in the beginning In 2023, the good folks at the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London surveyed 200 men between the ages of 18 and 74, and supposedly scientifically discovered what we all already knew: Men who drive fast cars are more likely to have small penises. .
More precisely, the authors state that there is “a casual psychological link between fast cars and a small penis.” The thinking, according to their paper, is that men are the ones Believes They are somewhat lacking in the pants department. They are more likely to rush out and buy, say, a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari.
It gets worse for the older gentlemen. The experiment, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, found that “males over the age of 30 in particular rated sports cars as more desirable when they felt they had a small penis.”
Someone suspects that the academics heard the screams of “Quill Surprise!Even before they finish their studies.
The design of the car, unfortunately, is still masculine. But now, fortunately, the nature of electric vehicles and the need for slippery, range-extending aerodynamics is at least beginning to shift new car shapes away from child-offset metaphors like power puffs, hard feedback and silly spoilers, and instead bring in more subtle, aviation-friendly lines. Admittedly, the bad examples that follow this new trail have more than a whiff of “Jell-O-mold” about them (we’re looking at you Mercedes EQS), but when done right you get something like the Ioniq 6.
Not a Jelly Bean in sight
When Hyundai revealed the Ioniq 6 in 2022, SangYup Lee, executive vice president and head of Hyundai’s Global Design Center, referred to the car’s sweeping silhouette as “aerodynamic classification,” referring to the nod to the aerodynamic automotive design of the 1930s and 1940s.
The 6’s efficient single-curve profile provides a drag coefficient of just 0.21, which is just a haze behind the 0.20 claimed by the aforementioned EQS, and is currently the most aerodynamic car in the world. But that’s the point: I’d trade that insignificant 0.01 feature of a lackluster Mercedes for the more thoughtful design of the Ioniq 6 any day. Here, Hyundai proves that intelligent, air-focused design can be attractive from any angle. Others seem to agree. At the 2023 World Car Awards, the sixth Model with Design of the Year, Best Electric Car of the Year and Car of the Year overall took off.
Despite that huge lack of tow, which should help propel the Ioniq 6 to 361 miles on a single charge in the long-range version, Simon Luasby, vice president and president of Hyundai Style Group, wanted more. “We were trying really hard to find solutions to get to the best possible resistance in the early days. I wore a T-shirt with ‘0.1x’ written on it because I wanted to score less than 0.2.
“One of the tricks we came up with was a very simple solution,” says Luasby. “Knowing we have a short front opening, it’s hard to attach airflow to the sides of the car. So we closed the gap in front of the front wheel by 25mm, and plugged it in, so that there’s less turbulence around that front wheel. That gave us the last numbers we needed to get down to 0.21. I’ve never shown him a car before, and he’s never actually tried it before.”
Another example of a design that promotes increased aerodynamic gain comes from Hyundai’s head of aerodynamics, who, upon analyzing the true wing, realized that they should ditch the straight shape and instead design the 6 on a Supermarine Spitfire wing, but improve it by adding inverted ailerons at the ends. . “Closing the gap between that wing and the surface of the body stops vortex build-up. A vortex puts energy into the wind, and that means energy is lost from the car,” Luasby says. “We’d like the spoiler to be up and down, but that’s more weight and more cost.”