All types of concepts are being sourced by the following person, aladis, on a VW car forum. . https://www.vwvortex.com/posts/116577074/
An older article about the now defunct Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild. A training ground for a number of guys that went on to become professional designers. Ended in 1968. Model Kids: Decades Ago, GM Put a Call Out For Young Car Designers. Thousands Answered Aaron Robinson 10 April 2024 Share Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club. Once upon a time, industrialists and educators came together to form a national organization for the advancement of artisanal craft skills among young boys. It was heavily promoted in high schools, youth groups, auto shows, and car dealerships across the country. It annually paid out thousands—and then millions—of dollars in college scholarships, and it grew to become second only to the Boy Scouts of America in membership. Its board of directors included the most powerful and influential industry leaders of the day, and invitees to its annual awards banquet in Detroit were flown in first class and chauffeured around in limousines. And all a kid had to do to take a shot at securing his educational future was to build a miniature model. Not a plastic job out of a box, as most of us have attempted at one time or another, but an exacting replica of an ancient carriage or a wholly unique creation of their own design, conceived, sketched, measured, clay-modeled, and then constructed entirely from scratch. No help from Dad allowed. From 1930 until 1968, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, so named for the coachwork firm that became a General Motors division in 1926, ran an annual nationwide talent search disguised as a model-building competition. The goal was to identify from among America’s teeming ranks of teenage youth the truly exceptional, the kids who had the artistic eye, the crafting skills, and the stick-to-itiveness to complete a phenomenally rigorous craft project. Image Unavailable, Please Login Three Lions/Getty Images Regional competitions fed winners to a national finale in Detroit, where a four-day pageant culminated in the awarding of scholarships that topped out at $5000 for the overall winners, a mighty sum in the era. The event also exposed the top echelon of young model builders to the wonders of the American auto industry at a time when it was at its imperial zenith. Naturally—and in accordance with the plan—many of those kids returned as college graduates to work in that industry. Marketplace Buy and sell classics with confidence Browse Marketplace It’s hard to imagine in the modern age when most people spend their day tapping keyboards or swiping screens that at one time, there were enough boys aged 11 to 19 in America willing to create thousands of model cars every year entirely from scratch. “When I look at my model today, I think, ‘How the hell did I do this?!’” said 1961 junior national winner Tony Simone, now of Bartlett, New Hampshire. “I have to give the Guild credit for giving us skills to use in life. Even today, that attention to detail is still with me.” “The people who won had mastered discipline before the age of 20,” said Robert Davids, who was a 19-year-old Venice, California, pinstriper and surfboard shaper when he won the 1963 senior national award and a $5000 scholarship by carving a dramatic three-seat bubble-top coupe out of yellow poplar wood. For a year, Davids said, there was no girls, no dates, not even haircuts, only work during the day and then the model at night, typically until 3 a.m. “Every single disciplined person who entered was going to do OK in life, but the winners excelled at an early age.” Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Then, as now, there was free money around if you could throw a ball or converse in mathematical theorems. Sports and academic scholarships have long been familiar avenues for teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds to access the realm of higher education. The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild stood apart by being a scholarship program based mainly on manual skills of the type one learned in the shop classes that were once commonplace in high schools. “Here was a take-home, industrial arts aptitude test that identified teenagers with innate artistic ability, creativity, imagination, spatial relationship acuity, manual dexterity, aesthetic eye, good taste, a propensity for perfection, and high intellect,” wrote John Jacobus, a Guild member in the 1960s whose later historical research for the Smithsonian Institution resulted in a book on the subject, The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild: An Illustrated History (upon which our story is heavily dependent). The skills that the model competition prioritized, he added, “were all qualities sought after by the auto industry.” The inspiration of William A. Fisher, one of the seven Fisher brothers