Cars are copying one another more and more in their appearance.

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Am I the only one who has trouble telling one new car from another these days?

To give just one case, not long ago Acura made a big noise about how it was reinventing its product line.  When the cars came out, the main thing I could see that was different about them was that their names had been replaced by alphanumeric designators.   (Perhaps they believed that consumers would now think they were buying Mercedes or BMWs.)  As for the looks of the cars themselves, the most ballyhooed "new" entry was a sedan that I absolutely could not tell apart from a Lexus.

After the passage of some time, though, I reconsidered this assessment. Perhaps the new Acura was actually more indistinguishable from an Infiniti.  Infiniti, I recalled, had also recently been restyled to look like a Lexus.

Well, then, was everybody just copying Lexus?  But Lexus wasn't exactly an innovator, either.  The first Lexus had basically tried to look like a Mercedes, only more so;  the only real differences were that the Lexus was a bit more aerodynamically rounded, and that it sported headlights of a type made popular by the original Ford Taurus.

Then again, today's Mercedes also echoes this Ford-initiated headlight styling--as do almost all other cars that want to be taken seriously.  So did Mercedes derive its headlight design directly from Taurus, or roundabout via Lexus?

In the increasingly tortuous line of my investigation, the question had become one of deciding which imitator the car that was first imitated was now imitating more directly.

At this point I realized that I had a headache.  I made a mental note not to think too hard anymore about who in the contemporary car world was imitating whom.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.