Small Cars get Sexier

Small cars sold in America are generally cheap to buy. They also usually look cheap. That's because labor costs for building a small car aren't much less that the cost of assembling a larger car. So what suffers is appearance.

Small cars use less material than larger cars, but not grossly less. What they don't usually have are parts made from top-quality materials. That is, instrument panel knobs and switches are made of cheap plastic, seats are simple and covered with comparatively inexpensive cloth, wheels feature small hubcaps or phoney-metallic disks made of plastic and so forth. Body shapes tend to be simple as well. Rather than fluid lines and dips and creases requiring multiple metal press strikes, sheet metal is usually shaped using as few strikes as possible to cut fabrication costs.

A major exception to all this was the original Volkswagen Beetle that hit American shores in the 1950s. VWs, while not luxurious, were clearly well made and were a sales success.

In the last few years run-of-the-mill small cars are being challenged by new models featuring styling that's as flashy as that used on much more expensive models. Hyundai and Ford are leading the charge; if their sales are good, other makers will have to follow suit.

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Chevrolet Cobalt - 2007
The Cobalt features some metal sculpting along the sides, but other body panels are generally simple. It looks cheap to me.

Kia Rio - 2009
The same goes for the Rio, a truly basic car.

Ford Focus - 2011
This is Ford's latest iteration of its popular Focus model. It's a European car with modifications required by American regulations and consumer tastes. Note the fancy sheet medal work; it's a lot classier looking than the Cobalt and Rio shown above.

Hyundai Elantra - 2011
The Elantra is also heavily sculpted, providing an image that doesn't seem cheap.

Last-Ditch Car Styling

Sometimes there's a last spurt of flame before the candle dies, or so I recall hearing it said.

True or not, something similar sometimes happens with automobile companies that are about to flat-line. In this instance it's a final roll of the dice, betting what money the company has left on a flashy model that is either brand new or (more likely, given the cost factor) a major styling face-lift.

Where money is totally lacking, nothing much gets changed and the brand dies with nothing but a whimper. Badge-engineered British makes that died in the 1960s are a case in point.

This post deals with some American brands that went down fighting with regard to styling. They are: Hupmobile, which was gone by 1940; Graham, that ceased production in the 1941 model year and had a curious afterlife (see the link for details); Kaiser, the only halfway successful post-World War 2 new brand; and Studebaker which built the Raymond Loewy designed Avanti for a few years before dying in the mid-1960s while trying to sell its Lark-based sedans with facelift after facelift after facelift.

Here are these companies' last (or nearly-so) gasps:

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1939 Graham "Sharknose" coupe
The "Sharknose" (a popular name, not the official company version) Graham was largely designed by Amos Northrup as an attention-getting style in the pseudo-streamlined fashion of the 1930s. For some reason I rather like it, though it was not a sales success and the company continued its slide out of the industry.

Surrealist Man Ray in his 1941 Graham Hollywood
Not a publicity shot: he actually bought one when he returned to the USA after France fell and was living in the Los Angeles area. Aside from the hood and grille, the Hollywood used body panels from the Cord brand that failed after the 1937 model year. The Cord 810 and 812 models of 1936-37 are not included here because they represented the revival of a brand that had been discontinued a few years earlier.

1939 Hupmobile Skylark
Hupp shared Cord bodies with Graham, though few of the Hupmobile versions were built. The car depicted is a prototype with a front that looked Cord-like apart from the tacked-on headlights (the Cord had them hidden in the fenders). Production versions looked almost identical to the Grahams shown above.

1954 Kaiser
This is how the last American-built Kaisers looked. It was a major facelift of the 1953 version. Changes included the Buick-like grille, wraparound rear window and elaborate tail light housings. Production continued in South America for a few years with another facelift style.

1962 Studebaker Avanti
Studebaker announced the sensational Avanti almost 50 years ago, yet the styling could just as easily be for a 2011 model aside from a few details such as the windshield angle (a 2011 would have greater slope).

