#8 - Why did Toyota make such an ugly car?
On how brands exploit our primal impulses to sell stuff
Hello People!
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Cool Stuff I learnt this week
Why did Toyota make such an ugly car?
This is a Toyota Prius.
It’s ridiculously ugly, isn’t it?
It makes you wonder why anyone would make such an ugly car.
Surely someone at Toyota must have realised how bad it looks, right?
Well, as it turns out, the fact that this car is ugly is no mistake—it was very much a deliberate decision on Toyota’s part to keep it this way.
Why? (I mean, seriously, why!?)
To answer that, you’d have to dig into how we make decisions.
Speak to anyone who’s bought a Prius, and they’ll tell you they did so because it’s electric/hybrid and hence, good for the environment.
What almost no one would tell you is that part of the reason they did so is because they want to be recognised as being climate-conscious and generous.
You see, at the end of the day, we are complex social creatures shaped by millions of years of evolution.
We might believe we make all our decisions consciously, but the truth is that our behaviour is often driven by multiple motives, many of which are unconscious—that is, we aren’t aware of them.
And one of the key motives behind all our decisions is to elevate our social status.
Buying an expensive electric car when they could easily have bought a Merc or a BMW allows the buyer to advertise their generosity and wealth, which, in turn, elevates their social status.
They can signal to the world: “Look, I paid a premium to buy an expensive electric car because I care about the planet.”
Now, the savvy folks at Toyota were very much aware of our tendency to make decisions to elevate our social status.
They knew that the Prius buyer would want to advertise their climate-consciousness.
Therefore, they made the Prius distinctively ugly and hence, immediately recognisable.
As a result, any time you saw someone driving a Prius, you could recognise them as being environmentally-conscious, generous, wealthy, and most importantly, as having high social status.
So, the Toyota Prius sells not despite its ugly looks but because of it.
With that, I’ll wrap up for today.
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Until next time! ✌️
Ojas
keen and Introspective on part of manufactuer but frankly, everything wrong with society and capitalistic marketing. No one in society should care about a individuals status. Pathetic and sad... it's clear we've borrowed the worst parts of the human psyche from hollywood elitists and allowed it to seep it's way into our auto industry. Our choices of vehicle should be made based on practicality and mindful design as a artform representing the best of product enginuity not some status symbol sold to the wealthiest consumers left in a broken monetary system. Unfortunately, the latter is all that seems to matter to every legacy auto struggling to survive. I can't wait to legacy gets finally wipped out by tech companies that produce innovative and affordable mass-produced vehicles so we can move on from this mess.