How Barbra Streisand's NCAP Nose Saves Lives But Kills Design

Safety is good. I’ve got no problem with safety at all, especially when it means avoiding a grisly pummelling beneath the bumper of a myopic old biffer in a Honda Jazz.

But this safety lark is going too far. It’s making cars ugly. Suited types in Europe (stand up, Volvo) would have you believe that humans are already far too dangerous for their own good, and safety is now the number two priority for pretty much all manufacturers (behind emissions, obviously).

Every time a car is updated you can see its styling sagging down the priorities list like a full nappy in a wheelie bin of curry sauce. Take a look at the Peugeot 306 from the 1990s; lovely proportions, great stance on the road and the GTi 6 looked fine enough to set your newly-descended plums quivering.

Even then you had safety, with ABS and the like working its way down from the luxo-barges. But recently all this anti-death guff has started to ruin the way cars look, and it’s not on. Check out the way overhangs are starting to get longer, especially at the front. The new Fiesta’s nose is almost as big as Barbra Streisand’s and it’s all so Johnny Crashalot can get away without serious injury when he bins it while Tweeting his mum.

Plenty of cars are guilty of this. Some of the overhangs I’ve seen lately must be visible from space. It ruins a car’s looks so completely that it makes me want to poke my own eyeballs out with rolled-up pictures of Ferrari 288 GTOs.

The side profile is the big loser in all this. The latest fad is pedestrian safety, which means making the front-end of the car softer. I’m sorry, is this some kind of joke?

When I grew up we looked both ways before crossing a road. If some fool gets mown down after stepping into the street without looking while texting his mate Daz about a fit blonde in Macky D’s, whose fault is that? Drive on, good motorist.

Making the front-end softer means raising the bonnet up and away from the engine. In turn, along with new-fangled ejector-bonnets, this lifts the bonnet line about two or three inches above where it should be. Cars end up looking clumsy, badly proportioned and out of shape. A bit like Kerry Katona.

This has got to stop. This completely pointless tech is going to make cars uglier than a Glaswegian football riot. The safest thing you can do in a car is just try not to crash, but apparently we can’t be trusted.

My beef is with Euro NCAP, because this is mostly their fault. Their ridiculous star system basically blackmails manufacturers into whacking the latest and most stupid safety tech on their cars, because not getting the maximum is unthinkable to any of the big players. If only mainstream car buyers weren’t so easily led.

If you ever read anything a senior suit at Euro NCAP says about a sub-five-star car, it amounts to something like “if you’re foolish enough to even try to drive this you’ll be instantly killed.” To them a car’s styling doesn’t register. I bet you could show them an Eagle Speedster and they’d walk on by, entranced by the technical drawing of Volvo’s pedestrian airbag on the wall behind.

But people still listen, forgetting all about the classic lines and shapes that used to make cars so wonderful in favour of a world of gadgets they don’t need and probably won’t use. It's a load of balls. And while I still say safety is good I reckon we should have stopped at ESP.

Barbra, this one's for you!