Renault Streamlined Cars - 1934

I wrote about automobile streamlining in both the technical and stylistic senses here and here. Now I'd like to mention a body style introduced by Renault at the October 1934 Paris auto show that was a first tangible step in the streamlining direction, a step roughly in line with what a few American manufacturers were doing at the time. (I exclude the larger step made by Chrysler with its Airflow that was introduced for the 1934 model year.)

I said "tangible step" because effort was made to go beyond essentially cosmetic streamlining features such as fender skirts and slightly inclined radiator grilles such as appeared a year or two earlier; I'll explain in the photo captions below.

One side-detail I find interesting is the fact that Renault was able to afford to put these changes into production, given their total output in those days -- about 55-60,000 cars per year. And that production was divided amongst three different body/chassis types: the low-end "Quatre," the mid-high range "Stella," "Nerva" and "Viva" lines (variations on the same package) and the semi-streamlined "Grand Sport" shown below. I don't have enough data at hand, so my guess is that French cars, small and large, were relatively more expensive than American equivalents. Otherwise, how could Renault and other firms remain in business and keep up with the technological and styling theme times?

Let's look at the Renault Grand Sports that were designed in 1933 or thereabouts.

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Here's a 1935 Nerva Grand Sport at one of the concours popular in France at the time. Note the sloped, V'd windshield, the sloped grille and the blending of the headlights into the fenders. These features surely improved aerodynamic efficiency somewhat. The sides of the car had partial streamlining despite what the swoopy fender line might suggest.

Another concours, this featuring a convertible version of the Grand Sport (note the English spelling of "Grand").

This side view shows that even though traditional fender profiling was preserved, fenders and running boards were in low relief compared to nealy all contemporary automobiles.

The view from above is useful because it shows that the front, hood and top were indeed noticeably more aerodynamically efficient than previous designs featuring vertical fronts, detached headlights and so forth.

This is a fragment of a publication I include to show what the rear windows looked like. Click to enlarge.

Compare the Renault to this 1935 Hupmobile. The Hupp also features embedded headlights and a sloping grille and windshield. However, the latter is a three-pane "wraparound" style rather than a two-pane vee. The sides of the Hupp are high-relief, typical styling practice until near the end of the decade.

This is Studebaker's Land Cruiser for 1934. Its curved rear and multi-pane back window design is in advance of nearly all 1934 competition and in the same spirit as the Renault. The rest of the car is conventional.

Dodge's Crippled Retro Charger

American Automobile makers use "Retro" styling a lot. There are reasons why, of varying degrees of plausibility. One might be that by evoking beloved cars of yore, sentimental buyers might be lured from BMWs, Toyotas and other foreign-based brands to return to the Yankee fold of their youth. Or maybe stylists or management have simply run out of ideas for new styling themes.

Regardless, what is, is. In today's post, the "is" is the facelifted Dodge Charger that uses the same body as the Chrysler 300.

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There was an earlier Charger than the 1968 version shown here, but the '68s sported one of the finest American styling themes of that era. This was the inspiration for the 2011 Charger. Besides the flowing lines and the relationships between the various shapes, note the wedge-shaped indentations behind the front wheel well: this idea is what the 2011 retrieves.

This rear three-quarter view illustrates other aspects of the sensuous styling.

Chargers were used in the popular 1970s television series Dukes of Hazzard. I include this action photo because it was the best side view I could locate on the Web. What's important for us is the car's length. Without that length, the styling shown above could not be achieved.

Here is the 2008 model Charger. It uses the Chrysler 300 body with slight differences including the grille and fenderline "hop." Unlike the '68, it's a four-door sedan, no two-door coupe being made on the platform.

The 300 and Charger got facelifts for the 2011 model year. The most obvious Charger difference is the side, where the fenderline was altered and a 1968-like indented wedge was added.

