► Gavin Green on big car grilles
► They’ve been a thing for a while
► But why do EVs need them?
Why do so many modern cars have big gobs? It’s a most unfortunate and unnecessary styling trend. A big mouth is never an attractive quality.
Big bluff-nosed SUVs aren’t new, of course. Some especially egregious examples that use great gaping grilles include BMW X7 and X3, Audi Q7, the Mercedes GLS (the Maybach version adds shiny chrome appliqué), Lexus NX, latest Kia Sportage and Cadillac Escalade, very possibly ‘King Gob’.
What’s worse, the trend is now migrating to EVs. Electric cars need less cooling than combustion cars and do not need big grilles. Yet, increasingly, EVs get unnecessarily giant maws: form follows folly.
We see deep jaws on new electric BMW Xs and Audi Qs, on the Mercedes EQC and Nissan Ariya. The otherwise sleek Lotus Eletre has a huge mouth, like a whale shark ingesting plankton. China’s Denza recently showed the premium D9, its gigantic grille looking like the main gate to the Forbidden City.
Now, huge grilles are catching on with electric saloons. The best thing about driving the new BMW i7 is that you don’t have to look at it. Its monster mouth isn’t an air-ingesting orifice but ornamentation suggestive of BMW’s hallowed twin-kidney frontage of fond memory. It’s even illuminated at night, moving down the road like a couple of floodlit beaver incisors, the buck-toothed Bimmer.
Meanwhile, Bentley’s new EXP 15 design vision concept is an ‘elevated sporting sedan’ with a front end that looks more Beachy Head than modern Bentley GT. This Winged Wardrobe apparently previews Bentley’s forthcoming first all-electric car due next year and is supposedly influenced by a 1930 Speed Six.
Now it’s true the Speed Six also had a tall, prominent grille, and for good reason. It covered a large radiator to cool 6.5 litres of Bentley straight-six. But as we’ve seen, EVs do not need the big radiators and the associated orifices of combustion cars. Instead, the EXP 15’s grille is a styling folly. Bentley calls it ‘digital art’.
Distinctive grilles have long played their part in car design, from Alfa’s Scudetto to BMW’s twin kidneys and Rolls-Royce’s stainless steel Pantheon. But big upright frontages don’t do much for aerodynamics and they certainly don’t do much for safety. A recent study showed that cars – invariably SUVs – featuring tall upright front ends are more likely to harm other road users.
So, I’m sorry, but big-gob cars don’t do it for me. On the other hand, we should welcome the newfound styling diversity of EVs. Their ‘skateboard’ architectures – where major components are sited in the floor – give greater ‘top hat’ design freedom than a conventional combustion car, where you’ve stuck with a big bulky petrol or diesel lump to work around.
So we’re seeing sleek cab-forward cars such as the Jaguar i-Pace and Kia EV6, and cute classically styled retro cars like the Renault 5, Fiat 500e and Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz. We’re seeing softly shaped new Mercs that look like slippery bars of soap, and sharp-edged flat-surfaced cars from Hyundai (the Ioniq 5) and Tesla (the wacky Cybertruck). The new bluff-nosed Jaguar Type 00 previews a new long-bonnet look, never mind there is no big-chested twin-cam six or V12 lurking underneath. We’re seeing saloons of astonishing sleekness – the Lucid Air – and supercars of great styling drama such as the Pininfarina Battista and Lotus Evija. Many new EVs have giant grilles, others are grille-free, such as the latest Tesla Models 3 and Y.
We are seeing boldly contrarian design and, to assuage those nervous of taking the electric plunge, new EVs that look reassuringly combustion conventional.
Of course, new-gen EVs may lack the driving engagement of our favourite combustion machines. We will no longer be serenaded by the fire and fury of the finest petrol units. (Nor be able to fix them when they malfunction: a recent misbehaving Volkswagen ID needed a bloke with a laptop, not a toolkit.)
Yet I’m convinced we are in for a golden age of car design, as the artists of the automotive world enjoy newfound freedoms. I just hope the gobby look is an aberration, an eccentric fork in an increasingly bold experimental journey.