The RX at Portishead

It was with genuine surprise that I received a Twitter dm (direct message for the uninitiated) from the ever-friendly @Valvo at Toyota PR asking if I wanted to have a Lexus RX 450 h for a week. Having never experienced a hybrid and having not experienced a Lexus on the road since a mate’s father’s LS400 back in – ooooh – 1990, I leapt at the opportunity. Here was a chance to trial the luxury brand that, to some eyes, changed everything and the drivetrain technology that some believe still will.

Having spent significant time in various SUVs over the years, from Grand Cherokees to X5s to Range Rovers, I was keen get the measure of this softest of soft-roaders and see if Lexus’ claims of class leading fuel economy really stack up. It would also be an opportunity to don my design strategist cap and gauge how Lexus is faring in the brand communication stakes in its interior design.

Historically, Lexus has been seen as the brand that stuck it to the Europeans on price, technology and engineering, teaching the old guard a thing or two in the process. This was certainly true in the early days of the LS 400 and GS 300, when Toyota’s era of “fat” engineering was at its peak and you simply couldn’t buy a better built car for the money.

In the intervening 21 years, however, lessons have been learnt, the field has leveled and so have Lexus’ prices, to the point where they’re no longer the “value” option from the East. Now priced head-to-head with the best European product, an RX 450 h like the one delivered to my door – a £52k SE-l model – actually costs more than a (roughly equivalent) BMW X5 XDrive 30d or Audi Q7 3.0 TDi. Not only is this serious money, but pits the car against some seriously stiff competition.

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Being newly (re)arrived in the UK and having never visited the bucolic pocket between Salisbury and Bristol, I loosely devised a trip that took in motorways, A and B roads and whatever sits below that, to make sure I gave the car a fair run. After a solid 9 hour day of driving and a few days stuck in south London traffic, it’s fair to say that my conclusions are decidedly mixed.

Happily, the refinement and integration of the hybrid drivetrain really is beyond reproach. The wave of piety that swept over me the first time I moved silently away from the traffic lights was something to savour and seeing energy flow back to the battery under braking (briefly) gave a sense of what it must feel like to be in a charity orgy with Bono, Sting, Trudy and Sir Bob.

Under full acceleration – which is never as strong as you expect given the claimed 7.9 second 0-62 time – there’s a pleasingly well-oiled thrum from the 3.5l V6 with only the CVT gearbox conspiring to make it all come across as a little bit whiny and appliance-like on occasion. Ride and handling… oh, who am I kidding, go and read Car if you really want to know.

To the sticky question of fuel economy, for which Lexus claims publishes a combined consumption of an incredible (for a 2-and-a-bit tonne SUV) 44.8 mpg: In the whole time I had the car, including a few hours of dedicated, 65 mph babying on the motorway, I couldn’t get it to budge over 31.8. The historical average thrown up by the onboard computer is 30.7. 44.8 mpg: incredible indeed. (I received a clarification from Michael regarding the fuel consumption figures Lexus is allowed to publish. Over to Michael: “One little thing I just want to clarify. Fuel consumption figures are not something us car makers “claim”. We are legally required to quote the official Europe testing figures, no other figure can be published or advertised. So it is not exactly Lexus “claiming” a particular mpg, we are stating the only official figure we are permitted to use.” Perhaps we need to take a good look at the test procedure…)

The RX in Cheddar Gorge

In terms of real quality – the way the thing is screwed together-, one can take comfort in the fact that there are so many old LS 400s about the place doing banger duty. Under-engineered Lexus’ are not. In the week that I had the car there was nary a squeak or grumble from the interior trim and that most German of tests, knocking on the dashboard, gave the impression that it’s upper surface was hewn from concrete.

The RX IP

Yet when it comes to the deeper levels of perceived quality – the design content that sets the surprise and delight synapses pumping, – the RX is, in many ways, comically lacking. Take the leatherette covering the door grip as a case in point.

