In Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb, there is an essay about Mickey Mouse and his devolution from an adult into a child….
Disney began Mickey Mouse with adult features, but over time made him more and more like a human baby. The reason for the neotenization of Mickey Mouse, Gould explains, is baby features (big head, big eyes, round everything) trigger an “automatic surge of disarming tenderness.” The evolutionary advantage of such feelings for baby features needs no explanation. It is as obvious as the day.
Gould’s essay was much on my mind when I came across this car, which is popular in Spain and surely all other parts of Europe…
It’s an egg. And Citroën—the company that designed the car (“Picasso”) in my image—is not the only one making eggs out of their cars. Almost every car company operating in Spain (and surely all of Europe) has turned to this design. America is not far behind…
Cars did not begin with this shape; what happened to Mickey Mouse is basically happening to the horseless carriage. But baby features make a whole lot of sense; with this egg thing, the sense is not so apparent. Eggs are hardly safe—they need to be handled with care, their shells are thin, they break easily. Also, the stuff in an egg is unformed, unconscious, mindless matter. So, why the egg shape for something that should instead inspire safety, strength, protection from accidents? My guess is it has to do with how we see Utopia.
There are two types of history. History that is progressive and looks in the visible to find the invisible new, the higher level, the next stage, the revolution. The other history sees history as moving toward a resolution of two things that parted—for Hegel, the split is spirit and matter. Because the end reunites what has been broken, it is a return to the initial and unified stage. Indeed, the beginning of the universe is sometimes called “the cosmic egg,” and until recently, until the growing acceptance of the reality of dark energy (the universe expanding into nothingness), scientists imagined the end as a grand contraction—the universe re-collapsing into the cosmic egg.
During the Renaissance, some inventors saw in machines the potential to end the curse of Eden—our banishment from wholeness and happiness (the blank pages of history). This reading of technology has never really left us. The promise of the future, the event on the horizon, the singularity is nothing more than the reinstitution of all that was before the fallen land of time. And all that was before time had the shape of an egg.
Jesus, Charles, it has nothing to do with it looking like an egg, and everything to do with aerodynamics. Get a clue.
Aerodynamism and minimization of surface area to internal volume ratio
Eggs are structurally very strong. End of story.
You’re trying too hard. Science always wins in the end.
my god, you guys have no sense of the popular imagination. you act as if it does not exist or exert pressure on design decisions. please understand what cultural interpretation means before you attack me.
and if you think i’m one step behind you, please read the story about the egg in Betty Crocker’s cake mix.
What @3 said.
Also, not to sound like Freud, but isn’t there a feeling of security associated with the womb? An egg is just another way to carry one’s precious delicates, in this case, one’s family.
This.
the GM muscle car revival contradicts your theory – camaro, challenger, magnum.
those cars are devolving to a pre-egg stage: the explicit, shameless phallus.
So the egg DID come first. Thank god, I will no longer have to be tormented by this debate.
A more interesting question, at least for me, is, why are people now willing to accept these aerodynamic designs, when historically, aerodynamics has been a very secondary consideration in car design. I don’t know what’s going on in Europe, but here, since the major examples of this type of design are the hybrids (the Prius, the Insight), I think it’s about telling the world that you care about gas mileage (or maybe, actually caring).
@9 – Coming soon: cars shaped like chickens.
@8 – cars are having the great battle, phallus verses womb!!!
@9 – now THAT i would like to see.
Egghead in the house!
I’d noticed that the all-electric cars have a cute factor beyond anything necessary for aerodynamics. I wonder if it’s a sign that we’re moving away from a culture of (adults) subduing the planet, and towards a culture of (children) living more playfully and less destructively. Exactly, back to Eden.
5 – Uh, oh: watch out for the flaming from the reductionists and materialists.
Good lord. Yet another trite observation by someone who appears to have lived in a box all his life, followed by an excessively masturbatory wankfest (hard to be excessively masturbatory with those, but Chuck manages it) about a profoundly detached philosophical concept (or misreading of a philosophical concept, take your pick).
(By the way, Chuck, you would have gotten bonus points for noting that the cross-section of an airplane wing looks like an egg, too, and somehow associating that with man’s attempt to reach the heavens. I would have, of course, expected the use of a “mudedeism” like “daedalan”. Oh, missed opportunities.)
