Annals of Design: Worst Car Designs Part 6----Jaguar 00 vs. Tesla Cybertruck

Some political types, including a U.S. President with his own social media company, recently took time off from planning (or apparently, failing to plan) a war to denounce a Jaguar ad campaign for being "woke".  Apparently this was because a commercial featured multi-ethnic people of sometimes undefined gender wearing bright, high-fashion clothing that looked a bit to this writer like balloons. Oddly, though the commercial referred to a new Jaguar EV that "copies nothing", it failed to show any shots of the car.  When we got a look at the new Jag 00 (that's zero zero) we understood why...

The new all-electric concept car promises a thousand hp, and designer Gerry McGovern claims it was inspired by Jaguar's E-Type, a car that first appeared in April 1961.  Back in that era, in the back pages after the end of a paperback novel you'd see ads that might claim if you liked "All Quiet on the Western Front" you'd enjoy something from Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series, or that if you appreciated "Ship of Fools" you'd go for "Valley of the Dolls."  McGovern's claim to have been inspired by the E-Type seems to fall into the same category of fabricated links.  Just in case you weren't around for that new model intro in 1961, here's a shot of an early E-Type coupe to jog your memory...

Fail to see the resemblance between the E and the 00?  Apparently you have to squint really hard.  Or maybe take some kind of psychedelic drug...

The minions of Jaguar Land Rover have even gotten rid of the time-honored Jaguar type font on their concept car, along with the "leaper", the famous leaping cat symbol.  This may be part of an effort to get potential purchasers to lower their expectations, because the makers have also seemingly hit the delete button on any awareness that a car, even one with a thousand horsepower, must pass through the air.  Back when Malcolm Sayer designed the E-Type, he'd kept that in mind.  By contrast, the bluff-fronted 00 looks more like a refugee from a pickup truck mock-up study.

Ian Callum had aerodynamics in mind when he designed the F-Type, a belated follow-up to the E-Type which began production in 2013 and sold nearly 88,000 copies over its production life of eleven years.  That's more cars than the E-Type sold over 13 years of production.  It all ended, though, in June 2024, when Jaguar stopped production of this and other car lines to prepare for producing a line consisting entirely of electrics with higher price tags.

The 00 designer Gerry McGovern is best known for his work on the latest Land Rover Defender, which is not a paragon of aero thinking, and has managed to revive running boards, along with an odd floating square of what looks painted metal running over the C-pillar into the side rear windows.  Like just about any SUVs in the current market, it seems to be selling well.  But you don't need to be very old to recall what happened to SUV sales back during the great recession, when gas prices peaked in 2008.  

If there's anything on the road that shares any design themes with the flat-fronted Jag 00, it could be Tesla's Cybertruck.  Despite being in the environmentally-friendly category of EVs, the Cyber manages to look as hostile as the 00.  Apparently in an effort to manage the difficulty of forming stainless steel, the designers went with flat panels.  This led to sharp edges all over the place, and with panels flying off some early examples.  The resulting form looks like it was designed to kill whatever it hits, and the nearly 7,000-pound vehicle has not been authorized for sale in the European Union.

Even wheels and tires, which are, after all, unavoidably round objects, are framed by antagonistic looking cutouts. 

Who knows, perhaps the fashion for sharp-edged, hostile-looking vehicles will go the way of other fashions.  Fashion, in any case, has always been a mystery to this writer.  During an oddly warm winter of repeated fire alerts here in the West, it's appealing to remember that the best industrial designers are usually concerned with maximizing efficiency and avoiding waste, getting the most from limited resources.

*Footnote:   The Jaguar E-Type has been featured in our posts before, on 8-13-17 and  5-31-19, and most recently on Sept. 30, 2025.

Photo Credits:

Top, 2nd & 5th from top:  Jaguar Land Rover

All other photos are by the author.

Dog Tales: Recent Visitors at Watson's Bone Lounge

A long time ago a philosophy professor began his classes with the question, "Did you see anything you liked today?"  It's proof of what a lazy student this writer was that he cannot recall that prof's name. But it seems that for anyone who loves dogs, the answer to that question on any day involving a dog walk or even a dog visit is "yes"...

