If you ever wondered what the absolute most boring, average version of any specific car type would look like, this is it.
A lot of research and development is spent on cars these days to make them try to stand out in a crowd. It’s tough work, as there are a lot of forces trying to make cars look the same. Parking spaces and road width mean that there’s an upper limit to how wide a car can get, but the desire for more interior space means that there’s also pressure to make cars as wide as they can get. Thus, everyone arrives at basically the same dimensions no matter what the vehicle class is.
All that you can really change is the styling, but even then there are limits. A car’s engine has to breathe, so there has to be a minimum amount of empty space in the grille for air to pass through. Ditto for the rear end with its exhaust. And everyone wants a nice, big trunk to store stuff in.
Put it all together and there might not be nearly as much variation in volume vehicle production as you might think. To prove it, Budget Direct created a series of images that show just how similar vehicles are in any given class.
The site used dozens of vehicles and put them through a fancy algorithm to show how they all looked the same. And by that, we mean they basically superimposed a bunch of semi-transparent images one on top of the other.
Also, the site is Australian, so some of their results are a little skewed. Pickup trucks are smaller and more rounded than they would be in America because they tend not to have big, full-size pickups down under. Utes are also a bit strange since while we’d be seeing a Wrangler’s facade, Australia has bizarre models like the Jumbuck and the VW Caddy.
However, the sedan, hatchback, crossover, and SUV are pretty much what we’d see here in North America. As you can see, the overall dimensions for all of them are pretty much the same, but with wide variation in hood style, grille, and headlights to make them all just a little unique. Sometimes, you can see the barest hint of something unique like the Nissan Juke (which is still sold over in Aussieland), but otherwise it's the same old, same old.