It’s one of about 6 different, black leather-look surfaces within the driver’s reach (this in itself no good thing), and the one the driver will touch every single time they get in and out of the car. Why, oh sweet mercy, why then does it feel like the 88 year old skin on my gran’s hand? No offence to Jaqueline, but even she would admit that after all her years, things have got a little dry, rough and strangely squidgy. And so it is with the RXs door pull.

Knee meet console, console meet knee.

More strangeness in material selection abounds in the centre console. The place where any driver is likely to prop their knee is rock hard and I managed to smack mine on it more than once when shifting in my seat, sending visible shockwaves through the whole console structure and sending invisible ones to my pain receptors. This hard plastic also wraps up to surround the gear-shift quadrant, a primary touch zone. Perhaps selecting a plastic less prone to marking would have been a better bet. Something soft better still.

The silvery painted plastic that swoops down the console isn’t fooling anyone with it’s pretensions to being metal; it’s not even cold to the touch and is beset with chamfers and rads that, intuitively, speak of something that’s injection moulded, not pressed or cast. The last time I saw metal effect this unconvincing was in a Chrysler Crossfire. Yes, a Crossfire.

Somebody also seems to have set the labeling gun to “brand whore” and shot a whole lot of logos across the IP surface (something that most Japanese manufacturers seem to do, to be fair to Lexus). Note to Mark Levinson: your premium surround doesn’t look so premium when the label’s not on straight… To top it all off, the obscurely positioned, painted-on Lexus logo – gold on silver plastic, a wonderfully baroque touch – talks of a brand that either can’t be arsed or is ashamed of itself. Either way, the glorification of the Lexus brand this is not.

The gloss panel surrounding the HVAC controls, scratch prone, strangely chamfered and inconsistently gapped, contains a set of geometric buttons that look marvelously ill-at-ease with their swooping organic surrounds. This impression is hardly helped by the fact that, in a desperate bid to be daring, the designer has set one cluster of temperature controls at a racy diagonal, while the others sit in a vertical formation, defying all usability logic. Incidentally, the vertical set are placed next to what I later discovered was a digital clock not, as I previously assumed, the HVAC temperature display (which appears in the high-mounted screen). Any user interface designer worth their salt would scream.

But not as much as when they try to use the Lexus Remote Touch interface device. With this, my screaming reached a volume more commonly associated with blue murder.

Having worked fairly extensively with automotive HMI systems in the past, I’ve got a reasonable grip on how the various styles work and their relative merits and faults. Lexus had previously used a touch-screen system that, much to the chagrin of users anywhere but mired in a Tokyo traffic jam, switched off above 5 Km/h, rendering most functions inaccessible. To the chagrin of designers, the touch interface meant that the screen had to be both within reach of drivers and in their line of sight. An instrument panel is already a pretty tough thing to design, so these were restraints that said designers were no doubt happy to throw off.

But rather than go down the well worn path of rotary twist-nudge-press knobs and nipples that almost all other manufacturers have ventured, Toyota, in collaboration with Denso, decided to do something different and develop an interface that operates like a mouse in a cage.

Using a puck (trimmed in yet another type of faux leather stuff), one pushes left, right, up and down within a limited range to select targets on the screen. Selections are made with an enter button on the side of the unit and there are extra buttons to take you back to the home page, to the navigation map and to assist with scrolling (more on this later).

In recognition of the fact that a free-roaming mouse would offer a disastrously imprecise selection method while on the move, a series of motors provides haptic feedback, helping the user to lock the pointer to a target. In theory, this would be fine, in practice it isn’t, simply because there’s still too much freedom of movement. The GUI itself still demands a level of accuracy more in line with a mouse attached to a computer, not an interface in a vehicle where the user is subject to the vagaries of physics and fleeting concentration. You can turn up the force feedback to give a more positive lock, but then the puck starts feeling (and sounding) awfully ratchety.

