For your weekend reading pleasure, we present a friend from the past. Chris Bangle on the current state of automotive design as published on his personal blog.

>But now we have eliminated the really ugly cars, and made everything look ok – good but the same. When everything is the same, no matter how good, nothing stands out and is beautiful. The biggest Design Challenge is still waiting to be answered: Global Cultural Enfranchisement in Design. Modernism in Design has become the dominant sort of business-English for getting the job done and in the process has smothered local cultural content and threatened to disenfranchise vast areas of the world that never had a background in the Greek geometrical underpinnings of the Bauhaus.

Source: Chris Bangle & The Future of Car Design