Looks can kill
I’m probably reading too much into this comment by Carlos Ghosn (from an interview that you can I read here):
“I prefer a not-so-attractive car that sells well than an attractive car that sells less. People who are buying Logan are looking for a family car with lots of space and not necessarily for racing. However we take feedback from customers. Second generation of Logan would address concerns.”
Sounds to me as if Ghosn was saying the Logan is aesthetically challenged in the first place, and under-powered in the second. Describing it as a family-car (an unfortunate phrase that reminds me of that favorite malapropism of matrimonial ads - “homely looks”) only seems to take him one one step further down the road to calling it a weak pig, then smearing cheap lipstick over it.
To make things worse, they don’t seem to have been watching the market’s feedback closely enough. See the comments here. These date back to Nov 2008. And if this article in the Business Line 8 months later is accurate, it looks like whoops, back to the drawing board.
A designer once wrote:
Engineers tend to think of design as something added to a product. Less of it, surely, would reduce the cost of an entry-level vehicle.
That was Jerry Hirshberg, who went on to point out that design adds to the product’s value, not to it’s cost.
Yes, he was from Nissan. The key word is “was”. He retired in 2001.
Read this article for a little more about JH. The last para is plain marvellous:
I am not someone who is elitist about the design process or about design. We are all born creative. We reach our peak at age five. Then education and the workplace get a hold of us. And the people there inadvertently kill it–and do so while talking about how important creativity is.
Interested in industrial design and how designers worked at the Z cars? Check out the interview with Ajay Panchal and Diane Allen here, and some background on the heritage here.
For the man who green-signalled Hirshberg’s Z-car design scheme, Ghosn has come a long, long way. What price the gap between Allen’s “We didn’t want the car to be seen as cute, friendly or just handsome. The new Z needed to have somewhat of a sinister quality. ” and Ghosn’s “Family Car“?
Ghosn’s famous “frugal engineering” line itself, by the way, is nicely analyzed in this blog-post.