We recently had two dogs in the Bone Lounge, which has not seen many of them since Bone Lounge management Watson* took his last walk with this writer (Watson's pal for 66 seasons) in late August.  After Watson had moved his toys into our breakfast room addition 9 years ago, it seemed reasonable to rename it the Bone Lounge. The visiting pooches appreciated how floor to ceiling glazing allowed them to watch a squirrel scamper up a tree, and we've posted a video below. The canine visitors might have loved to see the herd of mule deer* that visited recently, or (from inside the glass) the black bear we saw a few autumns ago.  But that squirrel served to provide them a bond of common interests and maybe even an appreciation for mid-century modern architecture.

Spaniel-poodle mix Ella is 21 months old, with the curiosity and enthusiasm that implies.  She's been a Thursday morning visitor while her human Carol attends Spanish class.  We immediately nicknamed her Ellie.  She made herself at home, and because she is known as a somewhat picky eater, we took it as a sign of confidence that she's now happy to have brunch at the Bone Lounge...

On Thursday Ellie had a canine companion in Mufi, a rare breed of French sheepdog, actually the only Stateside example of her kind.  Architect intern Peyton Floyd was taking care of Mufi for a few days, and we got permission from the dogs' respective humans to introduce them...

They got along fine, sharing a big walk and treats.  Ellie, like some humans, might've taken Mufi for some exotic species of bear, if not for her floppy ears and big, waggy tail.  After taking this profile photo, we tried to get a face shot of Mufi with more detail...

But the furry curtain in front of her eyes hides them, and probably makes for a unique perspective from Mufi's point of view.  She'd been brought from France as a pup, and so it's unlikely anyone has been able to put her working dog shepherding instincts to use over here.  The lack of sheep to mind doesn't seem to have affected Mufi's enthusiasm for life at age 8. The key difference between dogs and humans seems to be that dogs never seem to lose the innocence and joy for living that reminds us of children, and binds them to children. It's a reminder, too, that we have a world to protect, if for no other reason than to provide a safe future for those beings who enjoy living in the moment. 

Here's a video of Ellie and Mufi watching that squirrel clamber up a tree in the Bone Lounge garden. We'll be welcoming Ellie back for a stay while her human, Carol, is on vacation.  And as Ellie's previous stay was enlivened by the presence of Mufi, we expect she'll be looking for her new furry friend, and sniffing around for her, when she returns for her own vacation...

*Footnote:  For the story of 66 seasons of adventures with Watson, you might want to see "10th Anniversary Post: Remembering Watson, the World's Best Dog", posted here on August 25, 2025.  For a photo essay on the herd of mule deer that recently visited the Bone Lounge garden, there's "Wild Animal Encounters Part 3:  Reflections on Kindness and Risk", posted January 31, 2026. 

 

Photo Credits:

The top photo and the video are by Peyton Floyd; the other photos are by the author.

Roadside Attraction: Boulder Eats Exhibit at the Museum of Boulder

Just because you've been living in a town for a good while doesn't mean you know its history all that well.  There are always stories to discover, so when a friend told me there was an exhibit at the Museum of Boulder about local restaurants I might remember, I decided to go.  The museum, at 2205 Broadway, is right next door to the Carnegie Library for Local History where we'd researched the Boulder Theater story*, at the intersection of Pine and Broadway.

The Boulder Eats exhibit begins with a riot of signs and menus from Boulder restaurants that will call up fond memories for some visitors (well, this one for sure), including Tom's Tavern, Juanita's, the New York Deli, Daddy Bruce's BBQ, and the Zolo Grill.  Along with more than 300 objects from their collection, the museum provides some history you might not have known...

It was news to this writer that Daddy Bruce Randoph, who died at 94 in 1994, was not the first African-American to open a restaurant in Boulder. That honor belongs to O.T. Jackson, who managed the Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898, and later owned a seafood restaurant and an ice cream parlor. The exhibit notes his involvement in the 1910 founding of Dearfield, a farming community for African-Americans south of Greeley.  Daddy Bruce made a more recent imprint on local history, also because of his community spirit. In the 60s he began serving free Thanksgiving dinners in Denver's City Park, at first offering a couple hundred meals from a portable grill.  By the middle of the 80s Bruce was serving thousands of free dinners at his restaurant in Denver's Five Points neighborhood. 

