Something I really enjoy is seeing how products signal their quality in funny ways to appease consumer preferences. A few examples below, but if you have other examples, I'd love to hear them.
A simple example is any kind of handheld product that's deliberately made to be heavy because consumers associate heft with quality. In extreme cases, adding a weight for no other purpose than to signal that the item feels "well built" or "solid" or whatever it is people like about heavier items.
Cars are a great source of this because their cost and consumer preferences being heavily based on style means that a relatively large amount of engineering effort can be expended on signalling.
For example, luxury cars are associated with having a short front overhang (distance between wheel and front of the car) and a long hood. This makes sense with a front-engine RWD car, but FWD cars do all sorts of contortions in order to mimic this look, e.g., Volvo's SPA platform
Bentley made the mistake of not doing this with the 2nd gen Continental GT and it was panned as having a too large front overhang. They then fixed this and most reviewers wrote about how the car is better now because the front overhang is shorter.
This is so important that the Bentley website specifically calls out that they once again made their car look like it's subject to the constraints of a conventional RWD luxury car.
If you look at car reviews, it would seem that having a motor that emits extraneous sounds is desirable, but only if these sounds come via physically piping sound from the motor/exhaust and/or doing weird tricks with the firmware to generate extraneous sounds (some cars pipe in "fake" sound through the speakers, and this is usually panned as being bad).
A lot of these sounds mimic sounds cars would've reasonably made at some point maybe 40 years ago or so, but they have to do so "naturally".
You also see this plumbed through decisions that have huge & expensive impacts, e.g., when not many cars had turbos, performance cars would have turbos since they're cool (and practical). The combination of America wanting high hp cars (compared to Europe) plus CAFE regulations has pushed tiny engines w/turbos into many boring cars. How do you stand out?
Make a performance car with no turbo! The examples of this are impressive engineering feats (e.g,., the new Corvette), but also sort of absurd
If you look at consumer behavior, consumer surveys, and car reviewer comments, this all seems entirely rational behavior by the car industry in response to consumer preferences.
Another example of this is car wheels getting bigger and getting paired with shorter side walls. This started happening with sports cars for somewhat practical reasons, at least if you highly prioritized track performance over almost anything else. But sports cars are cool, so this look became cool.
A friend's father was about to buy a Prius, which was the perfect practical car for their family. But, at the last minute, the father changed his mind because the wheels were too small and the sidewalls were too big (this was the old Prius, before it was redesigned to appeal to people like my friend's father).
For most people, smaller wheels with taller sidewalls are basically strictly superior for practical purposes, but they don't look as cool, which is a huge driver of sales, so here we are.
Trucks and off-road vehicles are also fun examples. Who's the F650 pickup marketed to? People who need to haul/tow more than F350 can handle (21000 lbs) and people who want to drive the same thing as "racers ... kings, football/basketball/baseball players".
The G63 AMG is similar. It's a capable off-road vehicle, more so than, say, a Range Rover, but that makes it hilariously bad on-road. A neighbor has one; of course they never take it off road because who buys a $200k car for off-roading?
@danluu My dad went to collect some firewood with a friend. My dad took a sedan with a trailer attached, the friend took a utility truck.
The friend asked my dad to carry his share in the trailer.
Dad asked, why not put the firewood in the bed of the truck?
Because that would make the bed dirty.
@danluu similar with pickup trucks and imposing grills and hoods
The electric trucks have no reason to not have sloped hoods with better visibility, but they'd not look as "tough"
@danluu
Harley Davidson came out with their new, direct injection engine a couple decades ago. Quiet, responsive, efficient. But to appeal to the target market they added vents in the exhaust and a bracket directly from the block to the frame to make the bike rumble and shake as expected by their customers.
Bad design? No. Good design - for the intended use. If someone wants a fast, efficient, smooth ride they're not buying a Harley anyway.
Dan Luu
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