Ferdinand Filter has with his automobile have to take a lot. Because since the North German Fiat Multipla drives, there were always silly sayings of passers-by because of the bizarre design of the Italian van. That did not detract from his enthusiasm. On the contrary: Filter drives its “whale on wheels” with pride and love and praises to this day the efficient space concept.
Meanwhile, he has gathered many like-minded people around him. For the Rendsburger is a member of the First Multipla Fiat Club Germany and can therefore come to the Italian nerd nothing. “You hate him or you love him,” he says, leaving no doubt as to which faction he belongs: “The Multipla may be futuristic, but there are few cars that are so well thought out,” he praises the van with six seats in two rows and the idiosyncratic fish face.
The car history is full of such vehicles that were never properly accepted by the market in their day and later still have it to coveted lovers – albeit often only in a small circle. These include famous examples such as the entire model range of the 1958 introduced Ford brand Edsel, as well as the Renault Show stock market chart Avantime (2001-2003) as a futuristic luxury edition of the Greater sedan Espace, the VW Golf Country (1991-1992) as a precursor to the current SUV wave or the BMW Z1 (1989-1991) with its idiosyncratic retractable doors.
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And even volume models such as the second generation of the Ford Scorpio (1994-1998), the Fiat Regata (1983-1990) or the Opel Signum (2003-2005) are sometimes hard on the scene.
That’s no wonder, says design professor Paolo Tumminelli from Cologne, quoting legendary designer Raymond Loewy: “Uglyness sells badly.” Already he realized that products that look too new and therefore completely different repel most customers. “In that sense, beauty is always mediocre,” says Tumminelli. Ugly is polar and ambivalent for him: “Either really aesthetically unfavorable (last Fiat Croma) or conceptually incomprehensible (Fiat Multipla) – or both (Mercedes R-class).”
However, this is also an opportunity, the design professor is convinced: Tumminelli believes that many people consciously reject the propagated by the media and the mass trends and express this by unconventional purchasing decisions: ugliness means freedom. Inevitably, this results in a fan base of those who withdraw from the mainstream – consciously or unconsciously.
Design Professor Lutz Fügener of the University of Pforzheim makes on vehicles like this also the difference between beauty and attractiveness, which should not be confused when evaluating a car: “It is the attractiveness that sells a product.” So there were cars, where you can reach a consensus on their beauty, but as a product not attractive enough to sell them successfully, says Fügener and gives as an example the 2005 presented Alfa Brera.
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