Here's a rear 3/4 view. Compare to the 1968 shown above.

This is the key shot. Compare this to the side view above. Note how much more boxy the basic '11 body is -- due to short rear and (especially) front overhang. The underlying shape is not at all sensuous. In fact, that borrowed side indentation simply makes the car look stubbier than pre-facelift version.

I passed a 2011 Charger a few days ago on my commute to work and was struck by how awkward it seemed and how little the styling relationship was from the classic 1968 model. This is simply a case of Retro gone wrong.

Goutte d'Eau Style: Late-30s French Streamlining

I recently posted about the teardrop design motif favored by Norman Bel Geddes in the early 1930s. The linkage of the teardrop shape to aerodynamic streamlining resulted in an industrial design fashion during the 30s that eventually reached cliché proportions. Nevertheless, that shape is pleasing and its use in car bodies usually resulted in improved aerodynamic efficiency when compared to similar cars build prior to, say, 1935.

Although the teardrop motif was applied to large, often bulky sedans, it achieved its aesthetic zenith with sports cars. French sports cars, to be more specific. America didn't do sports cars in those days and the English apparently were too conservative style-wise to abandon traditional fenders for the teardrop kind. Same for the Germans, though a few examples of teardrop sports sedans can be found. And some late-1930s Alfa Romeos sported the teardrop motif.

But it was the French who dominated that style scene, with the coachbuilding firm Figoni & Falaschi leading the pack. If this interests you, try to locate a copy of Richard Adatto's book (French edition shown above, but the English version has a similar cover). It seems to be out of print, but it's worth tracking down if you love that kind of styling.

Here are some examples.

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Peugeot Andreau prototype - 1936
A sports sedan rather than a sports car, but I include it because it illustrates what was in the air of France when the cars show below were being conceived.

Dalahaye 135 Competition by Figoni et Falaschi - 1936

Delahaye 165 by Figoni et Falaschi - 1939
This car was sent to the USA for inclusion as part of the French exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Delage D8-120 by Letourneur et Marchand - 1939

Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS by Figoni et Falaschi - 1938

Talbot-Lago T23 by Figoni et Falschi - c.1938
The ultimate French teardrop sports car.

Jaguar C-Type: When Race Cars Looked Like Cars

Once upon a time that ended in the late 1960s, road-racing cars looked somewhat like something one could buy from a dealer and drive away on the streets. I'll set aside so-called stock car racers and not even consider Formula types and deal with Le Mans type racers. (Here is a link containing further links to winners of the Les Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans; click on those links to view photos of some of the winners.)

Above is a Porsche 917, the type that won Le Mans in 1970. It marks the start of Le Mans winners shaped unlike anything one is likely to drive on a street aside from a rare "supercar" -- an extremely low-production sports machine costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One of the nicest-looking winners in the post - World War 2 period was the Jaguar C-Type that won in 1951 and 1953. I'm not sure that racing C-Types were street-legal, but it's easy to see that a street version could be built with suitable additions and deletions that wouldn't change its appearance much.

Below are two photos of the beauty. The first shows it in action, the second is of a restored or perhaps replica version.

Fastback Comeback

A rose may be a rose even if we call it a tulip. Nevertheless, be it by politicians or public relations flaks, there exists the practice of renaming things in order to affect how they are perceived.

Normally the hoped-for change is targeted at outsiders, but from time to time it's insiders who are intended to change perceptions with the change of name. Consider "garbage man" as opposed to "sanitation engineer."

A more art/design related case might be General Motors' renaming its Art and Colour Section as Styling Section and, later on, Design Staff. Of course work went on as before, regardless of the monicker.

I'm particularly amused by the last change because it implies that the staffers actually design an automobile from the tires up. This is clearly not so. Creating cars, like creating movies, is a team effort. In the early-stages mix for a totally new model are market researchers, product planners, engineers and the aesthetic specialists. In recent decades, even production specialists have been included to keep an eye on cost and ease of assembly. So there is no single "designer" in the sense of a 1903-vintage Henry Ford. Instead, we have a committee tasked with coming up with something as little camel-like as possible.

