Earlier, we reported about Saleen’s announcement that they’ll be making a 1000HP version from their 16-year old S7 design. We’re a bit skeptical, considering all of Saleen’s financial woes. It also doesn’t help that the promo image they made for it looks like it was made by a chimp wearing mittens.
It’s not uncommon for carmakers to use a render or other sort of Photoshopped image to show a car that has yet to be produced. What is pretty uncommon is for that image to really, really suck. Like this one of Saleen’s S7LM does.
The first clue was when we noticed that, hey, why does that silver car seem to have a red reflection in the ground? A closer look showed, yep, it looks like a red car in the reflection. Then, I found that Saleen had made available a very high-resolution version of their teaser image, which was a terrible idea. Because it’s full of shit like this:
What the fuck? This is terrible. I can’t recall ever seeing such a half-ass photoshop from any car company, ever. This isn’t even half-ass: this is quarter-ass at best.
I mean, look at this shit:
It’s clear this has been mocked up from some picture of a red S7, but for some reason they enlarged the original image up beyond the resolution of the original photo, then clumsily painted/pasted/recolored the car. You can still see bits of red in the sloppy re-covered areas, and red reflections everywhere.
Bang up job, fellas. Top-notch. Another triumph.
Look at this. Were they using a mouse with a Jenga game balanced on top of it? Is this the work of a remarkably well-trained dog? Did the person who slapped this together actually enjoy the gift of sight?
The crazy thing is, they didn’t have to release such an embarassing high-res image. I mean, this thing is an absurd 15,093x5664 pixels in size! What the fuck are they planning to do with an image this big? Is this their billboard file? At default JPG pixel density of 72 pixels per inch, that’s 17 feet wide.
No media outlet needs an image that big. Ever. Is there some car magazine I forgot about that publishes everything by wrapping blimps? Maybe those guys like files this big.
Here, look, here’s the full-sized image, right from their website, so you can scrutinize it at your leisure, and enjoy the trainwreck. There’s really too much to even get into here. It’s fascinatingly shitty:
They could have just left it as a small, 800x225 image. That would have hidden most of the worst of this thing, though not everything.
Did someone do this on a laptop in a moving car? Why is this so shitty? Why did somebody think this was good enough to release? This is a Photoshop of a car. If this task has proved too challenging for them to produce properly, I’m not so sure I’m that confident about their ability to make a 1000 HP car.
Saleen. Please. Think about this shit.