A trip down memory lane in the way back machine. FoMoCo Styling video @1961. Cool video. The Secret Door: A 1961 Ford Styling Film Posted on May 3, 2023 by MCG Image Unavailable, Please Login Here’s a rare treat: A detailed look inside the Ford styling studios in Dearborn in 1961. There’s a lot to discover here—check it out. This very cool Ford film is actually adapted from a 1961-62 television documentary series,Keyhole, narrated by the popular travelogue producer Jack Douglas. The titles Keyholeand The Secret Door tell us what this is all about: We’re going deep inside the Ford Styling Center to see how yesterday’s cars of tomorrow were created. Our contact for the tour is none other than William Clay Ford Sr,, youngest brother of Henry Ford II and at the time, the chairman of Ford Motor Company’s Design Committee, overseeing the styling division. We see some other famous Ford faces, too: Eugene Bordinat, Ford’s newly appointed styling chief, and at around 16 minutes, check out famed designer Alex Tremulis demonstrating his gyro-stabilized vehicle chassis. We also get to follow the creation of a stylish, full-sized coupe from rendering to clay model, including the application of red and chrome Di-Noc wrap. Here this Thunderbird-ish two-door is called the Astrion—a bit confusing as that name was apparently applied to multiple Ford proposals (perhaps the name was merrely a placeholder). There’s extensive footage of the Lincoln Futura, and here’s another rare sight: We get to watch in horror as a full-scale studio model, its duties completed, is destroyed by a forklift truck. Anyway, there’s a lot to take in here, so we’ll let you get to it. Video below.
Pt.2 Pininfarina & Cadillac 05-09 Pininfarina vs. Cadillac Part 2 Image Unavailable, Please Login The Allante design model is presented to Vice President of GM Design Chuck Jordan by Sergio Pininfarina and his son in the Design Patio. On the right is Stan Wilen, Design Director for Cadillac at the time. By Dick Ruzzin As stated in Part 1, Cadillac had contracted the Italian design company of Pininfarina, then one of the best in the world, to submit an Eldorado design proposal in competition with us in the Cadillac Design Studio. This proposal did not include the Seville, only the design of the Eldorado. Many of the key Cadillac executives wanted Pininfarina to win the contest, as they had formed a good working relationship with the company during the development of the Allante. Furthermore, Cadillac’s relationship with the Cadillac Studio was not the best. In the end they made the right decision and strongly supported our design of the final car, the Cadillac Studio Eldorado. Along the way Pininfarina was allowed to see what we were doing but we were not allowed to see their design proposal that was under development. That was not fair but the reasons were never disclosed to me by Chuck Jordan and I was not about to ask as he knew Sergio Pininfarina well and was a big Ferrari fan. TRIAL BY PRODUCT CLINICS At GM, Product Clinics were very controlled data gathering events that presented a future product to a very select group of buyers to gauge acceptability and strength of product design. Questions were carefully crafted by the marketing groups with help and approval from the Cadillac Design Studio. Interpretation of the gathered data was very carefully analyzed by both groups together. The results of the clinics would have an influence on the fate of all future design programs. Image Unavailable, Please Login PININFARINA ELDORADO, DRIVERS SIDE.This is the master side of the Pininfarina Eldorado design that was commissioned by Cadillac Division of General Motors. The passenger side is a slightly different design. The car is also shorter than the Cadillac Studio proposal and of very different character in both graphic, form language and harmony. We immediately saw it as beautifully finished but a design that was static, a car to be looked at, not one to be driven. We wanted more, a car that when seen would make you want to drive it. The product clinic results showed that Cadillac owners were adamant that their cars would be protected and never scratched or dented in any way. The Pininfarina design had a body side protective molding and our many proposals, by a Design and Cadillac mandate, did not. Consequently, their proposal won all the product clinics, and was chosen through clinic results to be the production Eldorado. Pininfarina had an advantage over the Cadillac Studio, we were the underdogs. Why Pininfarina had that advantage was never explained to us but I will give you my idea of why the situation existed. Image Unavailable, Please Login The front of the Pininfarina proposal was immediately seen by everyone as too close in graphic design character to the 1990 production Cadillac Deville, which was a less expensive car. After seeing the Pininfarina Eldorado, we in the Cadillac studio did not think that their design was the answer. We could not understand what they were thinking, but we had lost the contest with Pininfarina for the Eldorado design at that point due to the product clinic results. The passion to create the ideal design remained with us in Cadillac Studio but the competition was over for the Eldorado design. We were obligated to create a release model of the Pininfarina design and proceeded to do that while at the same time still searching for a Seville design. Three weeks later in a Chicago color clinic the Pininfarina Eldorado was compared with the new proposed Buick Riviera and Oldsmobile Trofeo design models. The Pininfarina Eldorado was a catastrophic and stunning