Let’s begin with an embarrassing car confession. Well, two, if we’re counting. I am one of those people who did actually walk up to the wrong gold Honda Odyssey in the supermarket parking lot. Confession 1) I drive a Honda Odyssey. Confession 2) I cannot recognize my own car.
Our Honda is a little more decked out than most of the suburban soccer player transporters, with a shrunken head hanging off the rearview mirror, a neon South of the Border bumper sticker, and a highly inappropriate but funny-every-damn-time license plate. (I’ll let you guess on that one.) But despite the odds and ends that we hoped so desperately would make our stereotype stand out from the rest, it really looks like every other car in the lot.
Now, I’ve written about bringing color back to cars, (check that story out here) but I think we should go a little further than that in the car industry. I think we should start pushing the boundaries of car design, start begging for a little more from our everyday embarrassing-to-be-seen-driving people-carrying vans, start asking why family cars have to be boring cars.
I think we should bring back two-tone.
Now, before you start hollering, I’m not saying do it yourself. I’m also not saying do it like the Lexuses of the 1980s, (white on dirty grey? Come on), and I really don’t advocate for cutting a car horizontally and doing a Mondrian inspired solid color on solid color exploration of lines. There are a lot of bad two-tone jobs out there, and certainly some of them come from the manufacturing level.
What I am saying is that we need to bring back the classic styled two-tone. Give me a chromed out blue and white Nomad, a streak of rocketship inspired lines running back to front. Give me a Fairlane sandwiching off-white between a red roof and a red body, and interior where accents colors are left behind in favor of daring design statements. Give me chiaroscuro, colors rich and bold, give me contrast.
Perhaps I digress. Certainly my Honda would be the worse for wear if the designs of the 1950s and ‘60s were pressed upon it. But I can’t help feeling that if two-tone were in, really, really in, then maybe body style would follow. Maybe my bulbous, whale shaped van could sneak in an imitation of the two-toned beauties of yesteryear, let the lines of color dictate the lines of the car, instead of vice versa.
I can’t even imagine what tones I’d want two of, but that’s sort of beside the point. Having two colors instead of just one would slice in half my chances of walking up to the wrong car. It would add just a shimmer of personality to the machine who has never been given that chance. It would give every car off the line – from sedan to family van, the possibility of being cool.
Until then, I’ll stick to checking license plates before climbing into the driver’s seat.
Image top right by Tomm Scalera
Image middle left by Wikipedia via Creative Commons
Image bottom right by Tomm Scalera