Comparing the precise, engineered clicks of BMWs iDrive or Benz’s Command APS controller to the sloppy collapse one feels every time a target is selected on the Lexus system is a lesson in comparative perceived quality in and of itself. The fact that it took something like 30 clicks of the aforementioned scroll button through painfully slow-to-redraw screens to get to Erykah Badu on my iPod simply finished me off.

While to some ears it may sound like I’m being unduly critical of this car, and by turns, of the Lexus brand, I’m really not. Lexus wants to play hardball with the Europeans and have priced their cars to suit. Yet, looking at the market as it stands today, Lexus’ competitors offer far higher levels of perceived bang for buck and comparable – if not better – real-world fuel economy. The dubious benefits of the Lexus hybrid system make real sense for only a limited few living in dense cities where hybrids are congestion charge exempt.

From it’s near silence in the city, which makes one swell with green pride, to the disconnection of it’s fuel consumption figures with any kind of reality to the anaesthetised driving experience, the RX 450 h is, for me, the antithesis of what driving should be about. The visceralness that Lexus seems to have engineered out is the thing that allows me and many others I know, petrol head and punter alike, to build a relationship with a car, and therefore a brand.

Someone pointed out to me that, perhaps, this lack of distinct character, this ability for Lexus cars to fly under the radar is the very thing that makes a Lexus a Lexus and, as such, is a thing of intention. Then why produce the hairy-bollocked LF-A and bang it around the ‘ring? Or, indeed, go chasing that most obvious of cars, the BMW 3 Series, with just another rear-wheel drive, 3-box saloon in the shape of the IS?

In a fast-approaching future where owning a car once again becomes something of serious social and cultural consequence, I have a feeling that the demur average that the RX and its ilk embodies will no longer be enough to engage consumers. For Lexus to thrive it needs to be, and indeed can be a brand of remarkable vehicles; the shockwaves sent out by the first LS proved the company’s capabilities beyond doubt. Looking forward, it’s going to take much more than hybrid versions of established automotive paradigms to make the Lexus brand great.

So, rant and riff on the current and future states of Lexus behind us, you might be wondering if there was a moment, no matter how fleeting, when I fell in love with the RX. Indeed there was.

Making haste across Somerset, a patchwork of yellow and green fields peeling around the windscreen, after much clicking I managed to select The Cinematic Orchestra’s Late Night Tales compilation on my iPod.

Skipping through a few tracks to get to the meat of the album, I sighed with pleasure as Bjork’s Joga began to play, memories of it’s geomorphic and geomorphing film clip coming to mind as Britain swelled and subsided around me.

And then, just as the indescribably beautiful transition from Joga to Imogen Heap’s Cumulus reached it’s crescendo, so did I, cresting a hill to have spread before me the most extraordinarily beautiful valley I’ve ever seen.

I can say with an honest heart that at that instant I yelped with sheer delight. Here was a mind-blowing confluence of music and landscape, aided and abetted by a car who’s primary purpose in life, I’ve concluded, is to do nothing but shield it’s occupants from the realities of the world at large. And at that, the RX 450 h succeeds admirably.

Many thanks to Toyota GB PR, and especially @Valvo, for giving me the opportunity to drive the car. It was delivered by a lovely chap (with a full tank of fuel) to my front door should be back home safe some time today.

The second in the Royal College of Art’s Future Vehicle panel series, titled The role of the vehicle designer – where is it headed?, presented an opportunity to answer a question as perplexing to those already working in the industry as those wanting to gain entrée. As has been previously established in this series, the industry is in a state of flux and as old business models and market requirements change, so must the designer. But how?

Head of vehicle design at the RCA, Dale Harrow, suggested automotive designers need to get a better grip on how to operate outside of the secret garden of the design studio, integrating skills in “strategy, conceptual understanding and communication” to develop more satisfying products. By way of example, he discussed BMW’s 2007 collaboration with the University of  East London and the Social Issues Research Centre, The Secret Life of Cars, that saw designers working with ethnographers to better understand the consumer’s relationship with their car.

