How to be cool

There is much to like about the Vauxhall Adam. The name isn’t one of them, obviously, but the overall design and the personalisation programme is impressive. However, I’m not totally sure about all the marketing guff for the car itself. I feel like a grumpy old fart for criticising bosses for calling the exterior colours things like Buzz Lightgreen and James Blonde. I know it’s just a bit of fund, but to me it just smacks of trying too hard to be trendy. Being genuinely cool and fashionable and sustaining it past the initial hype isn’t something you can really dictate or create. It’s about allowing people to discover something, engage with it and then have it spread organically. Ironically it was Vauxhall’s lunch venue in Lisbon, Portugal that cemented the point for me. It was an old industrial area, with cobbled streets and old warehouses turned into quirky shops and creative businesses. It was properly cool, but that was because it was authentic and probably 50 years in developing. The Adam isn’t cool because it hasn’t been 50 months in the making. Part of me thinks the car would do better if Vauxhall just left it alone.