Gavin Green, Mark Walton and Sam Smith
THERE WAS A clear trend at this year’s Geneva motor show, a sign that we have finally moved on from our grey and foggy past to enter a bright new chapter in the history of the automobile. It’s the arrival of the perennially futuristic letter Z.
Just to recap, the 2018 Geneva show featured the latest Danish supercar from Zenvo and the Italdesign Zerouno Duerte. Renault unveiled its EZ-Go taxi, alongside the latest Zoe hatchback. Volkswagen went the full hog with its maximumstrength, double-zed Vizzion. Subaru unveiled its Z-enabled Viziv (or was it the Ziviz?), and Lamborghini was there with its electric Terzo Millennio. Mazerati was also present, though its stand was unfortunately blighted by a small spelling mistake.
Of course, many of these new cars were just concepts, not production-ready cars, but what does the arrival of the Z mean for the rest of us, in our day-to-day lives? Well, this represents the culmination of decades of development by the car manufacturers, as they have ranged up and down the alphabet looking for model-name nirvana. It all started with the Model T in 1908, though Henry Ford soon realised he’d got things all mixed up and in the wrong order and launched the Model A in the ’20s. By the ’60s we’d moved on from primitive ABC and everything had to be a GT – Ford Cortina GT, Capri GT, Mini 1275 GT, MGBGT GT.
Then, in the ’80s, there came the racy GTi. The shift from two letters to three showed clear progress – things had changed, and no mistake. Then the i shed the G and T (they were holding it back, creatively) and struck out on its own. We’ve been living in an i-world for two decades now, ever since Apple launched the iMac in 1998. So, since 2000, there’s been an avalanche of i cars – Toyota unveiled a string of i concepts like the i-Unit and i-Road; Mitsubishi launched its i-Miev electric car; Hyundai adopted an ‘i’ naming policy across the range; and BMW unveiled a whole ‘i’ sub-brand.
What’s so surprising is how concentrated these trends are. Take the X – ooh, what an exciting and mysterious letter, an X! No kidding. Within the space of about three years between 2004 and 2007, the world went X crazy. At the Geneva motor show alone there were concepts called the Ix-onic, the Trixx, the Flexa, the gen-X, the Xasis, the Hybrid X, the Xover. Land Rover unveiled the LRX, Honda the FCX and Jaguar the C-XF.
And don’t think that this naming policy has anything to do with Generations X, Y and Z. Conventionally, there’s a 20-year divide between these demographic groups, but the car makers aren’t carefully targeting 20-year-olds, 40-year-olds and 60-yearolds. For starters, no matter what the date or the car or the target market, the manufacturers launch all new models at the Geneva show with some dreadful ’90s hip hop and a cheesy dance troupe wearing their baseball caps backwards. To a middle-aged car executive for whom wearing a baseball cap is unthinkable, let alone wearing a baseball cap backwards, this represents the very essence of eternal youth. In fact, I’d love to see a launch using actual Generation Zeds like my teenagers: the lights would go up, and a bunch of kids would wander on stage in silence looking at their phones, before glancing up at the audience and mumbling ‘What?’
Anyway, those X days are gone now and (apart from that old-fashioned electric Jaguar thing) the era of i is over, too. We’ve entered the Epoch of Z – Z for zoomy and zesty and zingy and zero emissions! And er… faltering… er… autonomouz… and optimiztic. Z-car drivers are flamboyant and colourful and they’re completely at ease upgrading an operating system without losing all their contacts. Z drivers care about kittens, meadows of wildflowers and the environment and all that stuff, but they’re not going to let it stop them having fun! It’s the end of the alphabet, not The End Of Days! So redact your Xs and don’t ask Y, it’s time to embrace the Z, buy with Bitcoins, put aside your Brexit fears and embrace Brezit!
(Wait, I sense you have reservations. How long will it last, you ask? Dunno, maybe a year or two. And where next, now that we’ve exhausted the alphabet? Dunno. WTF?)