The Seville and Eldo were very nice designs for their time and demonstrated just how well GM Design could finesse the forms. I would say that something that was out of the control of Design was that GM had made a poor corporate decision that front wheel drive was the answer. My belief is that this hurt them in marketplace perception when MB, BMW, Lexus and Infiniti did not go that path for their high-end products. In part, I would further ague, was GM's commitment to not have any gas guzzler fees on their cars while the Europeans did not abide by that philosophy. I look forward to the upcoming episode(s) of this story.
Yes the WSJ had a story this morning about it. Contract people. No big deal, happens cyclically just like every other industry.
I’ve been proof reading them. Tells the story well. I’ve been asked to speak this summer on the Pininfarina/Allante’ project. That’s always an interesting story.
How many episodes in Dick Ruzzin's story? Allante is going to be a touchy subject for a GM Design person.
All Fall Down: The Cadillac Allante, The Buick Reatta, and How GM Lost Its Styling Mojo Aaron Severson April 5, 2009 The short-lived Buick Reatta two-seater may seem like the most innocuous of cars (indeed, that was part of its problem). Behind the Reatta’s placid exterior, however, lay a ferocious internal battle that also gave birth to the Cadillac Allanté, ended the four-decade dominance of the once-mighty GM Design Staff — and set the stage for the decline of GM itself. LINES OF SUCCESSION In 1977, GM Design vice president Bill Mitchell reached the age of 65 and followed his legendary predecessor, Harley Earl, into mandatory retirement. Although he never enjoyed the power that Earl once commanded, Mitchell was a formidable presence within General Motors. Sharp-tongued and stubborn, Mitchell feared no one, and his ferocious temper was as well-honed as his design skills. He was not always easy to get along with, but he upheld the styling leadership that Harley Earl had established back in the 1930s. Mitchell’s leadership played no small part in maintaining GM’s remarkable U.S. market share, which in the year of his retirement was close to 50%. Mitchell’s chosen successor was Charles M. Jordan, who had been his design director since the sixties. Chuck Jordan had joined General Motors in the late 1940s, becoming head of the Cadillac styling studio in 1958. On Mitchell’s orders, he spent the late sixties as chief stylist of GM’s Opel division in Germany, where he was responsible for the Opel GT and Opel Manta coupe. Like Mitchell, Jordan had strong design skills matched by what long-time colleague Stan Wilen described as an equally formidable temper. While Jordan was greatly respected for his charisma and obvious talent, his temperament reportedly made him a number of powerful enemies within the corporate hierarchy, including former Oldsmobile general manager Howard Kehrl, by then a GM board member. Having been hand-picked by Bill Mitchell was not necessarily to Jordan’s advantage either. For all Mitchell’s brilliance, he had many faults. He was a heavy drinker and stylists Stan Wilen and Jerry Hirshberg (later head of design for Nissan), both Jewish, say Mitchell was a font of racial epithets; Mitchell’s former secretary added that she would have had grounds for a whole raft of sexual harassment suits. The corporation tolerated Mitchell’s behavior, albeit reluctantly, because of his obvious value to the company, but they wanted his successor to be more politic. In July 1977, the selection committee bypassed Chuck Jordan and named Irv Rybicki as the new design VP. Rybicki had been Mitchell’s chief assistant, with stints in the studios of every automotive division except Buick. Both Rybicki and Jordan were clearly very skilled, but Rybicki was by far the more congenial of the two: even-tempered, fair, objective, flexible. Rybicki was a team player and by his own account got along very well with GM president Pete Estes and chairman Tom Murphy. In personality, he was the antithesis of Bill Mitchell. Mitchell persuaded Rybicki to make Jordan his design director, but it was an uneasy arrangement. Jordan had previously been Rybicki’s boss and was reportedly furious at being passed over. GM designers from that period told authors Michael Lamm and Dave Holls (himself a GM veteran) that Rybicki and Jordan were often at cross-purposes, undermining each other’s authority and leaving their staff unsure which way to turn. BUICK MAKES A MOVE While that drama unfolded in the Design Center, a different struggle was taking place at Buick headquarters in Flint. Buick chief engineer Lloyd Reuss had recognized that Buick’s traditional upper-middle-class market was increasingly threatened by overseas rivals like BMW and Audi. While those European competitors were significantly