There’s a red-and-silver Honda CRX that shows up in a parking lot near a park I walk regularly. Not always — it’s not a daily thing — but often enough that I’ve started to look for it. When it’s there, I stop. I stare longer than a car deserves. I’ve owned other Hondas. I never owned this model, and by the time I could have, I was a family man, and a two-door coupe with a back seat that barely qualifies as a suggestion wasn’t a thing you brought home. That’s still true. I still love it anyway.
For a long time I thought the pull was nostalgia — an artifact from a specific decade doing what artifacts from specific decades do, standing in for the whole era around them. But nostalgia doesn’t usually make you stop walking.
Something more specific was going on, and I only located it recently, looking at a rendering of Tesla’s Cybercab: the same silhouette. Not the same car, not the same era, not the same anything except the one thing that matters most in a side profile — the roofline. Low nose, a peak over the front seats, one continuous downward sweep to a short, cropped tail. No break at the B-pillar to speak of. Glass that continues the line of the roof instead of interrupting it.
Two cars, forty years apart, arriving at the identical answer to a formal problem. That’s the kind of coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence — it’s a shape that keeps getting rediscovered whenever the constraints line back up.
The Cybercab gets there because there’s no driver’s compartment to package around, no B-pillar structure fighting for space, nothing back there to make room for. The roofline can just fall away because there’s nothing left to interrupt it.
The CRX got there from the opposite direction — not by subtraction of function but by subtraction of everything else. Weight. Drag. Ornament.
What I didn’t expect, going looking, was how much fear was baked into that shape.
The CRX wasn’t dreamed up in some skunkworks with time to spare. It came out of what Honda’s own people described, at the time, as something close to an image crisis — the third-generation Civic was about to launch into a market with sharper competitors than the last one, and the man responsible for small-car development at Honda R&D was worried the company’s whole small-car identity was aging out from under it. The response was billed internally as a kind of renaissance, and the CRX was its opening statement — not a side project, but the leading edge of an “all-out attack.”
The person who actually shaped it, Hiroshi Kizawa, had already put his career on the line once, on the original Civic — a car he believed Honda’s future as a real manufacturer depended on. He came back and did it again, smaller and stranger this time: a two-seat coupe, under 900 kilograms, wrapped in plastic body panels molded in-house, chosen partly because they could someday be recycled — Honda thinking, in 1981, about what happened to the car after its life was over, which is its own small strangeness worth sitting with.
The reception at home was lukewarm in a way I find almost endearing now. One Japanese trade magazine at the time called it a dehydrated Camaro with some boy-racer posturing, allowing that it might not be beautiful but was at least likeable. That’s a strange epitaph for a car I’d call one of the most purely resolved shapes of its decade. But maybe that’s how it goes with real design — the people closest to it, watching it get made under pressure, can’t yet see what it will look like from forty years out, parked in a lot, still stopping people who weren’t even born when it launched.
Less than six months after the CRX reached showrooms, Honda started work on what would eventually become the NSX. The unglamorous little economy coupe, born from institutional anxiety and injection-molded plastic, turned out to be the warm-up act for the most serious sports car the company would ever build. Fear, it turns out, is not a bad place to start, if the people afraid of it are good enough to turn it into something worth being afraid for.
Which makes me think of Ferrari’s own version of this moment, playing out right now. Their first electric car, the Luce, is exactly the kind of institutional fear the CRX was born from — a company that has to prove it still belongs to the future, using a technology it didn’t choose. And where Honda answered that fear with a shape, a single unbroken line that turned scarcity into style, Ferrari answered it with a four-door liftback, roomy and glassy and, by most early accounts, nobody’s idea of a Ferrari silhouette. I wish they’d gone the other way. I wish somebody at Maranello had looked at what a wedge does when you strip a car down to its constraints — no engine bay to hide, no B-pillar to interrupt, nothing left but the line from nose to tail — and had the nerve to make the Luce look like it was afraid of something, the way the CRX clearly was.
I think about that shape differently now — not as a wedge from the eighties, and not as a preview of some robotaxi’s rendering either, but as a shape that seems to arrive whenever a design team is left with almost nothing to hide behind. No engine bay to speak of. No back seat to protect. No driver at all, in one case. What’s left, both times, is the same honest line — nose to tail, unbroken — and I wonder what it says that the shape survives every reason for making it, outlasting the fear and the plastic and the market anxieties that produced it, showing up again decades later for reasons nobody involved the first time could have guessed.
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