I don’t know about you, but these days I hear people complaining about how cars all look like jelly beans a lot less. That’s not to say that enthusiasts have all of a sudden stopped yearning for the days of old, rather I think it suggests that there are fewer ho-hum, generic looking cars on the road today than there were, say, a decade ago.
To my mind, that can only be a good thing. And, now that I consider it, it’s hard to think of a car that looks properly non-proprietary on sale today. Sure, there are ugly cars, SUVs that I’m not interested in, and minivans that I don’t like, but are there any truly generic cars out there?
Well, yes. Of course there are. But you just have to look a little harder to find them now than you did a while ago. We here at Carscoops, though, are interested in hearing what you think. What’s the most common-looking vehicle on sale today?
Read: Is The Lotus Eletre Too Generic? Here’s What You Said (And Lotus Won’t Like Some Of It)
By that, I don’t necessarily mean ugly. The Toyota Supra may have the face of a Borzoi and the pantaloons of an old-timey army officer, but it isn’t really generic. When you see one on the road, it’s easy to tell what it is.
I also don’t mean unappealing, necessarily. Tesla design, for instance, doesn’t really speak to me—the Model X looks like a speech bubble, and the Model 3 looks like someone put the Model S in a dryer—but I don’t know anyone who has a hard time picking a Tesla out in traffic.
And while not every design in the new crop of EVs is a triumph, most automakers appear to have taken pretty unique design paths when it came to designing them. That’s a relief, because the lack of a grille could have easily made EVs look faceless and dull.
To my eye, the most common-looking cars on the market today belong to Jaguar. It may be because it’s getting a little long in the tooth, but the Jaguar XF is about as plain-Jane as they come. There’s nothing wrong with it, necessarily, but I can’t think of a car I’d have a harder time identifying in traffic. It just looks like a sedan without a particularly strong brand identity, nor anything to really elevate it above the crowd.
And the only reason I haven’t mentioned the XE until now is that I genuinely forgot about it, which might actually make it the true winner in my mind. Answer honestly, can you tell which photo in this article is the XE and which is the XF without Googling it?