failure. It was not the color but its first comparison to other cars with body side moldings. The clinic clearly showed that the Pininfarina car was the weakest design of the three by far. The clinic not only tested the new colors of the three but also the strength of the design where it was seen as the weakest of the three. Image Unavailable, Please Login The rear of the Pininfarina proposal for the 1992 Eldorado. Note that the rear quarter and sail panel are slightly different than as seen on the drivers side of this model. The rear on this car was very close to the Cadillac Studio proposal in form but stiffer in shape. The black details like license box and front parking lights do not match the expectation for a Cadillac that was known for high quality detail. Image Unavailable, Please Login This was “it”, after two years. This final Eldorado paper mock-up design was constructed on an existing fiberglass model. Look closely, it is pasted together with black tape, cardboard and silver paper. Three were done in two days and then a fourth was developed by taking the most appropriate and harmonious design features from the first three and combining them. The design was then further developed until the release for production. This paper mock-up finally demonstrated the expected dynamic sporty elegance that was desired by the Cadillac Studio designers. TOTAL FAILURE After two years of work by Pininfarina and GM Design Cadillac had nothing and the release date for the Eldorado had passed. The entire effort by Design, Pininfarina and Cadillac was a complete failure, no design was available to be released for production. We had all failed. This gave the Cadillac Studio another chance to create what would be the final design. We were delighted with the turn of events and I was very confident that we would succeed because now everyone involved had an appetite for something completely new and it was revealed to us that the strength of the Pininfarina Eldorado was that it had a protective body side molding. We then created a new design in a four day flurry that started the two week process of design approval by all parties and final development and release of our Eldorado design to engineering. Strategically this was done before Cadillac could reengage Pininfarina. There also wasn’t time for them to regroup as we were close and very mobile. Also, throughout the process the Cadillac Studio designers had developed design techniques using unconventional methods that had never been seen before, allowing us to develop and display convincing new full-size designs in a very rapid fashion. That is how we were able to create a new Eldorado design in only four days. SEIZING THE MOMENT Cadillac thought that we were still preparing the Pininfarina car for engineering release. We had stopped as it was a dead horse in the Chicago clinic and under Chuck Jordan’s leadership, we immediately started another design much to their surprise. I am not sure even today that we were supposed to do that, but we did. We all were on a mission and I was confident that we would be successful. Chuck Jordan without hesitation seized the moment and directed us to immediately create another design. He reluctantly asked me to do another car, stating that he was surprised about my enthusiasm since we had done so much work. It was the first and only time that he had acknowledged the severity of our task and how hard we were working. Image Unavailable, Please Login The fourth paper paper mock-up became the final design proposal that was released for production two weeks later. The Cadillac Studio’s Eldorado design proposal was chosen over the design by Pininfarina from Italy. Here it shows an elegant and dynamic force that the Pininfarina design did not have. One can see the body side shape curving in all directions. The shape easily met sheet-metal tooling criteria as well as being in concert with good aerodynamic practice. I measured each design proposal by its potential of what I knew to be good aerodynamics based on my many wind-tunnel experiences on previous design programs. The Eldorado’s drag was slightly higher than the Seville at a coefficient of .34 which was excellent considering the high volume of cooling air required for the Cadillac V8 engine. After the release was over and a fiberglass model of our Eldorado was built Sergio Pininfarina came to see our design and he spent some time in the Cadillac Studio. He took a good long look at our Eldorado and said, “A great design, perfect for America.” I am sure he was disappointed as it would have been a tremendous amount of business and prestige for his company with more possible Cadillac design work to come. We took this as a compliment, but in retrospect perhaps it was not. He could have been given direction by Cadillac to design a car with International design character. If that were the case, then he might at that instant realized that he too had been played. Later, one of our sculptors put up a small sign in the back room where he had gone to use the restroom. “Sergio Pininfarina Peed Here”, with the date. GM Design and Cadillac Studio had won a design contest against the Italian company Pininfarina, highly respected and one of the best car design companies in the world. We won and we deserved to win as everyone involved on both the Cadillac side and the Design side agreed that our last proposal was head and shoulders above the Eldorado from Pininfarina. This was confirmed shortly by a large Corporate product clinic that showed that our Cadillac Eldorado was the best and strongest car in the show, as we will explain in Part 4.