The Tata Nano. Not a "car with nothing, but a motorcycle with everything" according to Pratap Bose

Pratap Bose, of Tata Motors and RCA alumni, emphasised the need for designers to be willing to travel widely and work within different cultural frameworks, noting that the development programme for his latest vehicle saw designers travelling from the UK to France and on to Korea and India.

Bose also echoed Harrow in his call for designers to think strategically about the products they envision, noting that Tata’s succes to date has resulted from identifying and designing for market segments that more established car makers have either failed to see or ignored.

RCA PhD candidate Louise Kiesling drew links between her previous experience in the fashion industry to illustrate how technology has had both positive and negative impacts on designers.

Trendstop.com, and example of the web helping automotive designers with research

She hailed social media as a boon for designers, not only for facilitating the trend research that feeds their work but for also gauging public reaction to their output, establishing new modes of market research.

Kiesling warned, however, that developing and experiencing design through virtual channels still has it’s challenges, especially when assessing form or using trim materials appropriately.

In discussing research she has conducted with Tier 1 and 2 suppliers in Europe, she said suppliers had told her that “vehicle designers don’t understand materials anymore [or have] the craftsmanship knowledge”. A response to the drag-and-drop nature of material application in CAD programmes, Kiesling stressed that automotive designers need to develop meaningful relationships with suppliers and their materials.

Finally, Kenny Schachter,  art dealer and commissioner of the Zaha Hadid-designed Z-Car, envisioned a future where the lines between automotive design and art become increasingly (and deliberately) blurred.

David Hockney's BMW 850i Art Car. Schachter wonders why manufacturers haven't capitalised on the art car phenomenon.

It was an idea that, initially, appeared tangential at best. But as Schachter went on, it became clear that in a world that becomes increasingly hostile to the car as an everyday tool, perhaps redemption could be found in concertedly elevating the car to the plane of collectable art object, paving the way for a more progressive industry less reliant on volume and “lowest common denominator” design.

From a collection of talks that provided no direct answers to the question posed by the chairman, there was, none-the-less, an overall theme in evidence. It was clear, in the minds of the panelists, that car designers will no longer be able to shelter within the hallowed halls of their design studios. New political, social and cultural contexts are demanding a new approach to vehicle design, an approach that is more connected, more social and more empathetic to the changing needs of the world at large and designers will have little choice but to embrace the change.

Now, more than ever, sustainability is the issue du jour being discussed – endlessly – amongst observers of the automotive industry. After years of car makers talking up their environmental sustainability credentials, they are now facing a crisis of an altogether more fundamental nature: the sustainability of their businesses.

To investigate the issues surrounding sustainability, both environmental and business, the Royal College of Art (RCA) held a seminar titled Seriously Now: where is the sustainable vehicle design?, one of a series of 5 events looking broadly at the future of automotive design.

How far have we come, really?

Up first, RCA PhD candidate Artur Mausbach offered an historical context in which to place the current state of sustainable vehicle design, noting that technological developments had far outpaced the ability of designers to significantly alter the package and appearance of the car.

Likening current eco cars, conceptually at least, to the very first automobiles that were technological marvels but lacking a clear design identity, Mausbach called for a change in how designers communicate sustainability to encourage consumers to form an emotional attachment to a new automotive paradigm.

We then heard from Nico Sergent of open-source automotive start-up RiverSimple. Although much has been made of the company’s technology demonstrator, launched in London last year, the real interest in Sergent’s presentation lay in his description of RiverSimple’s 7 point design, production and service strategy.

Key to this is discarding the traditional sales model, which is predicated on people becoming bored of their car after a few years (or, indeed, the car going wrong) and thus trading up to a newly manufactured vehicle with its associated environmental deficits.

River Simple's Open Source Car

River Simple has instead focused on the leasing of the car and, more interestingly, the components from suppliers, thereby forcing the design of the vehicle as a whole to be more robust. As the lease model guarantees River Simple income for the life of the car, it’s their interests to produce a long-lasting design to underpin the sustainability of the business.

