A frivolous fashion for fender vents

Dan Carney • E-mail

“Fashion fades, only style remains the same,” said style icon Coco Chanel, and now one popular bit of automotive ornamentation seems likely to fade, despite roots that extend nearly to the earliest cars.

It’s the frill festooning the front fender of an increasing number of newly introduced cars — a fender vent, or gill slot. It has been used for years in high-performance cars to cool off the engine, but in today’s ubiquitous application it’s typically a bit of tacked-on chrome plastic meant to evoke such a vent, but serving little or no such purpose.

“It has become a design cliché for this millennium,” commented John Manoogian, director of design at General Motors for Cadillac exteriors.

It’s a bitter conclusion for Manoogian, who included fender vents in the Cadillac CTS’s curriculum vitae, and also in its cousins, adding fender portholes on the Buick Lucerne full-size sedan.

But those cars have a history of fender perforation, and the new models’ fenders are actually punctured so there is a real vent, he points out.

“There are holes in [these cars’ fenders] and they are functional,” said Manoogian. “But it has become so ubiquitous now, everyone is using them in all manner and it is getting out of hand,” he added. “It has gotten so they are decorative pieces that are just tacked on the car.”

A vent’s legitimacy hinges on two things, according to Manoogian — historical use by the manufacturer and actual functionality. BMW claims that its history gives it license to glue fake plastic vents to its pumped up M3 sport sedan. The company used them on its classic 507 roadster and, more recently, on its Z3 sports car, so fake ones on the M3 are fine, insists spokesman Oleg Satanovsky.

But fakery by pretenders is beyond the pale.

“I’ve seen [added-on] M3 vents on Honda Civics,” Satanovsky groaned.

Non-functional vents have no legitimacy, declares senior statesman Peter Brock, who designed the universally acclaimed Shelby Daytona Coupe racing car in the 1960s. That car employed, yes, fender vents, to cool its engine. Among modern vents, the worst “are those that have no function,” Brock railed. “I don’t think any really good examples will make it to modern production cars.”

Part of the drive toward the use of vents on many new cars is the current preference for vehicles that have the wheels pushed far to the corners, both for aesthetic reasons and for the practical benefit of added space in the cabin.

A result of moving the front wheels forward is a lot of blank space between the wheels and the doors, notes Peter Horbury, Ford’s executive director for design for the Americas.

“A vent helps eat up a lot of space in what can be an empty area now that the front wheels are so far forward,” he said, although he admits the use of the vent is primarily for fashion purposes.

“Part of car design is fashion,” he explained. “We have to expect to use [a device like vents] and do away with it as fashion dictates.”

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