Charles, the issue is that you seem to assume that the “popular imagination” (by which I think you include unconscious drives in a Freudian scheme) is the driving force of all design decisions. Being a Hegelian, you overemphasize aesthetics and symbolism when utility is still the mother of invention. Like a rorschach test, seeing “the cosmic egg” in a Toyota Prius reveals little if anything about actual design considerations, but oh so much about the inner mental life of a free-floating continentalist and self-proclaimed philosopher-poet.
Well, remember Mork from Ork arrived in an egg shaped vehicle, lol.
18 – if “utility is the mother of invention”, how do you explain Apple’s products and non-essential consumer products in general?
Charles, I would suggest that the design evolution of the car is not as consistent as you suggest. Car designs have shifted over time to become more and less “infantile” at various times in history. Cars from the 1940s were significantly more cartoonishly rounded — and the windscreens actually looked a lot more like eyes — than they did by the 1950s. The VW Beetle was more egg-shaped than the general run of boxy car from that era. And then cars in the 1980s got very angular and non-egg-shaped. Now the design is rounding out again.
I think it has more to do with what people perceive as “the future” than anything else. A lot of the angularity of the 80s was a reaction to spaceship designs in popular movies of the time. By the late 90s, the trend in design was toward rounded things, for various reasons.
Basically, I’m just not sure I agree with your thesis. But it’s interesting.
20 — I meant utility of design considerations. I do not mean to commit myself to the notion that we truly need such things. Not that aesthetics play no role either, but my main point is best stated as utility > decor.
Yes charles, every romantic blathering that can be expressed in metaphor is entirely true.
Surely you’ve been to Europe before now, Charles? Surely you’ve seen the vast assortment of egg-shaped city cars before now? They’re not new at all. The Ford Ka and the Renault Twingo are at least ten years old. Citroen’s been making egg-shaped cars at least that long. SEAT, FIAT, Smartcar, anyone?
Actually, the proper word for this shape isn’t “egg” it’s “jellybean”. That’s what the people who design them and sell them and buy them call it. Not “egg”.
And you are wrong about the egg’s shell. It is astoundingly tough for how thin it is. And, of course, the shape isn’t everything. These cars, as tiny as they are, are in fact more crashworthy than many of the poorly designed behemoths that Americans drive; a Smartcar is much safer to drive than a typical American sedan of twenty years ago.
The “cultural imagination” did not eggify the shape of these cars, period.
22 – fair enough. On this issue, I’d agree with you. Also, engineering design can just be a clusterfuck of multiple domains. I do think there is feedback/feedforward from the “cultural imagination,” but how to measure that? Eh.
@5 Will in Seattle, how did you get Charles’ login?
All I hear from people is how ugly they think the Prius looks…
@24: Exactly. Not to mention that the “jellybean” car trend started way back with the 1996 Ford Taurus and basically fizzled out once already.
Charles’ philosophical musings might be interesting, if they were in any way connected to reality.
I told you Mork from Ork was ahead of his time.
fnarf, even you know car design does not happen over night. i meant the dominance of the design. it now dominates.
In America, besides the vehicles designed to appeal to practicality, we make our cars to look like the toys we played with as children.
I’m sure some effort has been put forth by automakers to discourage an association with their cars and an egg—although an egg is a brilliantly strong shape, they usually only enter our grip when they need to be broken.
@30
so this article was just to point out that you’ve just recently noticed that certain cars have egg shapes to them?
no, wait. eggs… neotenization of cars… mickey mouse… how we see Utopia… Betty Crocker…
it’s about how you try and draw parallels between things that people normally wouldn’t see (which seems to empower you to draw those parallels even more so), but the very nature of parallel lines are that they never cross. so while the parallel lines may be on the same plane they are still 2 different lines, never sharing a common point.
FYI the Prius is from Japan…. you know Toyota.
I was in Spain in 2000 and loved the Picasso so much I wanted to bring one home with me.
But much more interesting than arguing with Charles is the way the car’s reduced environmental impact is sold in the commercial. The spot promises “fewer smog-forming emissions.” Not lower green-house gas emissions, oh no. You can’t say that. Car buyers believes in smog, not that global warming nonsense.
The Prius’ number one selling point is its lower carbon footprint but its own marketers don’t think consumers will go for that. So they’ll sell it by implying it makes fluffy clouds whiter than white.
We’re. So. Doomed.