more expensive than Buick — more in Cadillac’s price territory — they were winning the hearts and minds of exactly the sort of affluent customers who had once been Buick stalwarts. Reuss pushed for a transformation of Buick’s increasingly geriatric image, introducing a new line of turbocharged V6 engines (which culminated in the muscular Grand Nationals of the 1980s). He and product planners Don Sullivan, Tom Patrick, and Jay Qualman also began work on a sporty two-place Buick, intended to show the world that Buick was no longer an old man’s car. The first iteration of that idea, conceived around 1977, was a tentative plan for a new two-seat coupe to be shared by Buick and Oldsmobile. Dubbed “L-body,” it was to be mechanically based on the upcoming FWD J-body sedans, powered by a four-cylinder engine mounted ahead of the rear wheels, much like Pontiac’s conceptually similar P-car. Despite its commonality with the J- and X-cars, the project’s likely break-even level — around 100,000 units combined, an improbable figure for a two-seater or even a 2+2 — was still too high to make sense. The project was canceled after Reuss departed in 1978 to become chief engineer of Chevrolet. Qualman, who was subsequently promoted to head of Buick product planning, did not forget about the two-seater idea and broached it again after Reuss became Buick’s new general manager in December 1980. This time, Qualman suggested basing the two-seater not on the J-car, but rather on the downsized FWD E-body (Buick Riviera/Cadillac Eldorado/Oldsmobile Toronado) platform then in development for a mid-decade launch. Using the E-body platform would bring the project’s break-even level to about one-fifth that of the abortive L-body’s, which made for a much stronger business case. In mid-1981, Reuss pitched this idea to GM president Jim McDonald, who responded enthusiastically, saying it sounded like a profitable, relatively low-risk venture. The concept also sparked McDonald’s interest in a related project for a division that needed such a car even more than Buick did: Cadillac. THE PININFARINA PROBLEM While Reuss’s Buick two-seater was intended to be a prestige piece, Cadillac had a very specific target in mind: the popular Mercedes-Benz R107 SL roadsters. Introduced in 1971, the R107 had become the gold standard for high-end two-seat convertibles, inevitably inspiring a good deal of envy among Cadillac dealers. In early 1982, Cadillac began work on its own two-seat roadster, initially codenamed “Callisto” and eventually called Cadillac Allanté. Like Reuss’s proposed Buick two-seater, the Callisto/Allanté was based mechanically on the FWD E-body, although the Cadillac was intended strictly as an open car. To add to its cachet, GM management decided early on that the Callisto/Allanté should be built in Italy by the prestigious design firm Pininfarina. This was not a wholly new idea — Pininfarina had previously built Cadillac’s limited-production 1959-1960 Eldorado Brougham — but the Eldorado Brougham had been styled in Detroit. This time, GM decided the new car should be designed as well as built in Turin. As you might expect, that decision did not sit well with Rybicki, Jordan, or anyone else in GM Design. GM’s designers admired Pininfarina as much as anyone did (and had borrowed plenty of styling concepts from Turin), but the idea of sending such an important design — and for a Cadillac, no less — out of house was a bitter pill to swallow. Concerned about the effect on his team’s morale, Rybicki insisted that the Cadillac studio be given a few months to put together a competing proposal. Senior management agreed, but it was largely a token gesture. Cadillac chief designer Wayne Kady believed that a decision had already been made before his team even got started; indeed, Rybicki was told that no matter how good Cadillac’s in-house design looked, the job was going to the Italians, in part because management thought Pininfarina would provide a level of assembly quality and detail finish Cadillac couldn’t match. The Cadillac Allanté had a lengthy trans-Atlantic production line with bodies assembled by Pininfarina in Italy and shipped back to the Cadillac plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. The complexity of the process no doubt contributed to its formidable price tag, which was over $50,000, nearly twice the price of a contemporary De Ville. Although the Allanté had a V8, early cars had performance very similar to that of the Reatta. The final 1993 model, however, had the 295 horsepower (220 kW) Northstar engine, which gave formidable straight-line performance. Bill Mitchell or Harley Earl would have fought that decision, but Rybicki reluctantly accepted it and moved on. Some of the designers involved remained understandably unhappy about the whole issue for years