who had transitioned the family carriage business into a hugely successful vehicle-body supplier, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild launched on August 25, 1930, with radio and print ads and large posters plastered to the windows of Chevrolet, Buick, Viking, Oldsmobile, Cadillac-LaSalle, and Oakland-Pontiac dealerships. The posters as well as promotional booklets lured boys with the promise of a share in the unimaginable sum of $75,000 (about $1.3 million today). Nearly 150,000 signed up the first year, just over 400,000 the second, records Jacobus. Image Unavailable, Please Login A 1957 booklet produced by GM (above) gave aspiring entrants tips on how to design and construct a 1/12th concept car entirely from scratch (wheels were provided to those who wrote in for them). “Don’t let the word ‘design’ scare you,” read its introduction. “Anyone can learn to draw, if he is willing to practice.”Fisher Body Image Unavailable, Please Login About 33,000 models were produced over the nearly 40-year span of the competition.Three Lions/Getty Images The need was great. The Great Depression was already beginning to grip the country following the October 1929 stock market crash. The ranks of the unemployed were swelling, and fewer and fewer families had the means to offer anything more to their children beyond a life of hardscrabble toil from the earliest age. Amid the bread lines and the whispers of worker revolt and communist revolution, big ideas floated around about the very nature of work and the role of individuals in societies that were rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. “It is the sincere desire of the builders of Bodies by Fisher,” extolled a 1930 ad for the Guild in The Saturday Evening Post, “that tomorrow shall see this country peopled by men to whom honor can be given for their ability to design well and build soundly whatever their generation may require.” The competition’s challenge was as daunting as the prizes were lavish. Early competitions required entrants to produce a detailed wood-and-metal replica of the ornate Napoleonic carriage that appeared in the “Body by Fisher” logo (ubiquitous on GM cars produced from the 1920s through the 1980s). Builders had to construct an 18-inch-long, 10-inch-high scale model complete with metal filigree, opening doors, and upholstery-lined interior using only blueprints and a 25-page instruction booklet that the Guild provided. It’s believed that two master models were produced over six months by craftsmen at Fisher’s Pennsylvania-based Fleetwood Metal Body division and that their time estimate to make a copy from the plans was 1600 hours. Which helps explain why out of the millions of boys who signed up to the Guild in those early years, receiving their free pamphlet, membership card, and diamond-shaped Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild pin, only a few thousand coach models were ever actually produced. Enterprising model companies developed kits to speed the builds, but even those were crude by today’s standards—just a few blocks of unshaped wood and some metal—and they still required enormous skill and patience to turn into viable entries. By the time the coach idea was dispensed with entirely in 1948 (the Guild paused its activities during World War II), it’s thought that only around 7000 carriage models had been built. Image Unavailable, Please Login Examples of Guild models from the Gilmore Car Museum in Michigan show the high standard of finish and exquisite detail that their teenage creators achieved.Cameron Neveu As it happened, the contest that replaced it wasn’t much easier. It asked entrants to build a 1/12th-scale concept-car model entirely of their own design. Believed to have been heavily pushed by GM’s first and renowned styling chief, Harley J. Earl, the concept category debuted in 1937 and the Guild fully pivoted to it in 1948. According to the late Charles E. “Chuck” Jordan, who won the 1947 competition and went on to become vice president of design at General Motors, the coach project was handicapped by the fact that “no individualized characteristics or personal creativity were sought—the coach was in the strictest sense a craft project, with no variation sought or accepted, saving excellence in detail or finish.” That was fine in 1930 when, as the author Jacobus notes, car bodies still employed lots of timber as well as hand-finishing. Originally, the Guild was created to ferret out promising pattern- and toolmakers. But as the industry evolved, stamped-steel mass production took over and styling rose in importance. The talent need shifted away from an increasingly low-skill and automated production floor and toward the newly created styling studios, where designers and clay modelers were tasked with envisioning tomorrow’s vehicles. It’s no mere coincidence that the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild turned its attention to futuristic concepts almost at the