Sergent also touched on the distributed manufacturing envisaged for the vehicle. Freed from the economies of scale demanded by pressed steel monocoques (the car is made of carbon fiber and plastics), co2-intensive supply-chain logistics can be simplified, in turn making localised factories producing only 5000 cars per year financially viable.

In an entertaining look at the aesthetic development of the car, Geoff Hollington, industrial designer and writer, argued convincingly that we have entered a new era of baroque vehicle design at a time when the socio-political context should, logically, result in something vastly different.

Geoff Hollington's "f**k you & f**k the planet" Audi Q7

Hollington eruditely observed that we’ve moved, in design terms, from the era of Venus [de Milo] cars – which he typified as “multi-purpose, caring, multi-tasking things” – through an era of Michelangelo’s David cars to a new age defined by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it’s not “Arnie the man, it’s Arnie the machine that’s become the paradigm…” illustrated, to much amusement, using an Audi Q7 with red “eyes”.

Relating this back to sustainable vehicle design, Hollington stated that design should encourage people to “drive for enjoyment, …not for sport. …To savour the journey rather than crave the destination, to be generous rather than competitive and to value smartness over brute strength”.

He argues that out of this perceptual shift from aggression to equanimity, the car can evolve a calmer aesthetic and a new format that is slower, lighter, and crucially, more efficient and sustainable. In closing, he said it was our responsibility as designers “to get people to fall in love with a different type of car”.

For Nick Talbot, of Seymour/Powell, one of the keys to sustainable design is shifting from design as a consumption driver to a reducer, a view championed by Alan Chochinov  in his influential 1000 Words manifesto.

He talked of research conducted by Seymour/Powell demonstrating that the rate of phone churn by iPhone owners has reduced to around two years (from a period of months for some phone brands), a substantial improvement that he put down to the higher intrinsic value of the device communicated through it’s design and it’s price tag.

He related this back to the auto industry via a 60s Porsche 911 that, owing to the higher initial quality of materials, engineering and design remains a desirable product today. He said the lesson was simple: “Make things that are higher value, that are more robust, that people want to keep for longer [and] derive more value from” and through extending the product lifecycle, you can improve sustainability.

The final speaker was Rob Holdway of Giraffe Innovation, a low carbon design and environmental management consultancy. Perhaps to the despair of some in the audience, Holdway stated that there “is no such thing as a sustainable car… it’s not sustainable, and never will be sustainable” but went on to suggest that a smart car could form a component of a networked, systematised approach to mobility.

The barrier to the inclusion of the car in this mobility network is that automotive designers, in his experience, work in “a very narrow field”, operating within a model of isolated innovation that often only allows for evolutionary development, actively discouraging the cross-disciplinary, collaborative processes required to develop a holistic mobility solution.

One of the provocative quotes Rob Holdway discussed

With Holdway having finished on a note that was, no doubt, somewhat unsettling for the largely student audience (he jokingly referred to it as a therapy session…), it was perhaps inevitable that questions from the floor would focus on employability in an increasingly fractured jobs market.

As panelists encouraged students to choice edit who they want to work for on a sustainability basis, it was noteworthy that all either suggested or agreed with the notion that real change in the automotive industry was not going to come from established industry players, but from start-ups or, indeed, outside the industry all together.

Part PR exercise for the RCA, no doubt keen to be the European ying to Art Centre’s American yang when it comes to sustainable automotive design events, and part mind-expanding exercise for the assembled students, for those working in the industry that made it along there was little new to be found.

The seminar did, however, raise the issue of another kind of sustainability: that of the education offered by schools like the RCA.

In his treatise, Restarting Car Design, RCA alumni Peter Naumann sounds a clarion call for a decisive shift away from automotive design courses “almost exclusively… developing stylistic skills”. Instead, he argues, that educators should prepare students “to be much more closely involved in the entire design process and to be used more broadly… to work in a problem oriented way and to be involved in coming up with solutions in interdisciplinary teams”.

