“Fashion fades, only style remains the same,” said the famous fashion icon Coco Chanel. Along this line, another auto part is destined to die. What would it be?The fender vents.
Auto experts say the famed ornamentation is likely to fade notwithstanding its enduring existence in the auto industry. To note, fender vents have been used cool off the engine in performance cars. This was the practice for years now. But today, the auto part is likely to be upstaged by the latest innovations in the industry.
“It has become a design cliché for this millennium,” said John Manoogian, director of design at General Motors for Cadillac exteriors. It’s a bitter conclusion for Manoogian, who included fender vents in the Cadillac CTS’s curriculum vitae, and also in its cousins, adding fender portholes on the Buick Lucerne full-size sedan, according to MSNBC.
“But those cars have a history of fender perforation, and the new models’ fenders are actually punctured so there is a real vent,” he stressed. “There are holes in [these cars’ fenders] and they are functional. But it has become so ubiquitous now, everyone is using them in all manner and it is getting out of hand. It has gotten so they are decorative pieces that are just tacked on the car.”
Manoogian said a vent’s legitimacy hinges on two things – historical use by the manufacturer and actual functionality.
According to the report, BMW is claiming that its history gives it license to glue fake plastic vents to its M3 sport sedan. The automaker used them on its classic 507 roadster and, more recently, on its Z3 sports car, so fake ones on the M3 are fine, said spokesman Oleg Satanovsky “I’ve seen [added-on] M3 vents on Honda Civics,” he added.
“A vent helps eat up a lot of space in what can be an empty area now that the front wheels are so far forward,” said Peter Horbury, Ford’s executive director for design for the Americas, although he admits the use of the vent is primarily for fashion purposes. “Part of car design is fashion. We have to expect to use [a device like vents] and do away with it as fashion dictates,” he explained.
Now the obvious trend is the use of plastic cladding; just take a look at Pontiac Aztec. Who will defy the flourishing trend?
“They will become the vinyl tops of the new millennium,” predicted Manoogian. “Twenty or thirty years from now, people will look back and say, ‘That car must have come from between 2004 and whenever’ because of the vents.”
Auto parts like engines, filter, wheel hub assembly and springs are vital to a vehicle. But who knows, innovations might upstage them in the near future.