Over the weekend, I had the good fortune of racing an E34-generation BMW 525i in South Carolina for a 24 Hours of LeMons event. (It would have been better if the good fortune had extended to the lifespan of the fuel pump, but that's a story for another time.) I was explaining to a friend why the E34 is my favorite generation of the 5 Series, and I heard myself saying, "Unlike the current Bimmers, it doesn't look angry."

"You're right," she replied, "the new ones are, like, really pissed off at something." Then we sat in silent thought for a minute. Why, exactly, does every new automobile with the slightest bit of aspirational positioning look furious for some reason? Why do they all have big open-mouthed faces full of sharp-looking toothy chrome? Why do they all have wrathful eyes with LED markers like murderous eyebrows?

Disagree if you like, but I believe that every car has a face, and I'm right about this. The faces can be froggy friendly, as was the case with the old Porsche 911 or its VW Bug ancestor. They can be reserved and serious, in the vein of the 1980s-era Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. But when you look behind you on the freeway today, all you'll see is anger.

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It's in the pickup trucks with their Peterbilt grilles and macho pretensions that would be hilarious if they weren't attached to a 3-ton unguided missile sniffing your rear license plate. It's in the big-nosed SUVs that seem to be continually frowning and squinting. Even the Toyota Avalon seems upset, possibly because the Hyundai Azera's doing such a good job of imitating it. The Azera, meanwhile, appears to be having a particularly unpleasant thought about someone or something, perhaps the Toyota Avalon.

Nor can you get anything remotely like a cheerful color on the bulk of today's cars. There's gray, and black, and that godforsaken non-color, silver. Some manufacturers are so in love with silver that they're offering two different silvers on the same model. If there's any actual color to be had in the brochure, more often than not it's red, the Martian and martial tone that seemed frisky on an E38 740il Sport but now just seems to add to the problem. Audi once offered the "Cool Shades" on their A4, fluorescent yellows and blues and greens, but now the company and its customers both take themselves far too seriously for such a thing to happen again.

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The cars have to be vicious-looking and color-free because they're being sold to people who wish to project that image. Your local cruising spot is chock-full of black Infiniti coupes with blacked-out windows and black-chrome replacement grilles. Somewhere in these TIE Interceptors are the drivers, who are often meek-looking, physically slight young men. They drive home at the end of each evening and park behind their exasperated mothers, whose Lexus RX and BMW X3 travel capsules show on their venomous visages all the fury that Zoloft represses for their owners. In traffic, they're pressing on you, honking, waving, flipping you off, just absolutely engulfed in righteous annoyance concerning your refusal to let them cut in ahead when the lane ends.

Stefan Jermann

Every interaction we have with other drivers now is pre-poisoned by a vehicular aesthetic that seems designed to project malice. You look behind you in the mirror and see an angry car before you see the human being operating that car. We're designed by biology to recognize faces and emotions. The styling of modern cars is designed to play on that—to intimidate you, to put you on the defensive. Even my Accord Coupe, which is such a namby-pamby vehicle that its very name signifies nonaggression, came stock from the factory with LED markers that replicate the eyebrows of an angry caveman.

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Look what this desire to have one's car bully the rest of the motoring public has done to the exotics. A Miura was beautiful, but an Aventador is merely forceful. The stunning big Ferraris of the 1960s have been replaced by the current crop of furious Fezzas, their flanks tribal-tattooed with flame surfacing and their mouths open to swallow the opposition whole. Further down the food chain, see how the changes to the 2015 Mustang are all about being squinty-eyed and hard-faced?

When Audi introduced the S5 a few years ago, I was smitten by it and immediately decided to buy one. However, I didn't like the way the "eyebrows" and the mouth combined to look deliberately mean-spirited, so I decided to take some counter-action. The nice people from Ingolstadt permitted me to order my S5 in a bright vintage lime green. I thought this obvious statement of cheer would tone down the car's built-in anger a bit.

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Once I took delivery and various candid photos of my Audi appeared on the Internet, the other S5 owners became even angrier than they'd been prior to my sacrilege. En masse, they thundered their disapproval on the Audi forums, screaming their fingers sore about how "weak" and "stupid" my car looked. Their signature forum photos typically showed a lowered S5 with blacked-out windows in either black or silver. Angry cars for angry young men. But I was no longer young, nor was I angry, and I wanted my daily driver to reflect that.

Women loved it, naturally. They're never as impressed by or interested in our putative toughness as we'd like to believe. The bright-green coupe made friends wherever it went. Even today, six years after it was built, it occasionally crops up on the Pinterest pages of various young ladies. I used to joke that I'd never be single for any day in which I owned that car.

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But the most significant interaction I had during that time wasn't with a female of any type. It happened on a Thursday morning. I was driving down a rural road and I noticed a bright blue Ford Focus pulling up behind me. The fellow driving it barely fit behind the wheel due to his considerable bulk, most of it muscle. He was banging on his horn with one hand and using the other hand to express his displeasure with me. There couldn't have been 6 inches between our bumpers. This wasn't good.

I wasn't more than 3 miles from home but I didn't want him to follow me there. When we came to a halt at a stoplight, I decided to address the issue directly. I screwed my courage to the sticking-place, as Lady Macbeth once advised, and I stepped out. As did he. I'm not a small man but he was considerably larger and tougher-looking.

"Hey," I inquired, rather tremulously, "what did I do?"

"YOU CUT ME OFF BACK THERE!" he screamed, walking towards me rapidly.

"Well, I didn't mean to. How about we trade places."

"TRADE PLACES?" This just seemed to make him angrier.

"Yeah. If I wasn't supposed to be in front of you, I'll stop and you can drive around." He came to a halt. It was just the two of us, with no traffic around, sitting at a stoplight. "Come on," I said, and then I had an idea. "Just look at us." And I waved my hand, to indicate my bright green car and his bright blue one.

He looked at the cars, for a long couple of seconds, back and forth. Then he looked at me.

"Naw, it's alright. It doesn't matter." For a moment, he searched the ground ahead of him with his eyes, wringing his massive hands. Then he raised his gaze back to me. "I'm sorry. I lost my job. I don't know what to do."

"It's okay," I offered, and because I didn't know what else to say, "I'm on your side. I'm sure it's going to be OK." Then, after a silent moment, we turned and walked back to our cars and drove on to our respective destinations, aware of our mutual humanity and perhaps, just perhaps, not as angry as before.

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