Combining 250 Car Designs Into Just One Gets You This, Apparently
Meet the Omnia Novus: A car so familiar to you, you probably see one like it right now.
Gaze long enough into the abyss and the Omnia Novus might just gaze back at you. The Omnia Novus is more than just a new car, it’s every new car. It's the creation of U.K. car dealer Hippo Leasing for … reasons*. The Novus isn’t quite an AI-generated vehicle—partly because I tried doing that and it looks nothing like this—but rather a very crowd-sourced vehicle made from 250 other cars.
The group said they amassed 750 photos from 250 cars—side, front and rear—and overlayed the group on top of each other. With the opacity turned way down, artists broadly sketched all the cars' designs into one shape, which created the structural design for the Novus. From there, they filled in the rest of the panels and sheet metal to return this Ford Puma-BMW X1-Honda HR-V-thing. Same goes for the Omnia badge, which is an amalgamation of 32 different automaker badges, created in roughly the same way.
For the color, they did what the rest of us would do: Ask Google. Turns out “red” was the most popular search term for a car’s color last year, et voila. (Maybe jazz it up in 2023, folks. Let’s search for “Soul red” or “Viper red” this year?)
Comedy lives in the details, and the Omnia Novus has plenty. The name: omnia is the plural nominative Latin for “everything,” and novus is the singular nominative for “new,” so there’s that. There’s enough detail in the body sides and beltline that it almost feels real, too. Maybe I'd smooth over the rear glass and rocker panels, but I'm nitpicky.
Hippo Leasing says they were looking at the shapes that dominated car design in the late 20th and early 21st century, and what they’ve created is pretty spot on. The next 30 years of automotive design is unknown; so much of what dominates design today is dictated by either crash safety or cooling, both of which change significantly for electric vehicles. And the Omnia Novus is certainly continental in its design and direction; if it were based on American tastes and car buying habits, it’d look a lot like this:
*I'm sure they have plenty, but I can't think of what any of them would be right now.
