Let me start by saying that I've long been a fan of aggressive front end designs. Ever since Dodge pioneered the thin, squint eye look on the original Intrepid back in the 1990s, angry has been successfully applied to designs from all brands. Increase the top slope leading down to the grille and - bam - last year's model looks goofy and doe-eyed.

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Crucially, that style still allowed automakers to maintain their own brand identities in the headlight design.

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BMW's halos were there, even without the top quarter. The W211 still looked like an E-class with the ovals pointing inwards. Hell, even Chevy made their cumbersome span-wise chrome bar from the Silverado work with the 2004 Malibu using angry eyes.

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The hypersonic multiplication of split-headlight designs over the past three years do not let those brand identities shine through. And that's why it's such a confounding design choice.

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Those four SUVs you see above all came from different manufacturers. Most of you ultra carheads will know that, but I bet that if even with the badges kept on, you wouldn't be able to differentiate one from the other at one hundred feet. Yet this brand distinction has driven the explosion of wild angles, complex curves and predator faces proliferating the car world since mid-decade.

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Quick refresher - in the split headlight format, the top row of lights contains the daytime running lights, perhaps a low beam and occasionally the turn signal. A second set of lights directly below contain the main beams and the fog lights in a handful of designs.

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In the four above, every one has the main beams in the bottom section and DRLs with turn signals in the top (with the exception of the Santa Fe). This design style is certainly interesting and at first glance satisfies my craving for pure aggression front designs. But it is an inherently flawed and constrained setup for three reasons.

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First, it requires a thin, highly slanted top section to work. Otherwise you end up with the hysterically dopey look of the base Super Duty from the late aughts:

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To achieve the look they're going for, which I can only interpret as tricking you into thinking that the regular set of lights is "hidden", the top section has to be thin. And to make sure the lights comply to federal regulations, the bottom set has to be large enough to actually cast light. A sneaky way that they make this come together better is positioning the bottom set so they look like a higher than normal set of fog lights. The Blazer and Cherokee are perfect examples of this.

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The problem for brand identity here is the required thinness of the top. They remove practically all of the useable space for designers to add brand elements, like BMW with the halos (which are completely gone on the forthcoming X7 and 7 series). The Hyundai above looks aggressive, but there's nothing "Hyundai" about it. Same with the Blazer, and arguably the Cherokee - which is barely saved from being any other of the billion crossovers in the world by the seven slot grille. Emphasis on barely.

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All scream "predator face" to you. Not a particular brand or school of design thought.

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Second of the three problems are the connecting points and angle to the grille. Such a thin top element means that the light has to run into an exponentially larger grille space, unless the designer is fine with a razor thin grille to match. Gone are the days where grilles and headlights would be on the same plane, which admittedly were first killed by the Mount Rushmore-sized grille trend ten years ago.

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I argue that none of the designs above successfully connect the lights and grille cohesively. All four attempt to connect a panel line to the top of the grille, but end up just looking like tiny headlights connected to a behemoth of an opening. The Jeep is actually the most inelegant, though at least it achieves brand identity through brute force and simply not giving a fuck above cohesion.

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The seven slot grille is a brand identity element that obviously wasn't designed with modern aggressiveness in mind. Designers run the risk of making corporate grilles look slapped on when applied with the split headlight design. And they're right. The X7 is shaping up to be a cynically designed monster, the automotive equivalent of an accomplished forty year old wearing the same chunky Filas they saw on their kid's Tiktok feed.

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The world bemoaned the X7's grille when it was new. Soon it will look positively perfectly proportioned. The juxtaposition between the two achieve the dual effect of making the thin top units look extra thin, and the grille looking absolutely gigantic - even more than it already did.

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BMW is likely unaffected given the supernova sized expansion of its grilles. But this hasn't done the Santa Fe, Equator or Blazer any favors.

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The third and final problem is that they are paired with body shapes that aren't readily identifiable as a particular brand. Crossovers, SUVs and sedans - all were suffering from brand osmosis and having identical front ends makes the problem even worse. With BMW abandoning the Hoffmeister kink, the criminal underuse of the hatchback (Model S and Panamera notwithstanding), and the jellybean shape of every single crossover built since the late sixteenth century, the front end was one of the last areas of car design that was still distinguishable.

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With the lights being closer than ever to the becoming the standard design choice, the grille is now the only thing apart from the badge that separates marques. The kidneys become even more important, the seven slot becomes paramount. But this only works for brands with identifiable grilles.

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Hyundai is still pushing that busted up hexagon, Chevy has no clue what a grille even means any more, and Ford gave up completely, applying a featureless rounded square to all its new designs.

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Add those up, and you have a design trend that is eviscerating the front identities of the world's most storied marques. Look, I'm all for brands evolving and am always dying to see what the next version of a 7 series will be. But split headlights feel like brands are cheaply affixing themselves to the current hot thing, rather than making distinctive, bold interpretations of their historical brand elements. Instead of reimagining how the BMW halos can look, or how Ford can make the new Ford Whatever show flashes of MK2 Escort, they slap on split headlights and a big grille, and call it a day.

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And hey, it'll likely work from a sales perspective. Which is all that matters, I understand. But as a design connoisseur, this feels like the commoditization of aggressive designs coming full circle.

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At least Hyundai got it right with the new Tucson. Hell, they made you think they skipped the top row of lights altogether by blending them into the grille. The venn diagram of grille and headlight intersection should piss me off - but it doesn't. It's not connected to any prior Hyundai design language, it's just fun, new and weird as hell!

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Let's hope the evolution of this trend starts putting some distinction back into designs. Or go away altogether.

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That's fine too.

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