In this light, the value of the RCA opening up dialogue between educators, students and innovative thinkers shouldn’t be underestimated. If educational institutions can continue to capitalise on these sorts of events, we may see some of the fundamental shifts in automotive design education required to prepare students to design for a sustainable, post-consumer mobility context.

The Royal College of Art is hosting further “Vehicle Design Sessions” over the forthcoming weeks – looking at “Mobility needs, mobility wants” on 11^th May, “Future forms” on 27^th May, and “Women in Vehicle Design” on 1^st June.

This is the second year I’ve been invited to contribute (I’m a Purple List member y’see) and it’s always interesting to see how the final report plays out. So just who are the top 15 brands in the world?

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Jamie Oliver
4. MIT
5. Ace Hotel
6. IKEA
7. Nike
8. Twitter
9. Foursquare
10. Nintendo
11. Facebook
12. Starbucks
13. Lady Gaga
14. Nokia
15. American Apparel

Companies are judged on their innovation, corporate and environmental responsibility, their relationship with the broader community and , somewhat nebulously, imagination. Yeah, you’ll have noticed there’s not a single automotive brand in this years list (and last year, we only managed to get Zipcar in there) but when you have once-gold brands doing things like this and this, it’s little wonder.

Note to the automotive industry: Must. Try. Harder.

To download the full report, replete with explanations of the rankings, just click here.

iPod Download

After another epic round of dragging and dropping in iMovie, here’s part 2 of the DSUD podcast covering the Geneva motor show.

This week Joe and I discuss the Alfa Romeo Pandion and 2uettottanta, Citroen Survolt, Seat IBE, Peugeot SR-1, Mercedes F800 Style, Hyundai i-Flow and *deep breath*, the Porsche 918.

We also have a brief chat at the end, trying to place the Geneva show in the broader context of where the automotive industry is heading and, more importantly, where it could, and indeed, should be heading.

iPod Download

It had to happen at some point and I’ve now gone and done it: I’ve made a podcast.

In true Coventry alumni tradition, it’s a bit rough-and-ready but by God we tried!

For this edition I chat – at length – with the erstwhile Joe Simpson about the production reveals from the Geneva Show. Sitting somewhere between a podcast and a vodcast, this slodcast (slideshow podcast, natch) slates and salutes the cars of note.

Next week, we’re aiming to bang out a review of the concepts for your audiovisual enjoyment. I’ll keep you posted.

Sassou begat Nagare;

and Nagare begat Ryuga;

and Ryuga begat Hakaze and his brethren Kazamai, Furai, Taiki and Kiyora;

And then Sassou invited his bretheren to a swingers party with a dude from Hyundai and they all got jiggy and begat the i-Flow.

As I’ve previously said, Hyundai is often a flatterer of the sincerest kind when it comes to their production cars. Their concepts, on the other hand, have always been deeply innovative, utilising new materials and developing a unique Korean aesthetic.

Although I’m unable to comment on technological innovation found in the i-Flow, it seems that developing Hyundai’s design identity certainly wasn’t on the agenda. Apparently, building on Mazda’s identity definitely was. I needn’t point out that the Japanese word nagare, the name of the whole Mazda concept series, translates into English as flow.

I think this must be the first case of a brand taking another brand’s productionised conceptual design language and making it conceptual again. My mind hurts as much as it boggles.

Something odd happened at the Geneva Motorshow today: Seat’s little IBe inherited some LED-powered glitz and glamour from big-sister brand Audi.

The question is, if these headlamps were behind you, could you tell which one was your granny in the Seat and which one was your Daddy in the Audi?

No, thought not.

Seat’s long been the “What the… ?” brand of the Volkswagen stable, battling it out with Skoda as the cheapest point of entry and popular with those wanting more sex in their C-Segment.

Often billed as a sports brand, it’s really nothing of the sort, having suffered  from a wave of failures-to-proceed with gorgeous-if-vaporous Walter da SIlva-penned concepts and titillated Golfs with suspensions of pure jackhammer.

