This Add-On Trunk Thing For Fancy Sprinter Vans Hurts My Brain

Remember yesterday? Me neither. But I’m told it was dazzling. Here we are, on Tuesday, which makes yesterday, what, Monday? Seems to check out. Well, one thing I do recall is that yesterday’s Cold Start was all about add-on aftermarket trunk extenders for cars. I find them to be strange, fascinating things, and yet I had no idea just how strange these things could get.

I learned about the depraved levels the add-on trunks could get when I ran into our own reclusive writer/designer who goes by The Bishop in the break room. As usual, The Bishop was raking fistfuls of chili and chowder into his dripping overcoat pockets from the large chili and chowder barrels that we thoughtfully provide for our employees.

As I squeezed past him to get to the perpetually-erupting Nutella Volcano we keep at the center of the break room, he seized me with his hot, damp hands, one dripping chili all over my silken smoking jacket, the other slathering it with chowder.

“You need to see this!” he hissed, pulling out a chili/chowder-streaked iPad from his pocket. He pawed at the screen, wiped away the brownish/creamish-colored slime with his sleeve and showed me this:

Dear lord, what hath thou wrought?

Here’s what I’m talking about; these are “backpacks” made for Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans, usually ones converted to be luxurious shuttle vans or things like that, and in those situations, where you’re carrying a lot of people, you may actually need more cargo space. So, companies like these Auto Elite people build bolt-on units that go on the rear of these vans that hold cargo. And they look like this:

I think you see the problem here. Those doubled-up taillights. Now, I get why they felt they might need to add extra rear lighting, because that huge backpack could block views of the taillights, but they don’t, at least not completely, so you can see both sets of lights.

And, it’s not just that they added duplicate taillights on there; they added the exact same lights, on the same colored bodywork, which directly mimics the overall design and shape of the original Sprinter rear-end bodywork, and all of these factors combined make something that pokes and squishes my brain just like this does:

It kind of hurts to look at, right? This is called the Double Face Illusion and it messes with our brains at such a deep level there have been multiple scientific papers written about it! Here, look at the abstract for this paper:

We report three experiments intended to characterise aspects of the ‘double face’ illusion, formed by replicating the eyes and mouth below the originals. Such doubled faces are disturbing to look at. We find there are wide individual differences in the ability to detect that a face has been doubled when presented briefly and masked. These differences appear to relate to perceptual speed, since they correlate with the ability to identify a briefly presented famous face. Doubling has a significant effect on identification, though much less than inversion. In a reaction-time study, participants are faster to decide that a face has been doubled as it is rotated away from upright. The final study shows that normal and doubled faces do not pop out from each other, but reveals a processing overhead of 40-60 ms per doubled face. We offer some speculations as to the cause of the perceptual effects.

It’s talking about how this kind of thing messes with our facial-processing abilities, and these doubled faces actually add a delay in processing, because they don’t immediately stand out as wrong – there’s more going on there. They’re weird. [Ed note: See also Battlestar Galactica’s Space Angels. They haunt me. – Pete]

And these Auto Elite Sprinter backpacks are triggering the exact same uncomfortable feelings for me – I think its because the parts of our brains used for facial recognition get repurposed for car identification for hardcore car geeks.

There’s a lot going on here; in this shot, where the taillights illuminate in different ways, differentiating them, the uncomfortable effect is mitigated:

…See what I mean? Now look at one where the lights are identical:

That one messes with me more.

If I was working at Auto Elite, I’d issue an edict that from here on, all Sprinter backpack units will use different taillights, pulled from some other manufacturer’s parts bin. There’s plenty out there that would fit just fine but at least look different than the original Sprinter lights. We can’t have these things driving around, freaking out other motorists! Come on!