Car companies both follow and set trends, depending on many factors from the designer's idea to the bean counters' cost assessment to what the board of management thinks will work. However, the car world seems a little lost at the moment. We have a Ford that is both an SUV and a Mustang, we have a BMW 7 Series that looks like it auditioned for the part of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and we have Tesla promising a truck that looks like a few chopping boards were pasted together. Then we have the new Subaru WRX, a car that we're told is a sedan but that features crossover-inspired styling cues that nobody seems to like. Fortunately, The Sketch Monkey knows how to fix those appalling looks.

The artist refers to the WRX Concept from 2013 as well as 2018's Viziv Performance STI Concept. Just like him, we were expecting the new Subaru WRX to draw loads of inspiration from this concept's design. From the front, the likeness between these earlier concepts and the 2022 production car isn't hard to see, but other angles are iffy at best. The profile shows off squared wheel arches and an unresolved shoulder line. The artist doesn't see too much trouble in the arches and can make the shoulder line less obviously bad, but only if the rear gets reworked considerably.

The Sketch Monkey, therefore, decided to shorten the height of that ridiculous rear diffuser and narrow the taillights. These changes help give the car an impression of increased width, an effect that is brought home by enlarging the wheels one size and spacing them out a little. In that diffuser, the exhaust tips have also been repositioned so that they make more sense, and the stick-on rear spoiler lip has been replaced with a duckbill trunk. Finally, those narrowed taillights get proper concept-inspired accents in the form of a segregated light bar connecting them to the badge. It looks a lot better, and we wish Subaru had gone this route instead. Hopefully, the STI version will make us forget all about the messy 2022 WRX.