Chinese cars, can't be ugly anymore

Produced by Tiger Sniff Automobile Group

Author: Li Wenbo

Thoughtful editing

Header picture|Tiger sniff shooting

On June 26, 2009, Chery Automobile, which started from several thatched houses in an abandoned brick factory in the north of Wuhu City, Anhui Province, released a small car focusing on "fashion and personality boutiques": QQme.

In order to allow the Chinese at that time to more smoothly understand the character of this Chinese brand car without an official Chinese name, the thoughtful Chery specially prepared three catchy names for the three configurations of QQme:

Cheerful, joyful, and joyful.

However, after watching the QQme real car, among the Chinese, there are not many happy and joyful, but there are many joyful.

Because of this car, it looks so funny:

You think it's the front of the car, but it's actually the rear.

You think it's the rear, but it's actually the front of the car.

When you meet QQme on the road, it's easy to fall into self-doubt: Oh my God, why did I go backwards?

After sitting firmly on the throne of "China's ugliest car" for many years, the lonely Chery QQ6 finally ushered in its strongest rival, Chery QQme. But who would have thought that such a ridiculous freak in the automotive industry was actually the "brainchild" created by Chery Automobile and Italian car designer Enrico Fumia for nearly 4 years.

Enrico Fumia 何许人也?

You may not have heard his name, but you must have seen his glamorous cars: the 1981 Audi Quartz concept, the 1981 Fiat Coupé Brio concept, the 1982 Alfa Romeo 164, the 1987 Alfa Romeo GTV and Spider and the 1988 Ferrari F90.

In terms of ability, Enrico Fumia is definitely the best in the world. But he used the so-called "symmetrical, consistent inside and outside" avant-garde design concept to fool Chery Automobile, and finally let QQme, which may not even be as good as a discarded design draft, be mass-produced and put on sale, which can only show one thing:

The level of Chinese own car design is really ridiculously poor.

However, if you think that Chery QQme is already the "outrageous king" of China's automotive design industry, then I can only say that you are too simple. Because the following Chinese brand coupe is fully qualified to be the father of the "outrageous king".

It is the main Dongfeng coupe that can be used as you like.

According to Dongfeng Motor back then, this car:

"Retaining the characteristics and style common to sports cars, while at the same time making a number of innovations"

"It is a model with completely independent intellectual property rights, which fills the gap of continental coupes"

"The vehicle is smooth, avant-garde and fashionable, and fashionable, breaking through the traditional sports car design mindset"

"The rear of the car adopts a lifting mechanism and a retractable canopy to lift the trunk lid, and the rear of the car still loses a smooth and rounded style"

Listen to it, is there a saying that looks like a human being?

Seeing these endless "ugly monsters", I believe you have the same question as me:

When will Chinese car companies be able to design cars that make Chinese feel good?

Monks from outside are good at chanting

Before answering this question, we need to make it clear that the impact of car design on sales is decisive.

According to the rating of the best-selling models by the word-of-mouth module of Autohome owners, whether it is a sedan or an SUV, the appearance score of the best-selling model is the highest among all dimensions of evaluation. This means that the exterior design of the car is one of the important factors influencing consumers' purchase decisions.

J.D. Power, a research and consulting agency, also verified this point through a follow-up survey of potential car buyers in the next 6 months: "good vehicle appearance/attractive design and styling" is the primary factor influencing the purchase of a car by the post-95 generation, and 7% of respondents will buy a car because of its good looks. Especially when buying new energy models, good looks are far more intelligent than smart, and they are hard currency.

Surprisingly, the "intelligence" (intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit) factors that have always been considered the most important for the post-95 generation are not among the top five car purchase elements.

"Appearance determines life and death" is a double-edged sword for Chinese auto brands.

The advantage is that multinational car brands certainly cannot understand the cars that Chinese like and what they look like better than Chinese car brands that were born and grew up in Sri Lanka and do not need to carry heavy historical baggage and adhere to the "century-old family design".