afterward, stung by the implication that they couldn’t produce a design as prestigious or as high-quality as the Italians. REUSS TO THE RESCUE Although Reuss had received preliminary authorization for the Buick two-seater, he knew the project was in danger of being overshadowed by the Cadillac project. Not long after chairman Roger Smith made the final decision to give the Allanté to Pininfarina, Reuss approached Rybicki about designing a two-seat coupe for Buick, cautioning Rybicki that its production was by no means assured. Seeing the project as a way to restore some enthusiasm to his demoralized staff, Rybicki decided to hold a contest to develop Reuss’s two-seater. Friendly internal competition was a useful way to build team spirit and it occasionally produced memorable results — one such exercise had led to the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Even if Reuss’s project never got off the ground, Rybicki thought it would help his team get over the bitter disappointment of the Pininfarina situation. The winning design, the work of Advanced Design Studio 2 assistant chief designer Dave McIntosh, was very attractive, but its curvaceous shape was incompatible with the E-body platform’s structural hardpoints. Making the body sides more upright helped, but made the design look a trifle bland. (The clay models from this period look something like the two-door notchback version of Nissan’s later S13 Silvia/240SX coupe or the first-generation Saturn SC.) To restore some visual distinction in that area, Advanced Design Studio 2 chief David North and designer Ted Polak finally decided to adopt a sharp crease along the tops of the front fenders, continuing through the beltline and rear fenders and wrapping around the rear deck. North says this feature was inspired by the Porsche 944, although the design otherwise did not look especially Porsche-like. Rybicki liked the results and thought the revised design was better-looking than the Cadillac two-seater. Some senior GM executives agreed — including Smith — which greatly improved the project’s production chances. It received styling approval in May 1983. The name “Reatta” was suggested by David North, derived from the Spanish word reata (or riata), meaning “lariat.” The marketing department added the extra T to facilitate trademark registration. (Contrary to some accounts, the Buick Reatta design was not related to Kady’s rejected Cadillac proposal, which to our knowledge was never shown to the public. In fact, in 1986, Cadillac general manager John Grettenberger refused to allow Car and Driver to release photos of the clay models of Kady’s design, fearing they might undermine the Allanté.) ARTS AND CRAFTS The Buick Reatta’s development took place during one of the most tumultuous periods in GM’s history: Smith’s ill-fated attempt to reorganize the corporation and merge the previously independent divisions into three ‘supergroups’: Truck & Bus; CPC (Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada); and BOC (Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac). At the same time, manufacturing responsibility was being transferred from the Fisher Body Division to the GM Assembly Division (GMAD), which resulted in the early retirement of many of GM’s most experienced manufacturing people. As a low-volume project, the Buick Reatta risked being lost in the shuffle; it wasn’t a high priority for either the BOC organization or the corporation. Ironically, the Reatta’s redheaded-stepchild status may have been the only reason it survived. Ordinarily, after management approval, a design developed in the Advanced Design studio would be transferred to the Production studio, where design engineers would begin the arduous task of transforming paper renderings and clay models into a producible vehicle. However, since few people believed it would even be built, the Reatta remained in the Advanced studio even after receiving production approval in August 1984. Had the Reatta gone through the normal production engineering process, it’s not unlikely that it would have been canceled entirely, particularly given that Buick was in the process of losing its dedicated engineering staff. Considering the intense controversy surrounding the decision to outsource the Allanté to Pininfarina, it’s ironic that the Reatta also ended up as something of an international project. With resources spread thin, chief project engineer Randy Wightman looked abroad for much of the engineering work, including having the early prototypes built in England by Aston Martin Tickford. Since the car was such a low priority, finding somewhere to build the Reatta was also problematic. Although the Reatta was based on the E-body Riviera, it was different enough that it didn’t make sense to build it on the same line as the other E-body