Neil Fein's Blog

Hey, all you big-car fetishists: I came across this article, Big and Bad by Malcolm Gladwell, that looks like it was written just for you. It may not change your mind, but it will make you think. (It also justifies my iitty biity plastic Saturn.)

"...It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller--and thereby reducing visibility--makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

Malcolm Gladwell is the guy who wrote The Tipping Point, a wonderful book that Judith lent me about contagious ideas and change. His writing always brings in unexpected elements; unfortunately, he's not written books since 2002's Tipping Point.