The disadvantage is that there is a serious shortage of local car design talents, resulting in cars made by local Chinese designers that are not attractive to Chinese at all.

The clever Chinese brand came up with a trick: let the foreign monk chant the scriptures.

The most classic and most valuable case of "copying homework" is BYD.

In 2016, Wolfgang Egger, an internationally renowned design master and former design director of Audi, joined BYD as a global design director. Driven by Wolfgang, former Mercedes-Benz interior design director Michele Paganetti and former Ferrari exterior design director Juan Mar Lopez have joined BYD one after another, serving as global exterior design director and global interior design director respectively, forming an "iron triangle of foreigners" with Wolfgang.

These three people, first using a paintbrush, changed BYD's temperament. With the same brush, BYD's fate was changed.

Less than half a year after joining the company, Egger exported a complete design language called "Dragon Face". Half a year later, BYD used this new exterior design on the "Dynasty" concept car.

With the blessing of Dragon Face design, the Tang, Song, Qin, Yuan, and Han dynasties all have a bumper harvest in sales and word of mouth. Chinese cars can even rely on their faces, instead of relying on pile configurations to eat.

Moreover, the practical path of "BYD + Egger", which is "foreigner tube design, Chinese tube manufacturing", can be quickly reused and immediately visible for every Chinese car brand.

Hongqi hired former Rolls-Royce designer Giles Taylor, Great Wall hired former BMW designer Pierre Leclerc, Land Rover designer Phil Simmons and Porsche designer Aaron Delta, Changan hired former Mazda designer Atsuhiko Yamada, ZEEKR hired former Bentley designer Stephen Sillaf, NIO hired former BMW designer Kris Tomasson, AVATR hired former BMW designer Nader Faghihzadeh...

These Chinese car brands, which have introduced well-known foreign designers and advanced design concepts and methods, may not have soared in sales, but they have achieved at least two breakthroughs:

First, let the Chinese remember their "new face";

second, let the brand connect with the high-end (premium);

On the contrary, Chinese car companies with local designers in charge of the brush, such as GAC (Zhang Fan) and SAIC (Shao Jingfeng), still have not escaped the old style of cost-effective sales and have always stagnated in the high-end of their brands.

Now you will think that NIO, AVATAR, and ZEEKR are quite high-end, or at least a little high-end. But do you think Aion, MG, and Roewe are high-end?

Let the Chinese designers speak

However, GAC and SAIC, which use China's local design team, are not as good as BYD, Hongqi, Weilai, and Zeekrypton that use foreign design teams, which does not mean that China's local design teams are not good, but it can only be said that the local design teams of these two companies are not good.

Because, the local Chinese design team has it. For example, Chen Zheng from Geely has been quite supportive recently.

What kind of branching method? Let's take a look at the Geely Galaxy E8.

To design a car, it is not difficult for Chen Zheng, who has extremely rich practical experience. But to design a Geely, pure electric, flagship sedan, it is still quite challenging for Chen Zheng.

There are three reasons for this:

First of all, in the era of fuel vehicles, designers of major car companies can make enough articles on the grille to make the grille a brand symbol, such as BMW's kidney and Mercedes-Benz's Xinghui, which are impressive and excellent designs. But in the era of pure electric vehicles, the grille has disappeared, and the front face has become completely closed, what should I do?

Chen Zheng's answer is: an integrated luminous front face.

At the position of the front bumper, a row of rhythmic "ripples of light" is integrated, so that different lights become the expression of the Galaxy E8.

This ripple, drawing on the computer, is really simple, but when it comes to real mass production, the process can't be reached. At present, there is almost no ideal process on the market that can 100% restore the design concept, because "Ripple of Light" has 22 columns with a total of 158 light-emitting windows, each of which is composed of more than 100 micro-holes. The realization is much like doing acupuncture on the front bumper, some processes are limited to black paint, otherwise there will be obvious flaws, and some of the strength is not up to standard, and it will not pass the challenge of car specification.