cars. Instead, GM transformed Oldsmobile’s former axle plant and foundry in Lansing into a nine-station workshop called the Reatta Craft Centre. In place of a conventional assembly line, a motorized, automated electric cart carried the partially completed car from station to station. This unusual approach used far more hand labor than was customary for GM, but it greatly reduced the investment cost, an attractive advantage for a low-volume product. THE SAWED-OFF RIVIERA The Buick Reatta shared much of its mechanical package with the newly downsized 1986-87 Buick Riviera. Although 9.5 inches (241 mm) shorter than the Riviera, the Reatta was still relatively large: 183.5 inches (4,661 mm) on a 98.5-inch (2,502mm) wheelbase. (Curiously, the Buick Reatta was actually 4.9 inches (125 mm) longer than the far more expensive Cadillac Allanté, although the Allanté rode a slightly longer wheelbase.) Despite its smaller size and the use of injection-molded plastic for the front fenders, the Reatta was not significantly lighter than the Riviera, tipping the scales at a little under 3,400 pounds (1,540 kg). Suspension was largely identical to the E-body’s as well, with struts at all four wheels and a transverse leaf spring at the rear. Four-wheel discs were standard, as was an anti-lock braking system. The Buick Reatta’s structural kinship to the contemporary Riviera is not readily apparent; the Riviera had exposed quad headlamps and a prominent grille. The most obvious consequence of the Reatta’s E-body heritage is the pronounced front overhang, which makes the Reatta looks stubbier than it actually is — it’s 7 inches (178 mm) longer than a C4 Corvette. Like the Riviera, the Reatta’s sole powertrain was Buick’s venerable 3,791 cc (231 cu. in.) V6 linked to a four-speed automatic transmission. The V6 made 165 hp (123 kW), enough to push the Reatta from 0-60 mph (0-97 km/h) in a bit under 10 seconds and an electronically limited top speed of 122 mph (201 km/h). Another element inherited from the Riviera was the controversial Electronic Control Center, which absorbed radio and climate controls into a touchscreen pod, accompanied by digital instruments. It was colorful, but widely panned as unnecessarily complex and difficult to use. Both Buick and the design team had envisioned a drop-top Reatta from an early stage, but engineering problems with bolstering the E-body platform for roofless duty (and perhaps a desire to avoid perceived competition with the Allanté) meant the Reatta would be launched only as a coupe. THE BUICK REATTA BOWS Since returning to Buick, Lloyd Reuss had resumed his efforts to make the division into a sort of American Audi. By 1983, he had successfully introduced an array of sporty T-Type models for each of Buick’s lines, and the turbocharged Regal Grand Nationals were emerging as some of the era’s hottest cars. It worked — from 1980 to 1983, Buick was No. 3 in domestic sales for the first time since 1956. Reuss was amply rewarded for his efforts. In January 1984, he was promoted to head of the new CPC (Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada) group and his chief engineer, Ed Mertz, became Buick’s general manager. Soon afterward, Roger Smith ordered a halt to Reuss’s ambitions of competing with the high-end European brands. GM management felt that rivaling Audi, BMW, and Mercedes was a job for Cadillac, not Buick, and that Buick had no business building sporty cars, which was supposed to be the role of Pontiac. Therefore, there would be no replacement for models like the Regal Grand National, which ended its run in 1987, and Mertz was ordered to restore Buick to its traditional position as a conservative, middle-class American sedan. The Buick Reatta has a certain gawkiness in profile or from the three-quarter view. The odd proportions are, again, a consequence of its E-body origins, which make both the rear overhang and the couple (the distance between the driver’s hip joint and the rear axle) longer than they would otherwise have been. If GM’s management had an idea of what a Buick was supposed to be, that identity was no longer obvious to the buying public. Since the 1930s, GM’s different makes had shared body shells, but its talented designers had usually done a good job of making the cars look distinct. As a cost-saving measure, however, the different makes now had to share most of their sheet metal as well as their internal structure. The result was an array of look-alike models that earned GM a thorough drubbing in the press. Since the divisions no longer had distinct engineering staffs, there wasn’t much mechanical difference between them either. All this confusion left the Buick Reatta in a very ambiguous position. Lloyd Reuss and Jay Qualman had meant it as a statement of intent. The question now was, intent to what?
