The Brain Sees a Face in Every Car.

Daimler's research with the University of Ulm found that the brain's social-recognition centers automatically interpret car fronts as faces, headlights as eyes and the grille as a mouth.

Cars designed with confident facial expressions trigger stronger activation in reward and social-status circuits. A campaign built around this neural insight contributed to a 12% Q1 sales increase. The brain makes a social, emotional judgment of a car before it reads a single spec.