Exhibit displays a history of kitchen appliances including a Victorian-style cast iron stove, a later 1920s model, a circular metal ice box with 100-pound capacity, a Fifties-style stove and fridge, and a microwave.  Exhibit historian and food writer John Lehndorff helped provide a timeline of Boulder's natural food businesses, including the 1969 founding of Celestial Seasonings followed in 1970 by the Green Mountain Grainary, the first health food store downtown, and first to offer Celestial Seasonings tea, the 1976 founding of Rudi's Organic Bakery, and the 1987 founding of Wild Oats Market, which became the 2nd largest natural foods chain nationally.

Owing to recent raids on food businesses in other states by ICE, the exhibit curators decided not to display photos of immigrants working in local food businesses.  Instead, they posted the silhouette of a worker, and noted the large part immigrants have played in harvesting and preparing food.  

The curators decided, however, to post a photo of a guy who worked as a janitor at The Sink on University Hill during his student days at CU. That was Robert Redford, who left us back in September.  The Sink is still in business, though, at 1165 Thirteenth Street...

There's also an ongoing, award-winning exhibit in the Boulder Experience Gallery that provides a panorama of local history including racing bicycles recalling the Red Zinger classic (1975-'79), runners and wheelchair racers from the Bolder Boulder 10k that began in 1979 and has continued on every Memorial Day since, and a satellite recalling Ball Aerospace, also in Boulder. 

The Boulder Experience also displays artifacts from deeper history as well, beginning with the stories of Chief Niwot and the Arapaho tribe, the true "legacy Americans" who first lived here, along with photos, musical instruments and clothing from the era of cattle ranches that began to take over after the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise restricted tribal land access.

Downstairs from the main level where you enter, there's an interactive children's area with geometric toys on the wall, and a mural of a VW Microbus with colors and symbols from the Summer of Love era.  That seems appropriate (this is, after all, Boulder), and though I'd thought the artist had made a bit of an error in choosing the "bay window" bus with its curved windshield, I was off base.  The "bay window" bus first appeared in August 1967, when it was still the Summer of Love, for the 1968 model year.  In May of that year, students joined union workers on a national strike in France.  But that story is for someone else's history museum...

*Footnote: The Boulder Eats exhibit on the history of food in Boulder will be open through July 26, 2026.  The Museum of Boulder is open Mondays and Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and is closed on Tuesdays.  June through August, Monday hours change to noon to 8:00 PM.  You can visit museumofboulder.org to confirm ticket prices, but we saw that children under 5 are free, kids 5-17 and college students are $8 (along with seniors), and that standard tickets are $10.

 

And "Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater", our history of the recently-restored Boulder Theater, appeared as our blog post for December 15, 2025. 

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Wild Animal Encounters Part 3: Reflections on Kindness and Risk

A couple of weeks ago on an unseasonably warm Thursday morning, a trio of these mule deer showed up in my garden. They wandered off before I could get a picture, but came back with six friends during the afternoon rush hour, maybe not a safe time for a herd of deer to be on Broadway.  I followed them when they crossed into a neighbor's front yard.  For a minute it seemed they might wander off to the north and east, which seemed a safer direction. But then they decided to come back to the driveway, close to the speeding cars and trucks. So, maybe because I didn't want to see any of my fellow mammals hurt (either these furry ones or the ones driving by), I walked out onto Broadway with my hand up. Southbound and northbound traffic, all 4 lanes of it, stopped. To my surprise, all the deer but one followed; maybe they'd wanted to graze at North Boulder Park, 3 blocks west, anyway. I motioned to the lone straggler, a male, and yelled "Come on."  He did, and crossed safely.  A BMW driver gave me a thumbs-up, and traffic flow resumed.