To me, "Styling Section" was the most descriptive name of the lot. That's because the guys with the Prismacolor pencils, airbrushes and (nowadays) interactive software systems are mostly playing around with visual themes rather than creating a vehicle from total scratch, unaided by non-aesthetic considerations. To be called "designers" is a means of improving self-esteem, the term "stylist" seeming oh-so-superficial.

Sorry guys, but fashion it is. Consider:

Above is an advertisement for a 1947 Pontiac. Note that it's a "fastback" model, a style popular from the end of the 1930s into the early 1950s. The concept was that the shape was more streamlined, or aerodynamically efficient, than alternatives -- the Platonic such shape being the so-called "teardrop" with a rounded front end that tapered to a point at the rear. More recent wind tunnel testing indicates that the taper isn't as important as first thought. But fastback cars were considered Hot Stuff for a few years until buyers began to realize that trunk space was limited compared to "notch-back" designs and sales dropped to the point where it wasn't worth the cost of tooling new fastback models.

Still, fastback cars have a certain stylishness, so from time to time one appears. In recent years, two major German car builders introduced such models.

First was Mercedes with its CLS (above). I recall some critics pooh-poohing its looks, but it looked plenty sleek and desirable to enough buyers for the car to be a marketing success. Recently Volkswagen got into the fastback act with its Passat CC which basically plops the CLS roofline and windowing scheme onto a Passat lower body as can be seen below.

Is all this Design or is it Fashion pure-and-simple where an innovation is imitated by sales-hungry competitors trying to grab a piece of the pie. I give you one guess as to where I place my bet.

Asiatic Faces of the Fifties

Automobile styling has become considerably internationalized in recent decades. In the 1930s, 40s, 50s and even the 1960s American, English, French, German and Italian cars tended to have a national "look" or flavor. (Yes, I can cite exceptions, but I hope you can see my point.)

Nowadays young people from automobile-building countries can attend design schools in the USA, England and the continent, receiving comparable training. That is, the outcome is approximately the same regardless of country of origin or country of school. If a car design turns up with a strong national character, that's because it was the stylist's intention. A case in point was the original version of the Audi TT sports car which was styled by an American, yet somehow evokes German racing cars of the late 1930s.

National character was apparent in Asiatic vehicles of the late 1950s. Since few were exported to America and Europe, readers might not be aware of that was going on at that time and place, hence this post.

The Japanese automobile industry didn't begin taking off until the mid-1950s. Its cars were often derived from English models, and the designers were probably mostly home-grown. The result for a few years was cars with curiously fussy front ends. I say "curiously" because traditional Japanese architecture and painting tends to be rather spare and simple.

But -- who knows? -- I might well be totally wrong about all this. So give the pictures below a peek and decide for yourself.

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Korean buses at Hongcheon, 1960
I found this image someplace on the web and was glad I did because it shows Korean buses as I remember them from my army days. Note that each one has a fussy grille that differs from the others. These grilles were probably cobbled together at the assembly point without the input of a trained designer.

Toyopet Crown
This is a Toyota from the mid-late 1950s. Whereas the grille design in general isn't greatly at odds with European or American styling practice of the time, its proportioning and execution are awkward and a tad fussy.

Toyopet Crown from the same era
The front end of this Toyota is tidier, but the design elements strike me as over-detailed for a car of its small size.

Nissan Prince Skyline ALSI-2 from around 1958
Another awkward design. Here we find round and rectangular elements that fight each other -- in particular, these round lights at the outer edges of the grille butting up against rectangular lights.

How (Not?) to Honor a Classic

The cars shown above are two surviving examples of the Bugatti 57SC Atlantique. Four were built and two or perhaps three survive. I consider this one of the most outstanding car designs ever -- an opinion held by many. The black car is owned by fashion magnate Ralph Lauren. The blue car was auctioned last year for an estimated $30-$40 million (an account is here). The Wikipedia article on the Type 57 line in general is here.

