Two Designs

Xzibit’s Pimp My Ride is what happens when someone with money decides to decorate a car with every impulse at once. LEDs, subwoofers, custom paint, whatever. The result looks like a vision board threw up on a Cadillac. It’s not taste failing—it’s the complete absence of any framework for taste at all.

So Mazda and Vice did a design competition for the Mazda2 where they brought in actual designers. Nik Nowak, a few people doing experimental 3D and digital work. Not car guys, not marketing people—actual people who spend their time thinking about form and proportion. The descriptions mention urban 3D designs, silhouettes, color storms. Language that suggests they’re designing, not adding.

The difference between customization and design comes down to intention. Customization is what you do to something that already exists. Design is the thing itself—proportions, how surfaces work, what you choose to leave alone. Most cars are so buried under regulations and marketing research and cost targets that design barely survives in them. Every decision gets defended by a spreadsheet.

I don’t know if the competition resulted in anything real. Usually these things don’t. But it was interesting that someone at Mazda decided to let people who actually think about objects come look at a car and reimagine it. No brief, no research, no approval from the brand committee. Just: here’s a platform, go design.

Most cars are compromises. The ones that stick with you are the ones where someone actually made a choice.