While I was at the LA Auto Show, I asked Tavarish, who was taking photos for us, to get a whole bunch of head-on pictures of cars. All types — big, small, SUVs, whatever. Well, production only. I wanted to see if I could find out what the average car looks like in 2014. And I think I did.
By the end of the show, I had 15 or so usable head-on pictures of cars. Not a vast sample, sure, but they were quite widely varied, covering most of the major car-producing nations, and varied across the spectrum of types: sedans, econoboxes, sportscars, SUVs, trucks, etc.
I put all the photos together and used some Photoshop tools to average all the images together (I used Stack Mode and the Mean and Median tools, if you're curious). The result I got was, I think, quite interesting. It really does feel like an average modern car.
It's fairly sleek, somewhat aggressive-looking, has a high, pedestrian-safe hood, some interesting chamfered edges, a prominent grille and mostly horizontal lights. It could pass for a Lincoln, maybe?
I added some lines to help pick out the basic design elements, as you see above, but here's the un-altered average view as well:
I suspect this could be different with an even bigger sample. I try to get even more at the Detroit show in January, and we can see if it makes much difference. I'm sure it would, to some degree, but I suspect less than we think. This feels pretty average to me.
Also, I'm a little surprised to see how red this ended up.
And, for fun, see if you can figure out the base set of cars I used to get this!