Automobile Magazine's February 2011 issue has a Page 63 sidebar by its car design writer Robert Cumberford concerning a project to create a "retro" version of the un-produced Type 64, what might have been the successor to the 57. I could find no on-line version of the article to link to, so here is an excerpt featuring Cumberford's case.

[I]n an alcove [of Peter Mullin's private automobile museum] stood one of only two extant prototype cast-aluminum chassis for the Bugatti Type 64, the model intended to follow the successful Type 57, introduced in 1934 and made in some 700 examples. That's not the problem; the chassis is fascinating. But it's surrounded by sketches and models of some absolutely horrifying bodies proposed by students at the Art Center College of Design, one of which may actually be erected at great cost on that unique, irreplaceable platform. The idea of creating a new body is fine, but I am distressed that unformed and uninformed youngsters have been entrusted with a task for which -- on the evidence presented -- they are incapable of executing.

They've done a series of Kalifornia Kustom adaptations of Jean Bugatti's 1935 riveted-magnesium Aérolithe ("meteor" in Greek) design that led to the Atlantics, as though Jean had had to rummage through discarded sketches to come up with a slight variation on older designs. ...

To properly honor Jean Bugatti's heritage with a new Type 64 body, designers need strong historical awareness, and they must know what precursors in form existed in 1940 [the year after Jean Bugatti was killed in a driving accident] along with the techniques and materials in use at the time. Using that knowledge -- and absolutely nothing that arose in the subsequent 70 years -- those students might have created a reasonable proposition. ...

What the students have done is anathema to me. Wouldn't it be better just to leave the bare chassis on exhibition?

Not quoted are references to the fact that Bugatti had built "tank" style racing cars with streamlined (for the time) bodies that eliminated separate fenders. This implies that Ettore and his son Jean (had he lived) might well have created a car in tune with styling zeitgeist of 1940: teardrop-shaped bodies pushed to beyond the outer edges of, and perhaps covering, the wheels. Such designs could seem sleek on paper, but usually turned out looking bloated on the few occasions that they were actualized, so it's possible the Bugattis might have attempted something leaner. But unless archival evidence appears, this is something unknowable.

As for me, I'm of two minds regarding Cumberford's harsh (for him) judgment. A modernized Atlantique is probably what Mullin and those Art Center students had in mind all along, and not a scholarly might-have-been design such as Cumberford advocates. For a show car, this doesn't bother me. On the other hand, if the goal was to suggest what a Type 64 might really have looked like, then Cumberford has a strong point.

Styling Discontinuities: Chrysler

Some car makes stick to styling themes or detail cues for decades while other brands toss away the past when launching a total redesign.

I'll be touching on this choice from time to time in future posts because it's an interesting subject, given the huge financial risk taken when retooling a car line.

The continuity school of thought holds that, since a good deal of money has been invested in establishing a brand image and if sales have been satisfactory, it's best to build on that widely recognized image. Luxury makes such as Mercedes, Rolls-Royce and (at one time) Packard also did not want loyal customers left in the lurch in the form of a total makeover.

The change-everything rationale is less clear. Where an existing design is a sales failure, it makes sense to wipe the styling slate clean to eradicate a bad image. The case for clean-slating a successful design is harder for me to grasp. Perhaps the thinking is that Brand X already has the image of being progressive/innovative, and something different is what buyers have come to expect. Or maybe corporate management doesn't accept or perhaps even understand the logic of continuity.

I bring this up because Chrysler is expected to offer a major facelift for its once-popular 300 series sedan for the 2012 model year. If the company could afford to create a new "platform" this might be really interesting: To what degree should a successful design be tampered with?