Pt 2. SOUL SEARCHING At Buick’s November 1987 press preview for the Reatta, Qualman — by then Buick’s advertising director — cautiously avoided describing the Reatta as a sports car, instead characterizing it as a luxury two-seater emphasizing comfort and practicality over outright performance. The division’s marketing materials called the Reatta a personal car, perhaps hoping to evoke memories of the similarly described 1955 Ford Thunderbird. That was an honest assessment, but not necessarily an inspiring one, which could also be said of the car itself. The Reatta was not unattractive, but its structural kinship with the E-body Riviera made for curious proportions that were more interesting than beautiful. The Reatta’s straight-line performance was perfectly adequate, but little better than the Riviera’s and a far cry from that of the now-departed turbo cars, particularly the ferocious GNX. There was good grip and reasonable handling composure, but the Reatta wasn’t sharp enough to be truly sporty and yet was a little stiff-legged for a luxury car. Moreover, while the body structure was impressively stout, fit-and-finish didn’t always befit the car’s $25,000 price tag. The Buick Reatta’s full-width “light panel” taillights were inspired by the rear treatment of the contemporary Porsche 911. Requiring 14 light bulbs, they were nearly rejected on cost grounds; keeping the Reatta’s price within reason was a major challenge for Buick. There was a brief flurry of public interest when the Reatta went on sale in January 1988, but total sales for the first shortened model year were not impressive; the tally was only 4,708, well short of Buick’s original target. The Reatta’s first full model year wasn’t much better. Total sales for 1989 amounted to only 7,009, less than half of Buick’s production target. Buick didn’t help the cause by raising the Reatta’s base price from $25,000 to $26,700 just as the modest initial demand was waning. The Cadillac Allanté, introduced a year earlier, was not doing any better. Allanté sales were only 3,363 for 1987, 2,569 for 1988, and 3,296 for 1989. Embarrassingly, the Mercedes 560SL outsold both the Reatta and the Allanté by a fair margin despite an elderly design and a $60,000 price tag. Well-heeled buyers were clearly unimpressed with the snob appeal of either the Cadillac or the Buick brands while those cars’ elevated prices were more than domestic loyalists were willing to pay. BUICK REATTA ROADSTER Buick’s last hope for the Reatta was the convertible, which belated arrived for the 1990 model year. Much of the development work was done by the American Sunroof Corporation (ASC), which had built the limited-production Buick Riviera convertibles of 1982–1985, but the Reatta convertible was built alongside the coupe at the Reatta Craft Centre in Lansing. The convertible was arguably the prettiest iteration of the Reatta. Unfortunately, despite the extensive work Buick and ASC had done on beefing up the E-body platform to compensate for the lack of a fixed roof, the ragtop noticeably compromised the coupe’s otherwise admirable structural rigidity. The only aspect of the convertible that was stiffer than on the coupe was the sticker price: a gulp-inducing $34,995, almost 25% more than the fixed-head Reatta. The Reatta convertible was a pleasant cruiser despite its shakes, but so was Chrysler’s J-body LeBaron convertible, which could be had for less than $20,000 and consequently proved far more popular. The roof of the Buick Reatta coupe looks almost like a detachable hardtop. A removable hardtop was optional for the Reatta’s Allanté cousin, but no such accessory was offered for the Reatta convertible. Despite its price premium, the Reatta convertible didn’t have a power top, although it did have a power pull-down mechanism to cinch the top against the tonneau. 1990 was indeed the Reatta’s best year, but that still meant only 8,515 sales, of which 2,312 were convertibles. That wouldn’t be enough to keep the Reatta alive much longer. THE END OF THE LINE Even before the 1991 models debuted in the fall of 1990, it was clear that the Buick Reatta was going nowhere. Ed Mertz reluctantly recommended its cancellation, judging the Reatta a lost cause. 