Over at Boing Boing there’s an interesting post about how most people prefer cars with ‘angry faces’. This is, in fact, something that has bothered me for a while. Even though some people, such as your humble narrator, just drive some car (meaning: it was given to me so I hadn’t much of a choice), I think more often than not a car’s design offers a pretty good image of the person driving it. There is, for instance, a pretty interesting essay by Nick Perry on his book Hyperreality and Global Culture on why the BMW 635CSi is evil.

From an European standpoint, Audi and Seat are the main offenders in exploiting the 'evil look’, and I’d say three-quarters of the time some bastard is pushing close behind me in the motorway, he’s driving one of those. Those cars may have the airbags and the intelligent braking systems, but are actually designed for unsafe driving. Remember the Honda CRX? One really good machine - shame that the place to see one is the junkyard, and it’ll be severely beaten.

Of course, there are also the 'sensible’ Toyotas and whatnot whose drivers will cut you off only to drive very slowly - the single road event that makes me step out of the car in the next light and beat the guy who did it with a large stick - so unsafe driving is obviously not something only people with angry-eyed cars do. But as they probably say, the headlights offer a look inside the driver’s soul…