There are literally huge debates about minor things like this in car magazine reviews, followed by tens of thousands of comments on various automotive forums debating the finer aesthetics of different head or tail light designs. It can get downright vitriolic: one person's beautiful is another's fugly.
I found the tail lights to be the first thing anyone spoke of when talking about the car - in person most people said they loved them, online many people hated them except for the base of customers that loved the car. And no amount of performance data would convince them to drive the car - the tail lights were THE deal breaker.
I've had similar debates over he colour of mud flaps I had on my old Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution (they were red, on a metallic orange car). Again, people online in enthusiast forums felt I was mentally ill and they would never drive such a monstrosity, it was just a personal preference for me. The colour for them was the deal breaker. http://www.zercustoms.com/news/images/Mitsubishi/Lancer-Evol...
Just like some won't drive a green car even if it has amazing stats.
The moral is: Most people don't think like engineers, for better or worse.
A couple years ago I drove a car with very distinctive tail lights (the Mercedes CLA AMG: http://images.caricos.com/m/mercedes-benz/2014_mercedes-benz...
I found the tail lights to be the first thing anyone spoke of when talking about the car - in person most people said they loved them, online many people hated them except for the base of customers that loved the car. And no amount of performance data would convince them to drive the car - the tail lights were THE deal breaker.
I've had similar debates over he colour of mud flaps I had on my old Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution (they were red, on a metallic orange car). Again, people online in enthusiast forums felt I was mentally ill and they would never drive such a monstrosity, it was just a personal preference for me. The colour for them was the deal breaker. http://www.zercustoms.com/news/images/Mitsubishi/Lancer-Evol...
Just like some won't drive a green car even if it has amazing stats.
The moral is: Most people don't think like engineers, for better or worse.