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In all my long days as an automotive writer, not one single car manufacturer has asked me to attend their display at an international motor show, and drape myself alluringly across the hood of one of their vehicles.
Sex Sells
When people (in truth, men) discovered sex sells, car makers jumped on the band wagon. They found that a seductive model adjacent to the product seemed to work. This has long since become a ploy beloved by advertisers.
It seems like a cheap, cheesy gambit to make the gullible male think he will meet more girls, but in reality, it is much more subtle than that. It seems that an attractive person in an ad excites the area of the brain that makes us buy on impulse. Of course, even today there are plenty of pretty women at motor show stands, but they are much more demure; corporate even. Except at Custom Car shows obviously. We can be glad that in the here and now, overtly sexist advertisements are behind us (mostly) but that does not mean the days of subliminally awakening those more excitable parts of our brains are long gone.
Far from it.
On Trend
In Europe, the populace have been well and truly seduced by the concept of the crossover car. This is a recent and much hyped sector of the motor industry whereby, putting it simply, regular hatchback cars are given more ground clearance and implied SUV qualities that are really just for show.
To be fair, there is considerably more engineering involved t...