In other news, Lexus is still pursuing 'beauty' From the Shanghai Auto Show Image Unavailable, Please Login The new Lexus LM Luxury Minivan boasts a partition separating the front seats from the pair of salon-style reclining rear seats, and has a built-in display screen that spans 48 inches, or nearly four times the width of the years-old MacBook Pro I’m writing this story on. That should give you some indication of the kinds of people who will buy this van to ride around its back seat in—not likely car journalists. The new Lexus LM Luxury Minivan can be fitted with seven seats, if it’s not being used as a VIP-shuttler, which we’d argue is its best use-case. It’s stiffer this time around, and has a new suspension to improve ride comfort and reduce cabin vibrations. And Lexus is now selling it in over 60 countries, including Japan and Europe for the first time ever, although we still don’t get it in Canada or the U.S. As sometimes happens when international brands show off their not-for-us luxury minivans, the North-American market took note. We agree with Edmund’s video director Chris Paukert’s Twitter take and “wish we could get past the stigma here.”
Here's one I haven't seen. Pretty cool for 1957. Reposting from Veloce today) The German Fiat club exhibited this 1957 Fiat 1200 Granluce Wonderful, first shown by Vignale at the Turin Motor Show. It should be noted that it presents a Targa roof, seven years before Porsche invented it. Three to five cars of this type were built. Story and photos by Hugues Vanhoolandt The 33rd edition of the Techno-Classica motor show, held in Essen, Germany, was once again the focal point of the international classic car scene with more than 1,100 exhibitors. If the manufacturers’ stands are less grandiose than before, the quality of the vehicles exhibited by the many dealers and brand clubs allows the visitor to get his money’s worth. It also seems that some prices charged in the past have returned to more reasonable values, although there are many exceptions of course. Finally, it seems that the German public is always fond of little Italians, which allows you to see rarities in this show that you don’t see anywhere else except perhaps in Italy itself. Image Unavailable, Please Login
While I’ve always maintained there is no such thing as too much horsepower, there is certainly a case to be made for an ‘inadequate’ amount. Offering the freedom of a scooter with the bonus of weather protection, the bean-shaped Fuji Cabin was a creative effort to fill a need for cheap, economical cars in postwar Japan. The three-wheeler was built using readily available motor-scooter parts and was powered by a one-cylinder engine with a kick start, three forward speeds, and reverse. The modern, streamlined body was a monocoque design constructed of lightweight fiberglass. The Fuji Cabin faced stiff competition from cheaper scooters and motorcycles, and, ultimately, only 85 cars were built. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
https://www.sonnysracingengines.com/engines/street-engines/sar-940-1650-hp-5-3-bore-space-hemispherical-headed-pump-gas-engine
Gotta love the fins! Prvenac (Firstborn) Yugoslavian car from 1958 Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
An older article, but still relevant from Hagerty: Design From 2D design to 3D clay: Our industry insider peels back the studio curtain Adrian Clarke 21 September 2021 Share Hello there! My name is Adrian Clarke. I am a professional car designer, earning a degree in automotive design from Coventry University and a Masters in Vehicle Design from the Royal College of Art in London. While I was there, one of my tutors was J Mays. (He used to bring in doughnuts.) I worked for several years at a major European OEM before the pandemic knocked the world into a cocked hat. In a previous life, in the Nineties, I daily drove a 1979 Ford Thunderbird while living in London. In any area of industrial design, once the initial sketches are done, there’s always the step of building models and mock-ups from scratch. Car design is no different. Full-size models are necessary for understanding the 3D form, solving problems, and selling the design (especially to non-design literate management types). For example, we did a ridiculous, almost cartoon hard model of one of our cars with a cut-down windshield: A manager asked me if I thought the header rail (the top of the windshield) would be in my sightline (I am, as the late lamented Russell Bulgin would say, professionally tall at 6’2”). The only way to find out was to jump into the driver’s seat of the thing. You can’t do everything digitally! Image Unavailable, Please Login Harley Earl (L) with a model of the 1956 Pontiac Club de Mer concept. GM Around 1910, aged 16 and on a family holiday in the Tehachapi mountains, north of his family home in LA, Harley Earl came across a canyon that