car design thread

Not denigrating your enthusiasm or, especially, your desire to try understanding design.

You need to step away from the idea that the pure side view is the determination of similarity. Hang out with auto designers and you get a lot hand gestures as 3 dimensional form development and transitional areas don't do well to regular words. All this is because the design realization is in cross sections and plan views. You are looking at things as if they are tape drawings.

Take the Testudo upper and its relationship to your Erickson is about zero. The Testudo has extreme wrap around in plan view with lots of curvature in cross section and a soft transition from the windshield to the roof surface.

The rear end of the Testudo is another study in rounded forms that your car does not exhibit.

At given times designers are all seeing the same things. Sometime they are very conscious influences coming from show cars, production cars, or the published development articles that show other proposals. Then there is just the non-specific stuff that the community "just knows". There can be paths that everyone is heading in the direction of. One sees stuff, one hears of stuff. I remember a story from Art Center about a particular surface treatment that had been rattling around for a while amongst the students. It showed up later on a Dodge.

Show cars can have short lead times but American production cars at the time could be 5+ years from program start to showroom. So in 1961 people are already thinking 1965 or so forms. If Erickson was in this environment, even as a student, he was part of this mentality.

When looking at you car what I see is a form that didn't quite get there. I can describe it as the difference of a student versus having a highly competent clay modeler to refine the surfaces.

I suspect that this sounds meandering. But I am trying to provide some insight into the environment that Erickson was likely to have been experiencing. For you, recognize that especially in those early 1960s, what you saw on the street was already old news as the design language was advancing rapidly.

 

When did the semester start/presentation by Michelin with the design brief?

How many students?

Of those how many gear heads?

Jeff

 

Kind of cool. I remember when GM rethought the city bus, wich I liked. I heard GM had a lot of problems with the production versions. Now look at the new buses, they look like rolling sheds with windows

 

I LOVE these things! I'm thinking of getting one and reconfiguring it. I'm thinking an Injected LS engine, shorten the rear overhang, a bed and a large bathroom. It would make a great travel vehicle for my wife and I.

 

Huge files on these at Winnebago. Clearly the RV industry was scared that GM would come in and wipe them out. Must of been some real good sources since there were lots of confidential internal GM documents.

The GM motorhome was an absolute financial disaster. Their annual production plan turned out to be the entire total production run.

Part of the financial problem was that based upon the high production rates GM has committed to sophisticated tooling that needed to be amortized across a large (never achieved) unit volume.

The tooling also restricted make more variations of the vehicle. It was offered in 23' and 26' versions only at a time when the industry was doing 23/24' to 32' with increments in every one or 2 feet. The GM system was also far more restrictive when the traditional manufacturers were doing lots of floorplan variations which in turn made different window placements.

As neat as it was to have the Toro front wheel drive that turned out to be a problem. Motorhomes are significantly tail heavy. The fwd apparently did poorly in bad weather.

The per nit loss by GM was astounding. But the ultimate killer weren't the losses but when the Toro/Eldo downsized the smaller transmission/transaxle could not handle the vehicle requirements.

But, all that said, the GM design sophistication was so far ahead of its time. The rest of the industry was selecting which corrugated aluminum siding to use for the flat body sides.

 

No Chrome Cobra hood ornament?

Metallic silver leather seating too?

 

Interesting that the show car was not symmetrical. Trying different variations from different sides?

All the best,
Andrew.

 

Opel CD

I had forgotten how the line on the nose was so sharp then made a wonderful transition to a very rounded form. That kept the clay models up late.

 

That's really cool.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

There's also the fact that it's gone WAY up in quality during that time... J.D. Power, etc.
That's all a couple of my friends cared about.

I personally care about design.