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We all know how the front of a car looks like a face. Headlights for eyes, the bonnet providing eyebrows and forehead, the grille making the mouth and the badge being the nose. Our human brains have evolved over thousands of years to be highly efficient pattern recognition devices. Primarily for threat and friend awareness this mechanism can have unusual side-effects such as ascribing faces to cars or seeing animals and shapes in the clouds overhead. The Man on the Moon is another such inference our brain makes for us.

Some cars generate more of an impact on us than others. Their ‘faces’ can be cute, docile, suave, fierce or angry; in fact the entire glut of human emotions can play out over these steel masks.

In 2008 Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna conducted a scientific trial to quantify the effect of us anthropomorphising car ‘faces’ – a phenomenon known as ‘pareidolia’. It concluded that 90% of us do see faces and attribute human traits to them. This has wide implications for car buyers and also for how people respond to their fellow road users.