Opinion: are 'curated' car options better than a free-for-all list?

Cyling through one of London’s hipsterish streets I see this, emblazoned in a cafe window: “Build-your-own or curated salad bowls.” Curated eh? What a word of our times, tiresomely deployed as a fancy dress description for any old take-it-or-leave it combination. High-end carmakers have latched on. You go on the configurator and you find you can’t actually choose what you want, but are instead directed to a combination of black-over-black with black wheels: ‘urban curated’. Or green-over-brown with chrome: ‘heritage curated’. My first impulse is to sneer. I know about cars and I want to pick my own spec: blue paint, dark tan cloth, no options except the brightest available headlights.

My second impulse is to try to be more generous. Maybe their designers do know more than me. As a student I used to build my own salad bowls as a means to get max calories at min cost. I’d start with a stockade wall of breadsticks or carrot batons to deepen the bowl, then layer up the densest material on the buffet trolley. But nowadays I acknowledge the best person to build a salad bowl is an actual chef, even if he insists on calling it a curation rather than a recipe.

Anyway, we’d better get used to it. Once, choice was a touchstone of the premium brands, from Mini upwards. You used to be able to pick almost any combo of power, petrol or diesel, auto or manual, two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive. A bewildering array even before you selected trims and options one by one.

Car buyers loved the idea of a red dash, but they all bottled it and defaulted to black

But the build-your-own car is fading into history. Drivetrain choices are narrowing. The options menu has shortened. Now it’s all about ‘packs’ or, at the sniffier end of the market, ‘curation’. If you want a hi-fi upgrade, you might find yourself saddled with one of those ridiculously annoying powered tailgates.

Some of this is about manufacturers navigating the WLTP test rules. Certifying a car’s consumption and CO₂ is a lengthier and more expensive process than it was, so they put up fewer powertrains. Besides, each option that adds weight or drag means a separate test. So they bundle the options.

Anyway, it costs them extra to build configurable cars. It’s a colossal logistical challenge, keeping tabs on the parts, and delivering them to the right point on the production line just as the individual car arrives. It also adds purchasing cost, because a dashboard supplier will charge extra if a small proportion of them need to be moulded in red or blue plastic. So it stopped. Car buyers loved the idea of being offered a red dash, but in the end they all bottled it and defaulted to black. Sorry, ‘urban curated’.

Anyway, is choice per se really a route to happiness? Even in the heyday of configuration, I always felt I couldn’t quite settle on the car I wanted. FOMO and choice paralysis took hold. So the experience felt like a bit of a let-down. In the end it’s often better to be told what to have. Curation is a silly and pretentious word, but I can get behind the idea.