had been flooded after torrential rainfall. Finding a small hollow that had become full of clay due to the rising water, Earl made some small tools out of wood and began using them to sculpt small model cars. Earl was likely not the first person to use clay models in the design process; early coach builders had been using small-scale wood and clays to show their clients for a few years. But Earl was almost certainly on the vanguard when he mocked up four full-size clay models to demonstrate his ideas when hired as a consultant by GM to design the 1927 LaSalle for Cadillac. Nearly 100 years later, clay modeling is still a fundamental part the design process. Image Unavailable, Please Login Ford Bear in mind, modern automotive modeling clay is not really clay at all. It’s a kind of industrial plasticine—hard at room temperature and soft when warmed up. It gets everywhere (don’t wear your black suede Chelsea boots into the studio, ask me how I know) and due to the sulfur content, it stinks. The exact ingredients are closely guarded proprietary secrets, but a large manufacturer will go through a lot. Ford uses 200,000 pounds in a year, recycling as much material as possible. Image Unavailable, Please Login Ford Why use a physical material like clay at all? We now have the ability to sketch in 3D, so why not just build a model digitally, hand everyone a VR headset, and conduct reviews without even going to the studio? Surely this will be faster and more efficient? Aside from the logistical difficulties of this strategy, not to mention the sheer computing horsepower required, any digital representation of a car is just that: a representation that’s filtered through a virtual camera lens and monitor. That’s simply not the same as the ol’ Mk1 human eyeball. Designers need time to reflect, think, and digest (usually over coffee) which is much easier when a physical object sits a few feet away from your desk. You can’t wheel a digital model outside to see how it looks in natural light (or pouring rain). Image Unavailable, Please Login Ford Image Unavailable, Please Login Ford Car bodywork is sculpture. It needs to be touched and felt. The human hand is extremely sensitive to surface variation; you can’t judge the quality of a radius or a panel shut line by squinting at a screen. You need to run your fingers along it and feel the surfaces. Lamborghinifamously doesn’t use clays and I’d argue it shows—its cars are either very rigid looking or a complete riot of clashing lines and angles with awkward transitions between surfaces. But not using clays saves them time and means it can churn out those multi-million dollar limited-run specials very quickly. A clay model starts off as an armature (usually an aluminum frame), hard foam blocks making up the basic underlying volumes of the car, and plastic wheel arch openings. Modelers then spend a couple of days liberally coating this contraption with clay by hand, known as “laying up.” What emerges is a very rough, brown-colored car shape like something a toddler would make out of Play-Doh. When ready, it’s wheeled onto one of several “clay plates” that take up the majority of space in the studio. Image Unavailable, Please Login Kolb Design Technology A calibrated metal floor with an accompanying 5 axis milling arm (not strictly 5 axis, but that’s what they’re known as), a studio will have a number of these arranged in a line under longitudinal fluorescent lighting tubes hanging from the ceiling. Over the course of a few days and nights, the milling machine will make several passes over the model, starting off rough and getting more accurate with each pass. It’s then finished off by hand, smoothing off the main surfaces and correcting any small mistakes. And it can be milled to a high resolution; you can mill in things like windows seals and roof guttering and clay will hold its edge fidelity. Image Unavailable, Please Login Kolb Design Technology The real advantage of clay is in its versatility. Clays are working models, constantly updated as details and surfaces change over time. If large changes are required, they can be re-milled from updated surface data. Clay modelers use a heat gun (think an industrial-grade hair dryer) to soften an area and add more material or subtract it, or to rework an edge to the tape line. Designers use Rinrei tape, (made in various widths from Japanese rice paper, that doesn’t leave a residue) to tape lines on the models, to work out shut lines, feature lines and block out graphics like lights and vents. And yes, designers really do that arm-outstretched-holding-a-tape-on-a-model pose that you’ve seen before. This is to look along the line of tape to make sure it’s correct. Image Unavailable, Please Login BMW Image Unavailable, Please Login Jaguar To resemble painted sheet metal, clay models can be covered in a film called Di-Noc, made by 3M. Thicker