Three different Seats. No, I can't tell them apart either...

Many of Walter’s styling cues did get carried over into more prosaic cars, yet the Toldeo, Leon and Altea all stick so dogmatically to the snouty, drop-waistlined theme that it can be impossible to tell them apart from some angles.

da Silva eventually left for Audi and Donkerwolke, fresh from taking an ice-pick to Lamborghinis, stepped in and took a machete to a Polo and produced the new Ibiza and a new house style. Then he turned the old Audi A4 into the Seat Exeo to produce a cheap D-Segment competitor. Now it seems Donkerwolke has been busy turning the new Seat IBe concept back into an Audi, from a lamp graphics perspective at least.

It probably wont be a bad thing for Seat, lending it some street cred with the tuner crowd (a core constituency) if doing nothing to help build a truly distinct image (which is what Seat truly needs).

But one really has to wonder what this kind of thing does to the image of Audi, a brand that, up until now, has had the warpaint LED look all to itself.

It’s all very odd.

So the wraps have come off the production-ready Cygnet at the Geneva Motor show and I’m as mad as ever with this cynical little marketing exercise (my previous take on the car is here). For proof of how off-zeitgeist the little Toyota-in-ready-to-wear is, Steve Cropley over at Autocar reports that Aston chief Dave Richards says the car will

sell the way a £3000 Hermès handbag does to rich ladies.

The comment rings with the same misplaced smugness that Ulrich Bez projected when suggesting that the massive Lagonda SUV concept was ideal for HNW individuals in eastern and developing countries. This was , presumably, because it could crush the proletariat as it steamed from oil well to arms deal to the House of the Rising Sun.

In his short piece on Autocar’s ever-interesting Design Language blog, Cropley goes on to imply that those rich ladies mustn’t have a good understanding of the Toyota range if they’re going to shell out for the Cygnet.

I go on to say that, Toyota underpinnings or not, Ason Martin’s product messages get more off track with every motor show.

Hermes handbags are passé (even La Beckham has stopped yapping bout her many-hundred strong collection) and surely, if any female fashion accessories will come to best represent the excesses of the pre-financial-cluster-fuck era, surely the Hermes Kelly and Birkin bags will be them.

To tie a car of questionable lineage and even more questionable taste to such a bête noire seems like marketing suicide when dealing with a core clientele that are now looking for dog whistle taste.

Yet to fight the dilution of the Aston Martin brand is perhaps a futile exercise. It was only last week that we saw their other brand association exercise come to market, the Aston Martin x Nike “Kobe Bryant” Hyperdunk.

I don’t know weather to laugh or cry.

P.S For a car that speaks to handbag hussies, this press shot looks way more H&M than Hermes.

Working in Germany I was thrown in the deep end of perceived quality research, taking more macro shots of headlamps, instrument panels and door cards than I care to remember. Yet I’m happy to come right out and say it: perceived quality fascinates me.

Gear shifter from the new Audi A8 (click to enlarge with caution, you might wet yourself...)

The way the tricks we use – from the amazingly detailed design of touch zones in a car interior to a superbly detailed tail lamp enclosure – coalesce to convince consumers that a product that feels good must be good, no matter the integrity of the engineering underneath the skin is a delightful thing. Take a look at the gear shift above and you might get an inkling of what I’m talking about.

Perceived quality’s a psychological game played by designers and engineers that reaps massive rewards for the companies that do it right. Just ask VW, who started on a head-long rush to improve the improve feel-good factor of everyday cars with a couple of otherwise unremarkable vehicles in ’96-’97.

Volkswagen Golf Mk IV

I still remember the column inches… no, miles generated by the Mk IV Golf and B5 Passat. Their flock-lined storage bins, silicone-damped grab handles and blue instrument lighting almost singlehandedly established VW as the mass-market quality king, no matter that the cars were as dull as ditchwater to drive and suffered some fairly serious reliability problems.

