If you search for photos or drawings of any particular car, the vast majority are facing to the left. You do see some facing right, most of those are 3/4 views of the front. Fairly rare to see a straight side shot facing right unless it is from an article with multiple photos of the car showing all angles.
My grandson has a large set of autos, trucks, aircraft, etc printed on rubber (like puzzle pieces), and every one faces left. Perhaps we are most interested in the driver’s side. Do Brits draw their cars facing the other way?
And yet, if you look at all the cars passing by (US), the ones on your side of the road are facing right.
If you’re drawing by hand, and you’re right-handed, you tend to start on the left side of the surface, and work towards the right. And, if you are drawing a car, you tend to start with the front of the car, and work towards the back.
Put these two tendencies together, and you end up with drawings of cars tending to face to the left.
That can’t explain the photographs, though. A wild guess may be that publicity photographs of cars may be produced by marketing people from the perspective you would have if approaching the car to get in and drive it away. (Gives a sense of possession, or control, or something.) For left-hand-drive cars, this will again result in photographs of cars facing to the left.
I’d go with this. I’m no artist by any stretch, but I’ve sketched for most of my life, and I’m right handed. Not long ago, I tried my “talent” to see if I’ve improved over the years. I began drawing cars that went to the left. When I tried going to the right, it just felt “wrong”. It’s like drawing a circle. If you normally draw a circle by starting at the top, then go counterclockwise, that’s “normal” for a right handed person. A lefty would start at the top, and draw clockwise. (Naturally, not every single person does it that way…there are exceptions of course)
If you are selling or advertising a car, they say it is best to show the car from the driver’s side as this helps people imagine themselves driving it. They also say that it is best to show the front of the car, as this is where a lot of the styling is on cars. They say that some people have ugly butts and so do some cars, so don’t shoot it from the rear.
So the “best” shot from a photography point of view is a 3/4 shot on the driver’s side, which shows the driver’s side and the front simultaneously. If you are going to do one photograph of the car, that’s the one you want.
If the Brits follow the same logic, I would expect them to shoot the car facing the opposite direction so that their driver’s side can be seen. I have no idea if they actually follow this or not though.
It also follows the pre-computers draftsmanship conventions for 3-D drawings in most of the world: the front of the object should be on the right side of the picture. This applied to cars, houses or any other object pictured in perspective by itself (that is, not to a view of a street, but to an isolated building).
I did some searches showing advertisements for cars. Private sales showed a pretty random selection of angles, but when I looked at Ford advertisements, there was a strong bias towards front and driver’s side pictures.
A bit like how all clocks in shops are set at ten to two.
I still say it’s confirmation bias. When I draw, I usually have the subject coming into the frame from the left, same with my photography. So it seems more natural that a car would be driving from left to right. Same with a person or an animal, all entering from the left and facing right. Perhaps it has to do with reading from left to right. I’m wondering whether there’s a difference in countries with right-to-left reading.
i just searched for a wide range of marquees in LHD and RHD and couldn’t find a statistically relevant bias either way. Definitely felt I could see bias before i actually made a tally though.
This video talks about the subconscious effects of lateral movement to the left vs to the right in movies. But according to its logic, car advertisements should be showing cars pointing to the right to create a more positive effect.
To buttress what Little Nemo said, I studied filmmaking in college and we were taught to show things (people, cars, etc) moving from left to right to imply progress or moving forward. Moving right to left implied moving back to where you came from. This is inferred because we read from left to right.
So I’m a little surprised to learn that the standard for car ads is right to left. I’d never noticed that before.
I checked used car listings in the UK and Norway and found that in the UK about half had a main picture with the front of the car pointing right. The rest pointed left or straight into the camera.
In Norway … about half pointed right, with the rest pointing left or straight into the camera. Too close to call and I’d go with confirmation bias.
I also checked several car manufacturer web-pages. Although there seemed to be a tendency for the main picture to show cars pointing to the left, or most of the cars in the picture pointing left, there’s not enough overall bias to claim from a cursory search that left is the most common.
My informal Google search shows a slight but definite majority of “glamor” shots showing the cars facing to the left.
Here’s my WAG: the steering wheel is on the left. If you’re showing the car, you want to show (or at least not hide) the driver’s spot. Since that’s on the left side, you need to show the vehicle facing to the left.
I suppose to verify this I could do a search of photos of right-hand drive models, but when I searched that term almost all of the images that came up were of vehicle interiors. I’ll leave it to someone who’s familiar with individual marques to do a detailed search.
In pre-CAD days the shapes of airplanes and ships (and likely cars) were “lofted” or defined by “station lines” (cross sections), “butt lines” (lateral), and “water lines” (height). The zero station line is toward the nose with station line #'s increasing toward the tail; therefore in a traditional X-Y drafting layout all airplanes faced left.
Yeah, it actually is. I hadn’t posted a re-post because I’m still trying to figure out 1) how did I understand the OP as saying the opposite of what it said 2) if there is a side variation by location, either in usage or in generation* (there is in draftmanship standards, but not in visual media) and 3) if I should or should not start drinking coffee.
And at the same time, other than apologizing, I’m not really sure I care enough to investigate… I usually only read car mags while waiting for my car.
Are, say, American carmakers likely to picture cars heading left whereas Japanese ones picture them heading right? Is there a difference between stills and ads? Car mags vs ads? Is there actually no such difference in reality, only in the OP’s perceptions?