Chrysler's styling history tends toward the clean-slate school. Consider these designs from the past 20 or so years:

Chrysler New Yorker - 1988
This is a version of the famous "K" platform of the early 1980s that helped save Chrysler Corporation under the helm of Lee Iacocca.

Chrysler Concorde - 1993
By the early 1990s, the K line was becoming old-hat and in need of replacement. Tom Gale, Chrysler styling supremo 1985-2000, was instrumental in creating a totally different replacement.The new styling concept was called "cab-forward" where the driving position was sited closer to the front of the car and the boxy K lines were replaced by a more rounded, more aerodynamic shape. This design was risky because it deviated somewhat from the competition, but it resulted in better sales than in the declining years of the K styling.

Chrysler Concorde - 2001
The 1998 model year saw a new (or perhaps extremely-heavily facelifted) cab-forward design. The previous image was continued, but in even more rounded form. As this style began to age, Chrysler was faced with the choice of continuing the cab-forward look or trying something different.

Chrysler 300 - 2006
Chrysler came up with something radically different for the 2005 model year -- the almost instantly-iconic 300 styling mated to rear-wheel drive (the other cars shown above had front-wheel drive). A sort of continuity was effected by using the traditional Chrysler "medal" insignia and a grille treatment that echoed the "woven" look of late-1940s Chrysler grilles. But these touches were minor in the context of the at-the-time shocking styling. I suspect the change happened because the cab-forward theme had been pushed about as far as possible and had been in production in one form or another for more than a decade; another round of it would have meant seriously stale styling.

Based on photos I saw recently of the facelifted 2012 Dodge version of the 300, windows likely will be enlarged. To what extent the style character of the car is to be changed remains to be seen. I'll provide a styling analysis when the 2012 models are announced.

Cars With Broad Shoulders

Longer, lower, wider and, therefore larger and heavier, was the general trend for American automobiles during the 1950s and 60s. Yes, "compact" cars were introduced around 1960, but these too tended to grow over time. (This isn't a strictly American thing. Consider the Honda Civic, a very small car in its first version and now just a notch smaller than its "standard size" sibling, the Honda Accord.)

The present post deals with the "wider" aspect of that growth. Some designs simply had fenders bulge out. But for a while there was a fashion of having "catwalks" on either side of the passenger compartment -- flat extensions between the side windows and the drop-off zone of the fender/side of the car. This will be made clear in the illustrations below.

I recall reading someplace back in that era that such catwalks, if they had an outer ridge, would serve to nest or cradle the passenger compartment "tumblehome" (that's a styling term for the part of the passenger compartment with the roof and windows).

The visual result was often pleasant. Moreover, the wide sides in theory could have contained substantial steel beams for side-collision protection. But fuel crises starting in 1973 and later fuel mileage regulations forced automobile designers to reduce the size and weight of vehicles. An easy way to reduce weight is to narrow a car, and that practice pretty well ended the fashion of wide catwalks.

Here are examples of broad-shouldered cars from that era.

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These first two photos offer a before-and-after perspective on standard size cars and their side treatments. At the top in a 1949 Ford, the car I consider the End of Evolution -- all styling since then being essentially relatively minor advances and variations. The lower photo is a of 2010 Chevrolet Malibu. Note that the sides on both cars don't project far from the windows.

1961 Pontiac Tempest

1962 Buick Skylark
The Tempest and Skylark shared the same basic body, so styling details were superficial elements General Motors used to visually distinguish brands.

1964 Ford Thunderbird
This Thunderbird's shoulders are more rounded than catwalk-like, but the ridge near the top of the fender stiffens the appearance of that section of the car.

1963 Mercury Monterey
Here is a particularly strong example. We see both a catwalk and ridge setting off the tumblehome.

1965 Chrysler New Yorker
The same might be said of this Chrysler, though the catwalks seem a bit narrower than the Mercury's.

1968 Lincoln Continental Mark III
This Continental appeared towards the end of the catwalk era; again they are narrow.