1991 sales were only 1,519, including 305 convertibles. On August 1, 1990, Lloyd Reuss became president of General Motors. On March 5 of the following year, he announced the demise of the car he had struggled so long to build. Total Reatta production for four model years was 21,751 — well short of the 22,000 a year Jay Qualman once projected. The Allanté’s fate was sealed at the same time, although it survived through the 1993 model year. The Reatta’s demise did not immediately mean the closure of its unusual production facility, which was renamed Lansing Craft Centre. Reuss announced that the Craft Centre would be tasked to build the corporation’s groundbreaking new electric car, which eventually emerged as the 1998 GM EV1. The Buick Reatta convertible, introduced in 1990, was the division’s last hope of pepping up disappointing Reatta sales. Unfortunately, the convertible’s lofty price tag limited interest and only 2,437 Buick Reattas were sold in 1990 and 1991. POSTMORTEM Conceived and developed largely outside of GM’s usual design process, the Buick Reatta was nonetheless emblematic of GM cars of its era. It was pleasant but thoroughly bland, a potentially exciting concept watered down to aw-shucks mediocrity. Its uniqueness and rarity have already made it a minor collectible, but it arouses none of the passion of the true classic. More vivid performance might have helped; in 1989, Buick built a handful of prototype Turbo Reattas using engines similar to those of the limited-production GNX, but by then, Buick was no longer in the turbo business. Buick’s retrenchment also did nothing for the division’s sales, which dropped from a peak of over 1 million units to around 376,000 for 1991. The blandness of the Reatta was characteristic of Irv Rybicki’s tenure as VP of styling, which lasted until his retirement in October 1986. In their 1996 book A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design, Dave Holls and Michael Lamm blamed Rybicki for much of the mediocrity that overtook GM styling in the eighties, charging that he was too willing to acquiesce to the demands of the finance and manufacturing people. Given the circumstances of the time, we don’t know that he would have had much choice — had Rybicki proved less cooperative, he might well have been ousted in favor of someone more compliant — but his tenure produced only a modest number of memorable designs and coincided with a precipitous drop in GM’s market share, which tumbled from more than 46% in 1977 to 35% in 1986. Styling excellence had always been GM’s fall-back, so its erosion in that era was keenly felt. The tenure of Chuck Jordan, who took over in 1986 after nine painful years as Rybicki’s reluctant understudy, brought a renewed sense of energy to GM’s designs, beginning with an impressive array of show cars for 1987’s Teamwork & Technology exposition. However, the balance of power had shifted, perhaps irrevocably. Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell had created a unique climate of styling primacy, where engineers were obliged to follow designers’ lead as much as the reverse. By the late eighties, GM’s product decisions were no longer dominated by styling or engineering, but by accounting and finance and the triumph of numbers over product. Both Jordan and his eventual successor, Wayne Cherry, produced some good-looking cars in their time (along with a few memorable disasters), but the days of GM’s styling leadership were long past. While we wouldn’t call many of GM’s current North American cars ugly, few show much of the corporation’s one-time panache, the confident strut of the Mitchell era. The cars themselves may be better, sometimes dramatically so, but to our eyes and our tastes, a compromised spirit still prevails. FIN
And after all the dust settled, I managed to talk the Pininfarina guys out of this Image Unavailable, Please Login
Ours was more “Cadillac” traditional, the Pininfarina car was more modern/conservative/contemporary, less traditional Cadillac.
