"Car design today is too aggressive": McLaren F1's designer weighs-in on the modern auto aesthetic

Car design is too aggressive nowadays: that’s according to the legendary McLaren F1 designer, Peter Stevens, who recently sat down with Auto Express for a fireside chat about modern automotive styling and its trajectory.

Stevens, 82, is a household name within the automotive industry, having sketched the likes of the Lotus Elan M100, the Le Mans-winning BMW V12 LMR and the limited-run Jaguar XJR-15, as well as the aforementioned F1.

However, the British designer firmly believes that in the ongoing EV transition, car design may have lost its direction. He told Auto Express, “There is no [cohesive] design language for EVs and people are desperately trying to find one. You’ve got grilles that look like electric fires and the wheels are always unbelievably fussy.”

Of particular frustration to Stevens is the current trend of styling aggression; “Cars nowadays all have to be so aggressive,” he remarked. “So much so that if you walk your dog near a new model, you worry whether it might get bitten!”

Much of this, according to Stevens, is down to the concept of electric cars themselves – the limitations they bring and the public’s apprehensive reception of them. “When they were first mooted, people said EVs could liberate car design completely,” he told us. “However, because the battery has to go under the car rather than all over the place, it has estate cars looking like off-roaders.” 

Yet Stevens believes the focus on aggression and idiosyncratic design traits is more a symptom of brands desperately trying to increase public excitement by trying something new – not necessarily because they firmly believed it would work. “The whole thing is predicated on selling people ‘the new thing’, and that thing is ‘challenging’. However, this isn’t because someone thought ‘challenging’ would work, but instead because they're lost on what to do.”

At the time of our chat, Stevens had just finished a collaboration with eBay, which involved designing and curating the restoration project of a Mk1 Ford Transit, with all replacement parts sourced from the eBay Motors website.

Such a project was a key reminder to Stevens of his early days within the industry; he began his career in the seventies working at Ford, who sponsored him as he set up the UK’s first car design school. Back then, a car’s lines and curves were mostly sculpted by the steady hand of a clay modellist, and Stevens firmly believed that the recent switchover to using computer-aided design (CAD) technology could be in part to blame for today’s awkward-looking car designs.

“The CAD tools we use nowadays are startlingly limited,” he explained. “[Having] several people round a clay model invites collaboration, and these modellers are great at telling you that certain lines just aren’t going to work.”

In the end, Stevens was keen to point out that his criticisms weren’t simply the grumblings of an ageing, anti-EV campaigner; “I rather like the idea of small electric vehicles,” he admitted. Yet he finished by reminding us that as more and more cars share platforms and as many of the sensory elements slowly disappear, “cars will slowly become more of a subjective [matter] because design will be the only way to differentiate them, making it the way something looks all the more important.”

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