Y'all can make as much fun of me as you want, but I love these retro-future designs. I think the roads would be way more interesting if we started to see a broad range of style in cars as opposed to the homogeneity we have.
And for today’s entry in the AI sweepstakes. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
So you're tellin' me that Benz started off as a man-child's skateboard? Image Unavailable, Please Login
Betty Thatcher Oros Ignore the incorrect title Dennis used, here's one of the first female car designers. The last portion of the video has a interior scene she designed. Her Wikipedia page is crude and doesn't even show the truck she designed.. According to Barrett-Jackson Hudson only produced 640 commercial vehicles in 1939. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Here's a shot of a Hudson pickup from only a few years later with her concave design. Kind of funny to see the trend of giving a passenger something to view is coming back now. Back then they wanted the passenger to look at the oil level, clock, and generator. Now you get a screen with speed and a bunch of movies. Image Unavailable, Please Login and here's the more luxurious one she mentioned with the woodgrain Image Unavailable, Please Login Found this article from 2015 expanding on the ladies involved in auto design https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2015/the-first-ladies-of-automotive-design
I think this is an interesting take on car design/AI from a non-designer. It's lengthy but he makes some interesting observations. Geoff Edwards · Love, Lies and Car Design in the Time of A.I. -- Let me just say right up front: I am NOT an automotive designer. Never have been. Not even a professional car illustrator (unless you count the car portraits I drew in my youth for entrants at local car shows). I've drawn cars all my life, though, and for all my life, I've wanted to be a car designer, and had I been mature enough in my teens, I might've ended up going to school for it. I've followed car design for my entire life, collected many books on the subject, eagerly looked forward to each year's new cars to see what the designers had managed to do ... or undo. I studied the works of my favorite designers, got the world car annuals, the Car Styling quarterlies that went into depth on specific new cars, and collected several books on rendering techniques. After all that, I'm still just a hobbyist, an admirer, but I like to think I've absorbed enough to at least be able to identify and appreciate good design. And I dreamed up my own designs, drew them out, planned them in great detail ... all based on the information I have absorbed, and the designers and artists (folks like Giugiaro and Syd Mead, for example) I've admired. And then a couple years ago, A.I. exploded on the scene, and it's been growing exponentially, devouring the contents of the Internet, waiting for 'inspiration' in the form of a simple line of text, a description of what you want it to churn out - literally - from its terabytes of images and data, along with all their associated metadata, so that it knows that this picture is a Mustang, that one is a Corvette, but that one is Marilyn Monroe and this other one is a Scottish sunset. At first, the results were rudimentary, obvious, little but recognizable pastiches. It 'knew' the big pictures, but it couldn't draw a proper circle - definitely not one in perspective - and it could depict a sexy pinup on the surface, but when you zoomed in you saw her eyes were weird spirals and she had extra fingers, or even multiple limbs growing out of the same joint - because nothing about the pictures it had ingested informed it that arms and legs are anchored at the joints and pivot about them, rather than grow out of them like the branches of a tree. But it didn't take long for A.I. to start actually learning these things - not only what the sunset looks like, but where its light source is, how it reflects off of different surfaces or how it casts shadows to define forms in 3-dimensional space. So now, A.I. is much better about how humans are constructed and move in space, how light affects them. Even more intelligently, it's learning how fabrics surround us, drape and fold on us, how light from one part of a body reflects on another part or how it scatters through and under the surface. As a result, we're seeing a lot more fake images, flattering or less than flattering, incriminating or insinuating, of celebrities and of the average person on the street - our friends, our neighbors, our families and loved ones. It's getting harder and harder to determine what is real and what is a computer-generated fake (unless you count the fingers Image Unavailable, Please Login ). What does all that have to do with car design? Everything. I can't speak for any professional car designers out there, some of whom I'm honored to have as friends here on Facebook even though they don't know me from Adam, but from my own perspective and experience, there's not a lot of fundamental difference between how I see people and how I see car designs. I get much the same enjoyment from looking at a beautiful woman that I get from looking at a beautiful car - the same considerations apply in form, balance, surfaces, lighting, details and composition. At the same time that A.I. has learned how to make a completely convincing image of a pinup, it is also learning how to make designs that are ALMOST as convincing - it's not there, yet, IMHO, but it's getting closer all the time - literally, every day it gets better. Which is great for me, because it lets me indulge in my hobby to design cars. But I'm not fooling myself - I'm not designing a car, I'm telling the A.I. what I want to see in an entirely inadequate, incomplete language, and it's sifting through its terabytes of images and metadata to make 'car sausage,' stuffing ground-up designs into a digital 'skin' that renders up as a simulation of an image, a simulacrum of a design based on parts of other designs and images. It's as much frustrating as it is fun, because while I've been posting several of 'my' designs lately - designs that wouldn't exist without v. 6 of MidJourney - each image is only 1 of dozens that weren't good enough. Many (most?) that weren't good, PERIOD. The A.I. can make completely realistic images of designs that not only no one would buy on a lot, they wouldn't 'buy' that anyone ever went so far as to approve or build them! Some are clearly derivative, some are completely unbalanced; A.I. doesn't 'know' anything about design processes or engineering requirements, but it has enough raw data to make