Is AI going to wipe out clay modelers? There are two factions out there-those who welcome AI with open arms and those who realize it can replace humans with machines that will work 24 hours a day and on holidays. I have only had a glimmering of what's to come but it occurred to me that the auto industry which has thousands of clay modelers won't need so many because in the eternal search for a low Cd (coefficient of drag) AI will be employed to log in the drag factor for every new car and later when an automaker says "four door sedan" the AI will began to direct therobot clay modelers to start chiseling away at the clay. There will be teams, clandestine to make it more oh-so-mysterious, that will pounce on each new car model making its debut. These cars will be soirited away to an automaker who will scan the results into their computer. When when Kia for example, is doing a four door sedan, once they do a few full size scans, they can have an aero picture from most 2023 cars but even a 2024 or two. The result is new cars will look more and more the same with only minor differences. What design chief will want to fight for some styling feature that their own AI says"will hurt your Cd?" Then there's the human designers themselves. Most designs are drawn on computer now (remember vellum?) so already the machines are doing the draughtsmanship. I know some designers personally like Franz von Holzhausen of Tesla and hope stong minded individuals can still overule The Machine's decision but, as time goes on, I am afraid individual dedisner's names will be forgotten and the AI of Ferrari or Porsche or Bentley given the credit. My lament for losing individual designers is that I sincerely believe the cultural milieu a designer was raised in influences their designs. Lose that background and car design will become more of an automatic design identified with no culture. Maybe not, maybe there still will be Giorgetto Giugaros of the future but don't bet on it. Call them Casualties of the Machine Age. Opinions?
Looks like the SF90 VS is going to be another nice, crazy design from Ferrari Design. I like the vents and holes and swoops. And yeah, it's ok for a Ferrari to have a crazy wing every now and then.
I don't agree with your position, but you certainly raise the right questions. AI is a tool, just like the computer. Where & how the tool is used will be up to each design organization. RE: your comments about aero. Aero is more art than science. The prevailing thinking was that a Kamm tail truncated high deck lid was the most aero shape. Along comes the Hyundai Ionic 6 with its droop rear end claiming the best aero numbers currently available. So much for one 'ideal' shape. AI will be a beneficial design tool, but it's a product of everything in the current computer realm. People are still unpredictable and creative, bet on it. Whether cars will continue to look alike, that's another matter. Each company will stake out their own 'design territory '. If it looks like the other guy's, then shame on the design leadership. No one wants to make an expensive mistake all Edsel/Aztek. Too expensive, too much risk. It's the ability to walk that fine line. Hyundai/Kia I believe are doing it quite well lately. Look at the Ionic 5 vs the 6? Share the same underbody, but look totally unique. Much like Harley Earl & Bill Mitchell were able to accomplish. Image Unavailable, Please Login Stay tuned.
Same here.. use to always admire one just like the below on the way to the bus.. Image Unavailable, Please Login one day walk by and an engine fire had ravaged the front end.
We the people, don't buy aero; we buy self -'image". We don't all have the same image of ourselves; you may fancy yourself as Steve McQueen, I, Audrey Hepburn's Cary Grant. I'm completely unconvinced that AI will be able to design a car that reflects our personalities, or those of your current 'main squeeze' or Audrey's for that matter. I believe there will be pushback on AI from people who want a Giugiaro, a Safdie, or a Serra. I will NEVER own an SUV; most recently I owned a '64 VW bus and a '64 330 at the same time. Plug those parameters into your AI program and see what it spits out. Purosangue? No thanks!
Image Unavailable, Please Login General Motors Battery laboratory at General Motors Technical Center in Warren, MI. INDUSTRY NEWS General Motors Tops the Auto Industry in R&D Spending The Volkswagen Group spends more money on research and development than any other automaker, but General Motors devoted the biggest share of its 2023 revenues to R&D. John McElroy | May 05, 2023 www.Autoline.tv and the Autoline Network on YouTube. The podcast “The Industry” is available on most podcast platforms. https://www.wardsauto.com/industry-news/general-motors-tops-auto-industry-rd-spending?fbclid=IwAR0HTLQhfTCoY4UQnMFfl-Az_dtqI8EvljNktMvJchqc1X68cemU7Za-5h4
