The Ugly Hybrid

The predominant argument against the Prius these days is that it is ugly. Sometimes some people want to really emphasize their point, so they call it fugly. You may still hear some random comments about its performance, and that it doesn't accelerate as fast, etc. but gone are the days when people used to say that the Prius is unsafe, impractical, unreliable, hyped-up and so on. Their comments now have converged to the looks of the Prius.

Well, lets see here. I am thinking of the fairy tale we all must have read: The Ugly Duckling. The ugly little duckling wasn't a duckling at all. He was unlike the rest and they made fun of him all the time. Then one morning he found out that he wasn't, after all, just a lame duck: he was a majestic big white swan! And he unfurled his wings and flew away as the mere ducks looked on. May be some of these aesthetic critics need to read their nursery school story books again.

Why is the Prius ugly? Because it doesn't look like other cars? Is there a standard by which the aesthetic qualities of a car can be measured? What is it about other cars that make them "pretty"? Why does it have to look like other cars? Why don't all the other cars out there look like the Prius? Why do cars have their engines in front under a protruding nose? Why do they have similar protrusions at the back? Why do cars have four windows on the sides? Why do cars have wheels? Why four of them? Why does the driver have to sit on one side and not the middle? Honestly I think almost all cars are ugly. And I am not even thinking of SUVs and trucks yet.

Now we all have our own idea of what the ideal woman or man should look like. That idea is shaped mostly by our genes, our DNA and the environment we grew up in. It's a genetic appeal. It's a hard wired attraction. It's an instinct. Basic instinct! However, the shape of the best looking car is not an instinct. It is merely something we have gotten used to. We have seen cars that look a certain way. We are used to it. And we have taken it for granted that that is what cars should look like. It's the engineer's idea of what a car should look like. It started with Karl Benz and Henry Ford and over the last 130 years the idea has been fed to us so many times that we now think that it is indeed our own idea of what a car should look like.

The car, the automobile, is a machine. And machines don't look good or bad. Machines perform well or poorly. And the looks of a machine is a function of its abilities and efficiency. That's how we judge machines. The Prius has the lowest drag coefficient of all cars out there. Drag coefficient depends on a number of things but most notably the shape. It determines the magnitude of the force that the rushing air would exert as the car travels through it. It's something we all know very well, stick your hand out the car window (safely) and have your palm face the wind, then have your palm face the ground. The drag coefficient of your palm facing the wind is higher than your palm facing the ground. The Scion xB probably has a very large drag coefficient given its boxy shape (what's up with that Toyota?); so do most SUVs. The Prius on the other hand is extremely streamlined making it efficient. Its looks were not determined by the random whim of Toyota, but by the equations of aerodynamics. And if you think the Prius is ugly, why did Honda copy the shape for its new Insight?

We don't hear much about the looks of airplanes, now do we? The Boeing 757, for example, is shaped like a thin tube with two flat surfaces sticking out on the sides, yet no one complains why it isn't shaped like the Porsche!