realistic lighting, shadows and reflections, transparency, how to make light sources glow, to create realistic images of unrealistic designs. It's getting better and better at perspective, it understands camera lenses, and in many cases, it can simulate an artist or designer's style. Of course, it can only do so much with its source material, and sometimes - a LOT of the time - what it thinks is someone's style and what we humans understand to be their style are two VERY different things! But it's nailed the circle, in almost any perspective, so it can draw a car wheel or a headlight and get it more than 'good enough' a lot of the time. At about the same rate that it gives Marilyn Monroe six fingers. It usually puts believable mirrors on a car, trim around the windows, the logos of major carmakers, and in many cases, it's good enough to simulate some of the design 'trademarks' of a manufacturer - vertical slots in a Jeep grille, for example, or T-shaped lighting on a modern Volvo. For all that, I find it impossible to get even a passable Batmobile with MidJourney, even though others have managed it, perhaps with other A.I. generators, of which there are currently dozens; this even though the A.I. databases must surely have thousands of images of each and every TV and movie Batmobile, from all angles. It's as much a matter of language as of resources. But car design is rarely about Batmobiles; only the lucky and skilled professionals get that chance, and I'm just a hobbyist. But the thing is, we're close enough that someone could easily design a Batmobile USING A.I. - or ANY car, for that matter. Not the final product, but it's good enough now to create images that some people can believe are real, either in or in absence of the proper context. In just this past week, I've posted several pieces - all of them after dozens of iterations - that to me looked 'good enough.' NONE of them are what I imagined when writing my prompts, but pretty much my entire artistic life has been as much about serendipity as it has been about planning, so this is nothing new to me. I think I understand enough about design to know when something is bad, even if maybe I'm not the best judge of what is truly 'good,' but I think I can pick out the 'good enough' to share. I've been careful to post the A.I. images to pages specifically created for that purpose, and if I post on my own page, I generally try to acknowledge that I didn't 'create' them so much as 'suggest' them and the A.I. did the heavy lifting. I'm enough of an artist to know the difference, and I don't feel that any of the A.I. pieces is art, but they ARE interesting, and many of them ARE inspiring - I could look at them and see the possibility of their existence, given the right conditions. Based on their appearance and details, I can mentally assign a make, model and purpose to an A.I. design, and I've done that with the ones I've posted this week; given that most of them have come from variations of the same prompts, I've created a backstory of car designs and models that all share a common platform from a single manufacturing group; with the right change in prompt, I could generate an entirely different vehicle type or manufacturer, and then label the results as I see fit. As if they were real. The thing is, 'good enough' is, at this point in time, good enough to be mistaken for real, given the right context - or lack of it. I know this because I am seeing it, now, in real time: from half a dozen designs, I've been notified of nearly a thousand reactions, most of them positive and some of them clearly believing the designs ARE real. Because people are sharing my A.I. designs, complete with their backstories, but once they are no longer associated with the A.I.-related page where they were posted, there is no label or disclaimer. I'm seeing responses from people who like them, who want them, who hate them and who feel threatened by them (for environmental, political, technical or whatever reasons). Also from my own experience, I've seen how Facebook can perpetuate a falsehood so that people completely believe that a 3D render or a Photoshop image is a real car, or a real person, or proof that a conspiracy theory is fact. I'll leave those particular arguments to those who enjoy having them. My main concern is where A.I. is going and how we are going to use it. I don't see A.I. designing cars. But I DO see it becoming more and more of a tool in the process. I'm not a car designer, but I've studied the processes for years and, as I said, I'm honored to be able to speak to several Facebook friends who ARE professional designers, with years of experience and whose designs are part of our lives as actual production cars - or custom cars, for that matter, which have benefitted first from Photoshop and now, no doubt, from A.I.. After all this rambling, I'm curious about how professionals see A.I. in the industry, from hobbyists like myself who post things we did just for fun, which turned out well enough that we think others might appreciate them, to their own industry and the tools they use to actually design cars and other vehicles. Do you think, even if A.I. will never actually design a car, that it is a tool that can or will be used in the studio to rapidly generate ideas far faster than any artist with a pencil can achieve? Especially with tools where a quick, simple pencil sketch can be fed to the A.I. and in seconds, a fully-rendered photorealistic image can be created. Is it, in fact, already happening? Or is there resistance to the technology, maybe because managers or others THINK A.I. can design a car and so they believe they can save time and money by replacing designers with A.I. because the results are, for the general public, "good enough?" [The attached pix are both from this week's session, variations on the same basic prompt with certain details changed, added or deleted, to illustrate just how much results can vary.] Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
AI automotive art Geoff Edwards · · 2025 Chrysler 300eH - AWD executive sedan based on the electric Charger platform (STLA), hybrid drivetrain with 1.5L ICE to recharge the batteries - no connection to the wheels. (MidJourney v. 6 AI) Geoff Edwards Experimenting with rear views, using the original image as a reference, I got a nice looking rear - the body details aren't exact, but I could see a tail like this working with the rest of the design in the original image. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login AI automotive art Geoff Edwards · · Studebaker Diamond Hawk - 500hp supercharged 4.5L I-8 AWD executive sedan
