Posted on September 23, 2008 by Fiona Hilliard

Are you more inclined to give way to a BMW than a Nissan Micra?  If you drive a dominant looking SUV are you guaranteed to win daily ‘battles’ on the road? Should your car hire decisions reflect your personality/ the personality you’d like to project to other drivers?

A German study recently set out to find out the answers to these questions.  According to the findings of the study, it’s possible for humans to tell whether a car is easy-going, or aggressive because we are programmed to scan faces for information.

Over centuries of evolution, humans have honed the ability to distinguish whether a person is a friend or a foe, helpful or hostile- in some cases it’s the difference between life or death.

Checking whether this ability extends to motor vehicles, a team of researchers led by Karl Grammer of the University of Vienna asked 20 men and 20 women to rate the front ends of 38 cars, all the same colour.

The volunteers were asked to examine each car’s face for 19 different criteria icluding whether the face was more like a child or an adult, friendly or hostile, male or female, arrogant, happy, afraid or aggressive.

Cars that had a low slung bonnet and wide front were classified overall as male.  Submissive, friendly and child-like cars were found to be Nissan’s New Micra, Volkswagen’s New Beetle and the Kia Picanto.