than the usual vinyl wrap used by customizers, it’s applied wet and can be stretched and heated to adhere perfectly to the clay surface. This allows designers to judge the quality of the highlights across the body work. Wheels can initially be simple print-outs on paper taped to a black foam tire, then as the design evolves there are secondary wheels used that can have different designs attached to them, so that variations can be reviewed in situ. The width is also adjustable so designers can pull the wheels out as far as legislation allows and to check things like sidewall profile to help minimize curb damage. When one of our new cars was launched the Chief Designer took delivery of his (before the customers naturally) and promptly sent it away. The next day it came back fitted with spacers to shove the wheels out further. Image Unavailable, Please Login Porsche Lights, mirrors, door handles, trim pieces and wipers can be added as hard parts later. Milled out of high density foam or 3D printed, then painted, they contribute to making the model look as real as possible. These parts go through many iterative updates—the aero team might tell you your mirror design is directing rain water over the side glass so it needs to change shape. So it’s simple to knock out a new part and simply swap it over on the clay model. As the design nears completion, the clay may be painted, using the exact shades that will be used on the real cars. This gives the Color, Materials, and Finish team the chance to view the color palette and make sure it works on a car, not just as a swatch on a mood board. Image Unavailable, Please Login GM The ultimate in design studio deception is the full-size hard model. These are extremely time consuming and costly to make, so they are used at very specific points—normally when the design vision is frozen (the master recording), or if the studio has come up with an idea on its own and wants approval to proceed. Made out of resin and GRP, with Plexiglas windows and machined metal details where appropriate, they are painted to the same standard as production cars, mounted on real wheels and tires and used to wow the higher-ups—this is what we are going to make. One car I worked on had three variations of roofline and door count. Although ultimately only one went forward to production, it showed what could be possible in the future. Larger studios will have the capacity to make hard models themselves, but smaller satellite studios might not: Nissan Design Europe (in London’s Paddington Basin) for example, doesn’t. There are companies that can do it for you from your data, but expect a bill of seven figures depending on complexity. These “vision” models only have a rudimentary interior—what is known as a half board—only what is visible above the door frames will be represented, the rest covered by you’ve guessed it, a board over the interior tub. (The interior team will have their own clay and hard models.) Reference models, made at the end of the realization process when all the engineering and production feasibility work is finished, are indistinguishable from the real car. They’ll be shown to dealers, journalists, and VIPs as part of the launch build up. They have working lights, opening doors and tail gates, a full interior, instrumentation and may have electric motors or be built on an existing chassis with an ICE to allow slow speed trundling around. Their hand-finished nature means they need constant checking to make sure everything matches production data. Trudging to the workshop and paint booths meant I got a lot of walking in (and regularly covered in paint and filler dust) supervising the building of two of these types of reference model. Image Unavailable, Please Login Creative Wave Image Unavailable, Please Login Creative Wave If you’re thinking that these processes sound a lot like a how concept cars are made, you’re right. Concept cars are done in exactly the same way, because they too are expensive hand built one offs. Only that concepts don’t have to adhere to annoying details like production feasibility, business cases, or legislation compliance, which is why if they get turned into production models their appearance changes to take these things into account. In the next article we’ll look at how the design vision is turned into production reality and what goes into getting it on the road. We’ll also explain why even at the last minute before production starts the designer still plays an important role.
Some of these I just can't resist posting for their obscurity. Not familiar with these at all. 1956-62 Ford Zephyr & Zodiac Mark 2 Image Unavailable, Please Login
You must know this elegant Ford France coupe from the early 1950s, the Comète? Body designed by Pininfarina (would that make it the Allante of its day?) and built by Facel. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
