Chevrolet: Speeding Toward Bad Design

Chevrolet Truck 1941

Designer Christian Annyas charts the evolution of Chevrolet speedometer design with more than a dozen examples and, like me, thinks it's getting worse, not better.

It’s easy for a driver to get used to a needle that rises and passes numbers that are located on fixed positions. A quick glance is all it takes to see and understand the value it represents. With the most recent design it’s different. The value of the ‘stopwatch’ constantly changes while driving. Some characters of the typeface look very similar to others (for instance 0, 6 and 8), which makes it harder to figure out whether you’ll get a speeding ticket or not. Not an ideal situation.

At the risk of sounding like an old crank, although it's probably too late, I feel the same way about digital radio tuners. Maybe its time for Chevy to go retro with their instrument panels.

Chevrolet Sonic 2011

Flint Expatriates Midterm Exam

Question: The above object is...

1. A stylish Zamboni
2. A bike helmet
3. An electric razor
4. Darth Vader's love child
5. G.M.'s latest vision of the future

Buick Town East

The 2007 Riviera concept car that was born in China.

Flint Expatriates has written about China's love affair with Buick before:

"Of course, G.M. isn't exactly picky when it comes to lovers these days. The automaker is as desperate as a balding, recently divorced, middle-aged guy hanging out at the White Horse Tavern with an unemployment check burning a whole in his pocket.

And today The New York Times has a good piece on how G.M. ended up designing the new LaCrosse in China. Clifford Ghetti writes:

"But today’s commercial imperative is more compelling than nostalgia: sales of Buicks in China first outpaced sales in the United States in 2006, and the margin is considerable today. For the first nine months of 2009, for instance, Buick sold 312,798 vehicles in China; in the United States, it sold 72,389.

"In 1997 General Motors established two joint ventures with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation in China. One was for manufacturing. The other venture, for design and engineering, is the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center. The center has done the engineering to adapt various G.M. global models for the Chinese market."

Read the entire article here, and go here for an interactive graphic on the new LaCrosse.