When local control strategies are used to arrange a platoon into a string like formation, there is mounting evidence that a poorly regulated accordion like motion will emerge. In this paper we prove that this is an inevitable consequence of using local distance measurements to design the control. More specifically we demonstrate that no controller, irrespective of its dynamical complexity, sparsity, or linearity, can prevent the appearance of macroscopic behaviours in the platoon if only noisy measurements of the distances between neighbouring vehicles are available.