Eventually, Geely developed its own microporous laser engraving light-emitting technology, which uses laser etching to create two layers of laser etching on the three layers of the front bumper, carving a small hole with a diameter of 0.2 mm, and then attaching a special layer of varnish that does not reveal the color of the substrate and can transmit light evenly.

"Ripples of Light" solves an epic puzzle that has plagued the car-making world for years: how can designers and engineers eat at the same table without fighting.

Chen Zheng believes that the nature of designers is to investigate uncertainty, and the nature of engineers is to pursue certainty, which are originally two types of people. All technologies, no matter what they are, must converge in terms of parameter performance in the final result. Design can maintain the uniqueness and differentiation of the brand, and the combination of the two can achieve maximum efficiency.

Secondly, for pure electric vehicles, the drag coefficient is the core index that determines the cruising range, but the pursuit of low drag coefficient is bound to make some compromises in the exterior design. We know that the teardrop-shaped wind resistance is minimal, and the wind resistance must be low when the rearview mirror and wheels are hidden. But this will make it less useful and aesthetically pleasing. How to balance the wind resistance and appearance, Chen Zheng thought of four words:

Chinese wisdom.

The first step is to circle the front and the back. The front of the car has a rounded silhouette to reduce wind resistance, and the rear is slightly wider to reduce turbulence. That is, let the whole car realize the dive attitude as much as possible, so as to reduce the orthographic projection area; the third step is to learn to Xi domestic large aircraft. The corners of the headlights, with their ends upturned, are like the ends of an airplane's wings, effectively reducing air vortices.

Finally, there's the Galaxy E8's 45-inch unbounded screen in the cockpit. Hardware-wise, this screen is 1130mm long, 138mm high, only 9.8mm thick, 1500 nits of brightness, 98% screen-to-body ratio, and 88-degree field of view. But only hardware, this is just a dead screen, and only the interaction that fits the user's preferences can make this screen come alive.

In this regard, Chen Zheng summarized four design dimensions based on the "focus rate" of the driving and road information area and the "hand-holding rate" of the blind exercise area: screen height, depth and depth, adaptation angle, and response speed.

Here are two examples:

On the large screen of the Galaxy E8, the core driving information is arranged at a height close to the road surface, and when the user wants to obtain this information, he only needs to lower his eyes slightly, without greatly shifting his gaze, which ensures that the driver's line of sight is directly in front to the greatest extent.

Secondly, although the voice control is very good, the Galaxy E8 does not cancel all the physical buttons, and the crystal knob located at the back of the central control storage compartment is to allow users to use the simplest rotary input method to complete the precise blind operation of the atmosphere light, fragrance, sound, temperature and other functions.

"Geely's beautiful Chinese car strategy, called DNA 3.0 internally, and now called DNA 4.0+, is the first stop and turning point of Geely's product design language switch. Chen Zheng told Tiger Sniff.

But Chen Zheng's goal is far more than just designing a car or a series of cars.

What he wants to do more is to make China's automobile design change from a single-point breakthrough to the improvement of system capabilities, and finally "build a discourse system of Chinese automobile design".

Write at the end

Constructing the discourse system of Chinese automobile design has been proven to be an impossible task in the era of fuel vehicles. It was an era when European, German, Japanese, and American cars were selling out, and it was also an era when Italian design, German design, French design, American design, and Japanese design took turns in power.

However, in the era of new energy vehicles, especially in the era of pure electric vehicles, Italy, Germany, France, and Japanese car companies have proven themselves to be "miscellaneous".

In the new energy era, Chinese car companies are not only dominating the Chinese market, but also selling Chinese cars to all corners of the world step by step by going overseas.

In the current global auto industry, Chinese car companies have the final say, and the current car aesthetics are naturally decided by local Chinese designers, and foreign car companies have to listen to Chinese designers if they want to sell their cars in the Chinese market. If you want to sell your car in other countries, you have to listen to Chinese designers.

I think this is probably Chen Zheng's ultimate vision of "building a discourse system for Chinese automobile design".

According to the acceleration of the development of China's new energy vehicles, this vision may not be realized for three years.