In his latest musing for B&T, Leif Stromnes, managing director, strategy and growth at DDB Australia, ponders why electric cars have skeuomorphic engine grilles when they do not need them — and what it can tell us about automaker branding.
Most of us who drive a car with an internal combustion (petrol and diesel) engine know that air is needed for cooling. It’s why cars have grilles that allow air to be sucked into the radiator, naturally cooling the vehicle as it is driven. It has been an essential and necessary feature of all cars since their invention in 1844.
While the size and design of engine grilles have changed over the years, the practical function of cooling remains their primary purpose. Quite simply, a car without a grille would overheat, the radiator would explode and the engine would die.
But what about an electric vehicle?
Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), the category of cars commercialised by Tesla, don’t have an engine. A motor or in some cases multiple motors sit on a flatbed, much like an electric skateboard and where the engine used to be there is a front trunk, or a “frunk”, a term popularised by Tesla.
Air cooling grilles on a BEV would cool the contents of the front trunk, not the engine. This is both unnecessary and depending on what you’re transporting, not necessarily desirable.
Given their redundancy, practically minded engineers did away with grilles, designing electric vehicles to have a flat, grille-less façade.
But ordinary car buyers aren’t engineers and certainly aren’t practically minded. Where engineers envisaged function, car buyers saw the electric versions of their much-loved petrol cars as faceless, blank, and without character. Or as one customer pejoratively put it “my car, in bondage”.
Today most BEVs* have engine grilles.
Why is that?
Even though they serve no practical purpose, grilles perform a much more important role for car buyers. They are comforting signals that keep the look of their BEV as something familiar, with just one small difference. It has no engine.
Most of the decisions we make as humans are emotionally led, and we are attracted to things that make us feel good. We use and enjoy particular products because they are familiar and comforting. We rely on their consistency and performance as emotional shortcuts in our daily lives.
Where engineers saw car grilles as mere utility, car buyers had reimagined them as markers of trust, and even more fundamentally, the face and character of the car they drove and admired. A grille-less car just wasn’t the same car in the eyes of its drivers. Even though they knew it performed no practical function, there was no amount of rational reasoning that could change their emotional minds.
In our rush to retire the old and usher in the new, we are often careless with the things our customers hold dear. Many a brand has made this mistake. Coca-Cola disastrously launched New Coke in 1985 in response to perceived changing consumer tastes and preferences, and Tropicana changed the look of its iconic drink in 2009 and was immediately forced to revert to the original packaging following consumer backlash.
We would be well served to balance the familiar with the fresh when introducing new products to our brand lineups. Humans are sentimental and generally don’t like change, especially when it comes to the things they know and love. It’s true that familiarity can lead to boredom, but too much change can also lead to rejection, a far worse outcome.
* Tesla does not have an engine grille because the brand has no legacy petrol cars, and therefore no prior grille for consumers to reference and be attached to. Tesla stands for electric. It will be interesting to see what markers of affection the brand develops over time.
