LADIES car?
the march has many women friendly features indeed. do you know that
nissan in the initial design phase had engineers hiding at shopping
malls' carparks to study how women struggled to get their shopping
bags and kids into cars (read in somewhere)?
i bet the engineers would have never expected such unexpected
success in appealing to male drivers back then.
frankly the March has never occured to me as a Ladies car, except
that since many pple started calling it this way that i go
along.
the first impression that struck me actually was RETRO
instead.
its very easy to design a fierce looking car, just put up some
sharp edges, pull the lines horizontally, make it lower, etc etc.
(tastefully done or not i cannot comment)
its also very easy to make a clown looking car, make it bubbly,
short, slap on some weird colours etc etc.
but how many pple can make a fun looking car but oozes character
and depth?
when i first saw the march, i could immediately "connect" with the
designers. it seemed like these bunch of designers conveniently
slapped up something, but i knew they have put up tremendous effort
to come up with the design.
with all the high tech gadgets thrown in the march, one would
normally go along the theme and make the displays high tech looking
with OLED lights, digital readouts, even headsup display, silvery
panels, sharp looking buttons and switches, black leather seats etc
etc...
instead they used ivory dials, retro looking displays from the 60s,
minimalist layout, rounded corners, milkish colour combinations.
yet made knowingly to the customers that hidden under these are the
latest and greatest technologies.
i went "OMG!!" when i first saw the car. these designers were just
damn humourous and stylo-milo! they were playing with their works!
intentionally challenging the norms! and doing it with style.
everything was purposely and tediously thought out to make it retro
but tasteful. many features and components were first in their
history and designed from scratch.
that makes the march so special and unique. even today i look at
cars in the street, not many appeal to me. even the latio has to
"borrow" the design so beautifully found in the marches (frankly i
dun find it fitting nicely in latio, esp in black).
the nissan march and its variants will be the first and the last
true blue beauty in many years to come.
