Proportionality

I'm back on my car shtick. Thankfully, it's not exclusively about the 3, although I am going to use it as an example. What I'm going to talk about today is what proportions manufacturers use on luxury and sporting automobiles. In specific, I'm going to focus on front fender balance.

When I say balance, I really mean the position of the front wheel inside the front fender—whether or not it's squeezed back along the doors, or pushed far foward near the bumper. I remember very clearly the moment six or seven years ago when I came to the realization that the position of the wheel along the front end was critical to the look of a vehicle. Not surprisingly, the car about which I had made this observation was a silver E36 3 Series coupé.

I'll cut the chatter and show you what I'm talking about.

There's a lot going on in this picture. The two points that you want to remember is that A < B, and that X < Y. Don't bother comparing A to X or B to Y—that's not the point.

Now, for a somewhat less sporty-looking vehicle. I've chose an extreme example to illustrate just how unsporty this looks.

Not only is A > B, but X >> Y. >>>>. Wow.

Now that you know what to look for, I'm going to post a few more pictures of luxury-sport and not-so-luxury-sport cars. There's a really clear trend—the luxury cars are on the left, and those that aren't so much are on the right.

There are some oddities in this table. You may be asking yourself, "why the hell am I still reading this?" but presuming you're loaded on enough quaaludes not to care, then you're probably also asking yourself, "what are cars like the Hyundai Tiburon, the luxury Cadillac Eldorado coupé, and the super-sporty Geo Storm doing on the right column?"

Well, if you notice, they all have ridiculously poor proportions out front. The Cadillac, in particular, is a hell of an example—it's got a front overhang that sticks waaay out.

There's something else that ties all the cars on the right together, too: they're all front-wheel-drive. Yes, even the Eldorado.

It turns out that one of the biggest reasons for pulling the front wheels back towards the passenger compartment is the way that steering racks are designed. Steering systems (or at least, most steering systems) require the wheel to be mechanically connected to the front wheels somehow. In front-wheel-drive cars, the engine is predominantly mounted in a transverse orientation, and it's really difficult to stretch a steering column up and over an engine or transmission. In rear-wheel-drive cars (or front-wheel-drive cars with longitudinally mounted engines), the steering column isn't generally impeded by anything important, because the transmission is tucked under the passenger compartment.

Luxury cars are overwhelmingly designed as either rear- or all-wheel-drive cars. There are only a handful of front-wheel-drive "luxury" cars out there, and they're all Japanese models based on lower-market equivalents. For example, the Lexus ES330 is based on the Toyota Camry, and both are fitted with front wheel drive.

See what I mean?

Now, there are surely exceptions to all of this, and I welcome you to comment if you can think of any.

So there you have it. Hot cars have long front fenders. And I'm out of things to say. Amen.