It's like the wind, some say.
Or gravity.
You can't see it, but you know it's there.
You can't find its button on the dash. Or its chapter in the owner's manual.
We have no drawings of it. We don't know how much it weighs. Can't time it on the track.
Ask ten of our engineers about it, and get ten different answers.
But there's no debate about its existence.
After just one day behind the wheel, it's the most valuable part of the car.
The irreplacable component.
The thing you love more and more with every passing mile. The thing you instantly miss in any other car.
The soul.
This is from a commercial for the Porsche Taycan. It also shows what I consider to be the most important quality in any engineering product. The soul.
People often talk about soul when discussing cars. A car's soul communicates through its steering, handling, sound, and all other kinds of feedback to the driver. People often say a car has soul when it is communicative and offers something unique. They wax lyrical about cars like the Mazda Miata, where its frankly pathetic performance figures are completely outshone by its playful charm and spirit. On the other hand, people often say a car is soulless when it is bland and dull, not responding coherently to any of the driver's inputs. The new 2024 C63 AMG is the perfect example; it makes 671 horsepower with an incredibly complex hybrid system derived from Formula One, yet journalists rant on about its excessive weight, subpar chassis, and overcomplicated interface.
The Miata simply distills and conveys the joy of driving directly to the driver, whereas the C63 manufactures and synthesizes it in its own weird, discombobulated way through layers of overly complicated technology and bloat. While the Miata was made with the singular purpose of driving pleasure and stuck with the same recipe for over 30 years, the C63 is suddenly trying to be multiple things it is not - a comfy luxury sedan, a track-ready sports car, and an economical daily driver - and fails to excel at most those. While on paper, the C63 decimates the Miata in every metric, it fails miserably in real life, as it simply lacks the soul to do so.
Porsche is right. What doesn't show on paper is the most important quality of a car.
To me, this idea extends far beyond cars. The soul of any engineering product, whether it's a car, an app, or a circuit board, is breathed into by those who create it, specifically by these three qualities: purpose, simplicity, and attention to detail. These three qualities of an engineer are directly transferred to his or her creations, and that is what gives a product soul.
"THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN ANY TWO POINTS IS A STRAIGHT LINE"
- ArchimedesDesigns have soul when it has a clear purpose; everything in the design should be there for a reason, to fulfill the design's goals and nothing more. More importantly, its purpose should stay consistent through the engineering cycle. The moment an engineer strays away from those goals, the design loses its ability and confidence to fulfill its purpose. And there's nothing more sad than existing without purpose.
This means the design should be honest with itself; It should be confident with what it is and what it's supposed to do, and never try to be something it is not. I believe the confidence and honesty of a design, and thus its ability to fulfill its purpose, is transferred directly from the engineer to the product. Thus, an engineer who is confident and honest in themselves will always make confident, honest designs.
This is why I find such immense beauty in mission-critical products of engineering with sky-high stakes, such as satellites, heat-seeking missiles, or Formula One cars. They are all constructed with a singular purpose in mind, an extremely specific set of designated tasks, to be carried out in surgical precision with ideally zero chance of failure. The soul of such machines lie in the beauty of such finely orchestrated precision.
"AN IDIOT ADMIRES COMPLEXITY, A GENIUS ADMIRES SIMPLICITY"
- Terry Davis"SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF SOPHISTICATION"
- Leonardo Da VinciI believe the ultimate goal of any engineering project is to maximize efficiency; doing as much as possible with the least amount of resources. Simple solutions reduce complexity, which means less things to go wrong, which means increased reliability. It also leads to more intuitive solutions with increased end user appeal, especially for consumer products. Simplicity is one of the very few things in life that costs nothing to implement, yet pays enourmmous dividends throughout the entire engineering development cycle, from idea to fabrication.
Ironically, the beauty of simplicity lies in the sheer complexity and effort it takes to achieve it. It requires both low-level fundamental understanding as well as a high-level view of the finished product, along with intuition that can only be obtained with lots of experience. To make a product simple, one must understand it in its most complex form, down to the very last minute detail, and be able to distill the essence of that product to a simplified solution. Simplification is, in my opinion, the most valuable skill any engineer can have.
Simple things are beautiful because they are pure. The beauty of a simplification lies in the sheer density of skill and engineering behind it, tighty bound into a concentrated ball that has everything it needs and nothing it does not. It's this purity that I so strongly believe adds to the soul of a machine.
"GOOD DESIGN IS THOROUGH, DOWN TO THE LAST DETAIL"
- Dieter RamsUNDER CONSTRUCTION