Ford and Toyota show that there’s no right answer on whether to change a winning team
F-150 and Camry appeared at the latest Detroit Auto Show sporting opposite ways to pursue the same goal: to keep leading the market (article published on 01/25/17)
Once your business takes off, what to do next is a question that divides people. Change frequently or stick with what has worked? Change when sales fall or try to anticipate it? In the automotive industry, this creates the basis for design work: it’s necessary to respect the company’s financial situation and market goals, the model’s history and what consumers want. This helps to explain why it’s so difficult to see two car renovations carried out with the exact same parameters.
Among all the cars and trucks which appeared at this year’s Detroit Auto Show, held in January, two are particularly interesting for those with a penchant for design: the updated Ford F-150 and Toyota Camry. As you can imagine, there’s a world of differences between them. Pick-up and sedan, local and foreign makers, part of a truck lineup and single model, 69 and 37-year old nameplates (considering Ford’s F-Series as a whole). Their biggest similarities are being produced in the US, and leading that market for a long time.
In a first glance, it’s possible to say both models should be as conservative as possible. The F-150 used to be typically bought for work and in rural regions, while the Camry is perfect for the driveways of family houses in the suburbs. Until the 2000s, Ford and Toyota responded to that by applying traditional styling. Smooth creases and contours, bodies with well-divided volumes, big windows, even plastic protectors on the doors. Their biggest attempts to please people’s emotional side were sporty versions with very discreet tweaks.
While such monotonous lifecycles disappoint the media, they proved to be exactly what buyers wanted. They mean that cars bought today won’t be obsolete in two years and lacking spare parts in three; this gives people confidence to invest in them. Nevertheless, as pretty as this scenario might have been, it is still true that people’s wishes change all the time. There are cars which people buy because they want them; not because they need them. Over the past few years, these cars have become more popular than ever.
This phenomenon tends to drive customers away from traditional products, so it meant a huge problem to Ford and Toyota. Its most obvious solution is to attract new customers, but that would imply falling into yet another dilemma: how to attract new customers without disappointing the current ones? This is a question whose answer isn’t general in any way. Therefore, in order to understand the ones given to F-150 and Camry’s cases, it’s necessary to get a little more grasp of the context which surrounds each of these vehicles.
Pick-up trucks are an icon of the North-American culture, especially the bigger ones. There will always be many people who enjoy them the way they are, so any attempts of radical changes would be fruitless. Family cars, on the other hand, are usually dubbed as bland and tedious. As a result, their customers have become highly volatile once they were given more options: they have gone from station wagons to minivans, then to crossovers. Sedans have stayed popular over the decades, but this is getting increasingly harder.
Ford’s solution was to make the F-150 a better car, not so much different. Style-wise, the current generation debuted three years ago with changes that could easily pass as a heavy facelift. And this is pretty much what happened now as well: the new front fascia looks more imponent, rather than more modern. The main grille invades the headlights even more, now through a horizontal segment whose shape varies with the trim level — and offers chrome finish in all of them except for the Sport and the work-related ones.
When it comes to the Camry, radical changes were the way to go. Toyota had already tried to make it less predictable, but applying bigger air intakes and bright-red paint wouldn’t be enough even for a company with a tenth of Toyota’s experience. The new Camry is no sports car, don’t get me wrong, but it does have personality. It looks bolder as a whole now, so it was possible to give a distinctive look to all trim levels, not just the sporty one. Being a best-seller, the massive appearance on the streets will surely take away some of its shine, sooner or later. But even then will it be possible to find this car attractive or, at least, well-designed.
Needless to say, the F-150 does not intend to repeat the very same recipe which made North-American pick-ups famous decades ago, as is the Camry far from coupés, let alone performance cars. However, they do point in those directions; they were designed with some inspiration in those. Their respective average buyers would never purchase cars of those types because their needs wouldn’t be fulfilled, but that doesn’t stop them from enjoying them. To those buyers, that simple pointing in those directions is more than enough.
In a deep analysis, design is a big part of what makes the F-150 and the Camry market leaders. It’s not so much a matter of looking good or not, but of expressing how well their makers understand their typical consumers. It’s a matter of understanding how much emotion and reason do they want, and a matter of making the effort to actually deliver this balance. The ways to execute it, as we’ve seen, can be entirely different.