In an Icarian twist, so great was Volkswagen’s perceived quality success that they eventually fell victim to it. While interior quality standards continued to soar, bolstered by the almost-unbelievable feat of craftsmanship that is the Phaeton, something caused VW to take their eye off the ball – profitability, perhaps – and the wheels came off with a string of underwhelming products

When the Mk. V Golf came along, journos and consumers alike complained loudly about the dowdy, cheap-feeling interior. No matter that the car had a new, massively more expensive multi-link rear suspension that made it great to drive (unlike the Mk. IV), people were looking for – and failing to find – more soft-touch plastics, more cold-touch metals and simply more of what had made the Mk. IV so lovable on first touch.

Volkswagen Golf Mk V

Volkswagen Golf Mk VI

So stinging was the reaction that VW pushed forward the release of the Mk. VI, essentially a gussied-up, re-skinned Mk. V, just to keep sales on the boil. Despite, or rather because of a raft of largely  superficial changes, people started talking about VW quality again and the arrival of the new Polo last year confirmed that the company was very much back in the game.

In a segment where value is more often defined by the lowest price no matter the quality, the soft-touch plastics covering the entire door, the cold-to-touch door handles, the rubberised, bejeweled air direction controls and the fine tolerances all had me in a state of rare wonderment.

Yet the Polo’s time in the perceived quality sun is about to be cut short by it’s sister with a twist, the Audi A1.

And the twist is this: despite their shared mechanicals you’ll have to pony up (sorry…) only £10 grand to get into a beautifully finished 1.2l Polo, but you’ll need around £14 grand for the Polo-in-drag A1. Need I spell it out? Four grand. That’s epic money at this end of the market, no matter what your badge cachet is.

So what is it, apart from rather mundane, formulaic Audi styling and a turbo strapped to the common 1.2l three-pot  that will persuade people to pay that kind of supplement for the A1? You guessed it: perceived quality.

Audi A1

Volkswagen Polo

Comparing images of the two IPs, the once swoon-worthy Polo now looks dowdy and low-rent in a way I simply couldn’t credit this time last year.

Look at the way the A1s entire IP is one whole soft-touch molding. Now compare it to that of the Polo, which has a soft-touch top sitting on a hard lower half with a nasty flange covering the join.

Where the Polo suffers the indignity of a closure line around it’s passenger airbag, the passenger of the A1 sees nothing but an unbroken expanse of dash-top which, somewhat disappointingly, is leather textured but is far and away a more elegantly resolved surface.

Audi A1

There are no awkward parting lines in the A1s centre console, and the unique HMI panel is far better integrated into the surrounding forms, no matter that it necessitates a dicky folding screen on the dash top. A heavily sculpted spar beneath sprouts HVAC controls that wouldn’t look out of place in an R8, let alone the A1.

Volkswagen Polo

The HMI/HVAC controls in the Polo appears, by contrast, like a 90’s Sony – our should that be Sanyo? – stereo system.

But let’s leave the comparison with the Polo behind. It’s unfair to compare it to the A1 and I feel churlish taking aim at a car I still love.

Let’s step it up a notch and take a look at the pictures of the air vents below. One belongs to the A1, the other to the A1′s chief competitor, the Mini.

Audi A1

Mini Countryman

A1 vs Mini

One look at the Mini these days leads me to think that Fisher Price was brought in as the interior design consultancy. Audi has got BMW seriously trumped on perceived quality and the more I looked, the more evidence I found of a fanatical attention to detail.

Audi's WMD release

The vent was the first thing that blew my mind (satin aluminium, knurled knob, razor thin part lines), then I saw the stitched leather on the centre console. Everywhere you look, there’s perceived quality candy. My favourite touch, however, is that little lick of red light (it’s not paint, I checked…) peeking out from the gear-shift trigger. Clearly Audi thinks of the A1 as a WMD primed for release. And they’ve aimed it straight at BMW and their Mini.