Mitsubishi Once Gave Their Little HVAC Guy A Striking Profile

You know who one of the most famous yet least-celebrated figures in the automotive world is? It’s someone that shows up, tirelessly, on dashboard controls and street signs, a stand in for every single one of us. It’s someone who shares our basic body plan, but dramatically simplified, eliminating all details and such frivolous features as hands, feet, and, yes, necks. Heads have been streamlined into perfect spheres. I’m talking about the Iconic Human, known from walk/don’t walk lights and various seating and HVAC controls in cars and all sorts of other vehicles, and, I think, hospital beds.

These Oliver Cromwell-like (get it?) figures are generally pretty consistent in how they are rendered, whether it’s a half-inch high on a dashboard control or a big glowing Euro-style exit sign, where they appear to be in quite a hurry. But there is one notable exception, a rare example of this universal figure being granted the gift of a lone, but quite important, facial feature: a nose.

These en-schnozzed figures seem to appear in primarily one place: the dashboards of 1986 to 1991 or so Mitsubishis.

Look at that little guy there, and look at that prominent beak of a nose that fella has. It’s bold and pointy, quite proud and prominent, and perhaps the confidence this strong nose gives him is why he’s not flinching from those dramatic arrows of (presumably) conditioned air that are menacing the front and rear of his head.

The nose is quite prominent on cars like the 3000GT and the Debonair, where these photos are taken, from a 1991 model. The nose here flows elegantly from the forehead, looking quite aquiline.

The proboscis-enhanced figure shows up on Mitsubishi electronic displays as well, again menaced by arrows of air:

As the 1980s slowly morphed into the 1990s, the decade of morphing, the noses began to shrink, and become less prominent:

Eventually, the noses became but a tiny suggestion of a nose, a little pointy nub more suited to a budgie than a parrot, a nearly-vestigial bit of cranial character that was on its way out.

By the mid ’90s, Mitsubishi’s experiments in facial features for their humanus genericus had ended, and their iconography had become indistinguishable from anyone else’s.

But for those of us who care – like our daydreaming designer, The Bishop, who shared many of these images with me – we remember the time when Mitsubishi’s dashboards contained a bit more character, a bit more distinction, and for once, had little human icons that looked like they actually smelled.

Verb, not adjective.