Why am I telling this story?  Because what might have seemed like a foolish action to others seemed like the only thing to do. I didn't want to witness an accident, and it seemed like simple kindness to prevent one.  Maybe my six years of Saturdays volunteering in the vet clinic at the local Humane Society* came into play. There was some risk involved, but it seemed worth it.  On the subject of kindness and risk, it would seem that in everyday human interactions, kindness should not be punished, but it recently was, in Minneapolis.  On January 24 in that city, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse employed by the Veterans Administration, was filming a demonstration against Operation Metro Surge on his phone when he went to the aid of a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by ICE* agents.  When he attempted to shield her with his own body, he was pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground by ICE agents, who fired at least 10 shots at close range, with 6 shots fired after Mr. Pretti's body had gone motionless.  His last words to the woman he'd tried to protect were, "Are you okay?"  As they had following the ICE killing of Renée Good on January 7, federal officials refused access to the crime scene by Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  In the case of Ms. Good's shooting by an ICE agent, a medical doctor offering to aid the victim was ordered to stand back by the shooter. Minnesota authorities recently sued, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the Dept. of Homeland Security "from destroying or altering evidence." 

Gauging public sentiment by the number who'd written Congress demanding independent investigations, attending street demonstrations, and organizing memorials, the ICE attacks seem to have struck a nerve that previous scandals have not, with outrage amplified by multiple videos depicting two crime stories completely at odds with ICE or DHS explanations.  Today, there were memorial bike rides organized in around 250 towns and cities around the world, including this one that began in Boulder... 

We started in North Boulder Park with a group of over 760* cyclists of all ages, and rode eastward across town to Carpenter Park, with local police and volunteers directing traffic, often to the sounds of honks by approving motorists.  By the time we'd circled west again along Boulder Creek to the Central Park Bandshell, the crowd greeting us seemed to number well into 4 figures.  A poster we noticed read, "Whenever cruelty becomes normal, compassion becomes radical."

*Footnotes:  

Our local Humane Society is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, providing adoption services, offering classes, training volunteers and accepting donations at 2323 55th Street, Boulder, CO 80301, tel. 303-442-4030, and at their website: boulderhumane.org. 

ICE is a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The initial estimate of participating cyclists was provided by volunteers posted at the exit from North Boulder Park, and is likely an undercount of the final total, because there were many cyclists behind our group.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Film Review: "State of Siege" --- Past Becomes Prelude

It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...  

Soon enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat.  It belongs to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay.  The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here.  Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.

In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals.  Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...

Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage.  Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions.  Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...

Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...

Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer.  By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy.  By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.  

In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore.  This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time.  The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...

The students at a local university are not in denial, however.  They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay.  In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...

Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views.  At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...

He seems aware of what's going on below the surface.  By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples.  In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses.  The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.

In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him.  It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness.  In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months.  Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.

Photo Credits:  All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).

Book Review: Sports Cars by Charlotte & Peter Fiell--- What Collector Tastes Say About Society

If you like old cars and you're looking for a distraction from the relentlessly bleak news about the world around us, you could do far worse than spending a weekend sinking into Sports Cars, by Charlotte & Peter Fiell, published in 2023 by Taschen.  The ample color photography is all as well-composed as the cover shot of the '56 Ferrari 290 MM, and there are monochrome photos of the races where many of these cars originally competed.  The book is divided into eras: 1910-1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s-90s, and the 2000s. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on "ultimate collector cars", and this occasionally leads to featuring a car that attracts huge auction bids today, rather than one that was more innovative technically, or more successful in racing. But because there's all that photography to go with the stories, this aspect of the book will only strike you if you're a fan of a particular car.  Like the Maserati 300S which is not featured, but more successful in racing than big brother 450S, which is.  Or like Italy's pioneering Lancia, which is not featured at all...

We understand that the 50-car, 511-page format imposes limits, but think that some redundancy could be reduced. Keep the classic Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, but drop the roadster, likewise choosing the race-winning Shelby AC Cobra 289 over the 427.  There could be some culling of racing red Ferraris, too.  Then maybe the authors would have room for the Lancia D-24, above, which beat Ferrari in the '53 Carrera Panamericana, the '54 Mille Miglia and the '54 Targa Florio.  The section on 70s cars is kind of thin, as it features only one car actually introduced in '67, so it would benefit from inclusion of Lancia's Stratos HF, which won the World Rally Championship in '74, '75 and '76.  If that's not a 70s landmark, nothing is.  Maybe for a future revised edition...

