I cannot truly explain it, but I'll try to. I have always had a strange attraction to those cars whose designers rolled up to work with a set-square rather than a protractor. I just have a thing for square cars.
Take a recent motor show, for example. The Tokyo show of 2013. I could have been wowed by any number of the swoopy, low-slung stuff with engines in the middle and exotic names apparently picked from a food blender catalogue. But no, my heart was won by the Nissan IDx concepts, a pair of throwbacks to the Datsun Violet that were three-box and square rigged and looked just fantastic. Inevitably too, I preferred the beige one to the one liveried up in NISMO motor sport colours, but that's another affliction for another day.
Perhaps it's an age thing. I was brought up in a time when heroes on the telly drove square cars. Well, Knight Rider didn't, but even then, I could tell that David Hasselhoff was a bit naff, and that was before he sung on top of the Berlin Wall. Ah, but BA Baracus drove a none-more-square GMC Vandura and that was properly awesome. Plus all the cops back then drove Dodge Monacos and cars didn't come much squarer than that.
My love of square cars has been with me a while now. You may have read my polemic on why the Series I Land Rover is, quite simply, the best (and certainly squarest) car of all time and a childhood encounter with a MkII Ford Lotus Cortina was something of an epochal moment for me.
Most car designers will hate me for this, but I can't be doing with too many curves. Maybe it's a masculine thing, or maybe it's that ingrained impression that if the metal can only be bent into a square shape, then it must be thick, strong metal. I was never so glad as when Mazda announced it was dropping the swoopy, wavy lines of its designs from the mid-2000s and instead going for something a bit squarer, a bit more upright.
To me, square cars just have more character. Compare the late seventies Ford Cortina (the MkIV and Mk V, built in Cork. Your dad or grandad will almost have inevitably owned one) with its successor. The Cortina was solid, square, sensible and strong enough that eventually they were banned from demolition derbies because nothing else could kill them. The successor, the Sierra? A lauded car in its day, but one eventually blamed for inflicting the bland 'jelly-mould' car shape on the world, which was only really eradicated in the late nineties.
Even Mercedes-Benz, which really should know better, hasn't been immune to adding needless curves to its cars, and the German firm's output in the mid-2000s was disgustingly ovoid. No wonder I'd rather have a W124 E-Class from the mid-eighties. In estate form, for extra square-ness of course.
Square is very versatile too, somewhat surprisingly. It can be funky and space-efficient (see the Nissan Cube, Honda Element or Fiat Panda) or it can be patrician and expensive in its bearing (Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, Mercedes 500SEC for example). It can even be a bit bonkers and outrageous (Aston Martin Lagonda, the William Towns one from the seventies).
So I say it's time to chuck out the curves and bring in the straight lines. Let's celebrate square-ness in all its rigid sensibleness and leave the curvy bits to the Freudian types. I think Huey Lewis said it best...
Incidentally, there's an Volvo 245 GL from the eighties for sale around the corner from me. And it's in beige. Should I take the cubic plunge?