‘Worlds Oldest Car Magazine’ should be doing better than validating this.
I’m noticing a few autojournos online outright slagging SUVs off and it bugs me because it’s like they’re a fucking edge lord or gatekeeping and it makes me insane.
Well if you didn’t call them butterfucks, I doubt they will take you seriously.
I’ll own up to being in the second group of Butterfucks.
You’re dead to me. I liked them before they sold out.
You may be even more correct than you illustrate. It’s been shown that the same regions of the brain light up when recognizing cars in car enthusiasts (I assume this translates to other aficionados, but I haven’t seen any studies) as facial recognition in normals, but with the former, facial recognition capability is muted. It appears that we use our capability for recognition to identify cars instead of humans. Anecdotally, this checks with me. While some people certainly stand out (like normals could likely readily ID a Countach or OG Sting Ray), I can ID cars that were never sold here originally from magazine reviews I read 30 years prior, yet I have often thought people look familiar even though it will turn out that I had never seen them before. Other people don’t ring a bell even though I had gone to school with them for years (in fairness, they were not people I interacted with or had some outstanding reason that made them memorable). On a new job, I tend to remember people by seeing the car they drive, which leads me to an example of confusing two people as being a single person. In that case, I only realized this when I saw one getting into a different car in the parking lot (Subaru SVX). Then I spotted “her” car (RAV4) in a different spot. Suddenly, the confusing way she seemed to beat me from one end of the building to another made a lot more sense as I realized they were two different people. As it turned out, once I realized this, I noticed that the two women didn’t even really look that alike at all, very much like the Ferrari and Mazda in question here. OTOH, I was once tailed by two people and I made those fools easily from the odd license plate on one and stickers on the roof rack of the other. That was a fun afternoon.
“The Perpetual Idiocy of Butterfucks” sounds like the unpublished sequel to “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
It was going to be the name of my hipster themed Mumford and Son pub.
Which when packed to capacity with trust fund scarecrow cosplayers I would fire into the fucking sun.
And this kind of Goth Tweed content helped me to pony up for better than basic membership.
I don’t think I ever want to actually hear Adrian because the the supercilious sneering voice I use in my head is already perfect. Chef’s kiss is too mainstream-how about a Buskar’s Buss? Done.
You might be hearing my voice somewhere soon. I actually hate my voice, I think it sounds nasally and reedy.
Every American person I’ve met loves my accent, specifically my last American ex. I think you all have a BBC device in your heads that turns my accent into Best Received Pronunciation, probably a holdover from colonial days and we were going to beam Test Match Special directly into your brains.
my take on the meme; ferrari spent a lot of money to end up with a Mazda whatever cuv type thing for their first whatchamacallit thing they swear is not an suv.
I need to really gather my thoughts on the Purosangue (did I miss a fucking meeting?) and maybe I’ll get to see one (because god alone only knows I won’t get to drive one), but my initial thinking they’ve kind of made a big raised four door coupe, as opposed to the traditional boxier three row SUV.
I’m sure it’s going to have insane presence, and it was probably about as good as we were going to get.
Aside from the fact that I agree about the nuances of vehicle design is lost on most people, why do you have to drag Ron Perlman into it?
I’ve met the man. Fantastically nice person. Leave that dude alone! haha
What about the cat? Have you met the cat?
Maybe they are just the same.
No, the cat is Ron Purr-lman.
I have! That cat is a pussy.
If kit cars ever make a comeback, I’m getting a CX-30 with a Ferrari front end and some badging, and maybe some 22″ wheels. Then I’d be cool in a SUV
When I’m elected President of the Universe.
First against the fucking wall my friend. First against the wall.
“Butterfucks” has now been added to my vocabulary.
Somebody has to bring a little class to this joint. I’m British. We do not fuck about with class.
For a contrarian take: maybe it would be a lot better if cars were dramatically different. I can tell a Miata or a Beetle or a 911 from their silhouettes. They are, you know, literally iconic. But here we have a Mazda toaster, and Ferrari made their own toaster to try to capture the high end toaster market segment Neither is ever going to be iconic, and I think the meme stands: they’re both toasters and maybe Ferrari and Mazda should both get back to making interesting cars.
Can you tell an iPhone from a Samsung from a Google phone? Nope–they’re boring rectangles with rounded edges that do the same rectangle things, but I bet that weird phone people find it astounding that you’d think they look the same!
Yes and to a point I agree. Cars are a very mature markets now, and the phone has also probably settled on it’s final form as well – remember mobile phone market we had different shapes and size by the week.
But a toaster or a phone doesn’t have anything like the complexity of a car. There’s still huge variations in functionally and feeling even if they’re both red boxes with wheels.
Weird phone person here. The things that differentiate a car and the things that differentiate a phone are somewhat different, but there are some good parallels we can make here. One is performance. If you took a budget phone and a high-end phone, performance differences will be more stark than visible differences, much like with cars of the same general class.
Also important, design tends to ebb and flow in much the same way for both. Smartphones had very flat screens, then there was a movement to very curved edges, and that has settled into (for now) a slight curve at the sides being common. Foldables look like they could be the next big trend. Similarly, you can look at various eras in automotive history and find a lot of similar aesthetics in the vehicles of the time.
Finally, and this is a big one, like this comparison, a lot of that is angle-dependent. The face of a phone that is off is black and featureless. You might spot the buttons on the side or a camera notch, maybe slight curves or no curves at the side, but it will look similar. Flip it over and you’ll see different finishes and materials, different numbers/placement of cameras, maybe a raised area housing the lenses, maybe individual lenses protruding. you may not know which is Samsung or Apple or Google, but you can see they are not the same. Much like this. Another angle shows the cars are very different.
I think foldables were essentially forced onto us, because the form factor had stagnated and manufacturers needed a new gimmick to use to sell phones. It’s the law of diminishing returns, eventually you need something new. Remember the first Samsung foldable? It was an underdeveloped shitshow.
When Apple release a foldable I will reassess my thinking.
It’s all forced on us. The curved screens, the hole punch cameras, the larger screens, all of it has been pushed to have something new. That’s why I suspect foldables or other expanding screens will take off soon. They ran out of gimmicks for the dominant form factor. Then we’ll see a pushback and move away from foldable.
I could easily be wrong, but when it feels like they stagnate, they find a new gimmick to push. I’d rather it be something cool like interchangeable lenses for the cameras, but that would potentially open the door for others to make the profit on the lenses instead.
The side windows on the Purosangue are really far too small, it makes it look squished.
But yeah this is the same as saying my late, lamented ’84 Civic looked just like a Ford Taurus. Sure they’re the same color and maybe you might confuse them if you’re a 97 year old woman with macular degeneration* but no they’re not the same.
*My grandmother 100% got those two cars mixed up. The Taurus also had a woman in the passenger seat who was very concerned about why this old lady was trying to get into her car.
“The side windows on the Purosangue are really far too small, it makes it look squished.”
Seriously. My main conclusion from looking at the two of them side by side is that I far prefer the look of the CX-30.