The text helpfully lists the engine size, configuration and power, transmission type, top speed and number produced for each car, and tells the creation story of each. Engineers and body designers get plenty of credit along with race drivers; even the poster artists get mentioned.  You might be surprised to discover that the 1912 Stutz Bearcat featured a 3-speed transaxle nearly 4 decades before Lancia introduced the first modern production car with front engine and rear transaxle.  You won't be surprised that Maserati gets 3 cars included, but not the offshoot OSCA made by the Maserati brothers, as the OSCA is better-known by racers than trend-conscious collectors...

Other etceterini like the 60s Fiat Abarth below didn't make the grade, perhaps because they are typically small and auction for 6 figures instead of 7 or 8.  Perhaps for similar reasons, pioneering beauties like the Lotus Eleven and Type 14 Elite don't appear.  Again, a suggestion for a future book...

The chapter on 1960s cars makes it clear the authors feel this was a golden age; they include 17 cars.  Six of these are mid-engined, showing the effect of the revolution presaged by the Porsche 550 Spyder in the 50s chapter, realized by Cooper's GP Championships in '59 & '60, and reflected in production cars like the Lamborghini Miura S below.

The section on the 1970s-90s surprises by including only one car from each decade.  The '71 Lamborghini Miura SVJ is really a modified version of the P400 Miura which first appeared in 1967.  Representing the 70s instead, you might've expected to see Lambo's LP400 Countach, also bodied by Bertone, as Marcello Gandini's wild wedge occupied so many posters on teenagers' walls and influenced other cars of that decade.  Gandini's earlier design for the Miura is more graceful and fluid, though, and the first of 4 SVJs attracted a huge auction bid because it was built for the Shah of Iran (the money factor). The money factor began to dominate as we moved into the 1990s, just as it became clear that the distribution of wealth in society had shifted upward to the peak of the socioeconomic pyramid...

The authors selected the McLaren F1 to represent the 90s (no complaints there on technical or esthetic terms). The original price range of the F1 was $800,000 to $1 million, making it stunningly expensive as well as stunning.  The 3-passenger, center-steered, mid-engined road rocket signaled the beginning of the transition from supercars to hypercars, cars that were purchased because of their high prices, rather than despite them.  The authors note that the Sultan of Brunei bought 3 of the 6 special LM models; one wonders if he will drive all of them.  F1s have since brought auction prices of up to $20 million; one guesses owning half of the special LMs produced will have some effect on an LM's eventual auction price.  By the 2000s it was apparent that these types of cars had entered the category of vacant Manhattan penthouses owned by oligarchs in distant dictatorships; they are places to park money rather than driving or racing machines.  By the 2000s hypercars proliferated along with the lopsided distribution of wealth; the authors feature 8 cars in that chapter, many of them with contrived, gimmick-ridden forms designed to capture attention in an attention economy, including Ferrari's La Ferrari. Something has gone off track when the builders need to tell you twice that their product is a Ferrari. Superlatives and hyperbole begin to run a bit rampant in this chapter, and a visit by the Adjective and Adverb Police might have been helpful.  Perhaps a future revised edition will note that the 90s also produced the Lotus Elise, a compact, lightweight, reasonably-priced sports car that was fun to drive.  Its chassis design was shared by the later Tesla roadster.  But that is a story for another chapter...

Footnote: 

For more info (along with photos) on the cars we'd have added (without being invited) to the Fiell's awfully good-looking book, you might want to have a look at the following posts from our archives:  Lancia Stratos;  "Lost Cause Lancias: New Stratos and Old Hyena", posted Feb. 15, 2018.  OSCA: "The Etceterini Files Part 30: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous: OSCA" posted April 20, 2016.  The Lancia D24 is described in photos and text in "1st Impressions of the Monterey Historics: Whatever Lola Wants..." posted August 28, 2018,  

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author, except for the 3rd from the top (Lancia Stratos), which is from Wikimedia; the shot of the book's cover features Tim Scott's photo of the Ferrari 290MM for RM Sotheby's.