same time Earl unveiled the industry’s first concept car, the 1938 Buick Y-Job. Image Unavailable, Please Login The culmination of the contest was a four-day pageant in Detroit to which the finalists were invited at GM’s expense.Three Lions/Getty Images Image Unavailable, Please Login A panel of industry judges awarded the scholarship prizes, then GM photographers meticulously photographed each model so that designers could study them later for inspiration.Three Lions/Getty Images In an age before the time sucks of television and computers, when more families made their living doing manual labor in factories or on farms and college seemed like a faraway dream, plenty of kids were willing to gamble their free time and their sweat on a long shot like the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. And it was indeed a long shot. Though the posters advertised the riches available to winners, fewer than 400 scholarships were awarded over the 34 years the Guild was active (though smaller prizes were distributed at the regional level). During that time, 10 million American boys signed up—girls were allowed only in similar programs run by GM’s European and Australian subsidiaries—from which about 33,000 models were produced. Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Despite the odds, it was worth it to kids who saw little opportunity elsewhere. “My father was a machinist and a toolmaker during World War II,” said Tony Simone, the ’61 winner. “One night, he came home and told my brothers and me to come to the dinner table, and he said, ‘I can put a roof over your head and food on the table, but I can’t afford to send you to college.’ [The Guild] was a lifeline, and I’m just one story out of thousands and thousands.” Davids, the ’63 winner, was born the son of a soybean sharecropper in Franklin, Missouri. “My mother told me, ‘You don’t have a chance. People like us don’t win things like that.’” Keenly aware of the challenges facing its members, the Guild produced a booklet called “How to Build a Model Car” with illustrated step-by-step instructions, starting with the basics of vehicle design. Cartoons showed readers how a low, curved roof and a long wheel-base was more aesthetically pleasing than a short wheelbase under a tall, boxy roof. It encouraged doodling of headlights and taillights, of fins and windshields and different types of exterior decoration such as hood ornaments and faux jet exhausts. It gave instructions on how to make a clay model, a wood model, or a plaster model from your drawings, how to get the wheel-to-fender clearances right, how to curve a piece of translucent plastic to make a windshield, and the best ways to apply paint. It included plan drawings of coupe and sedan/wagon cockpits, giving builders an accurate size template to sketch around. In addition, a bimonthly newsletter, called the Guildsman, was full of tips as well as profiles of working designers and interviews with past winners. Typical headlines: “Four Hundred Pleasant Hours of Work: How Ken Kaiser built a $2000 Winner.” And, “Use Proper Plaster—Avoid Breakage; Hydrocal and Dental Plaster Good.” Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu “Headlights can be made from the ends of small, inexpensive screwdrivers,” read one how-to column from 1959. “The end of the handle is sawed off, filed, and mounted. The parabolic shape of the end looks much like an actual headlight.” To make things easier, aspiring builders could send to the Guild for a free set of prefinished wheels (sans hubcaps, of course, as those were up to the builder). The newsletter reminded builders not to forget rule No. 7 of the 13 compulsory rules, which required the models to have provisions for license plates front and rear. David Courtney, now of Lomita, California, remembers as an aspiring car designer in small-town Illinois reading in the Guildsman a tip that taillights could be cut from the ends of toothbrushes there were made out of transparent red plastic. “I had those red toothbrushes for years,” he said. But like a lot of aspiring entrants, Courtney never completed the two models he began, one of which, an attractive Camaro-like roadster crafted from wood, he still has. “I had a handsaw, a file, a drill, and a 4-inch vise. That was it. As a result, my designs were pretty limited, and how to go about making it, I had no idea.” Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Davids, the ’63 winner, attributes at least part of his success to knowing some past winners personally, and to obtaining a mailing list of others so that he could write them. Thus, he learned before starting the high standards that were expected. “One of the things you heard was detail, detail, detail. And you had to be authentic; you can’t polish aluminum until it looks like chrome. It has to be chrome.” Most kids didn’t have ready access to chrome shops or much else that was needed to build a winning model from scratch, so the Guild encouraged its teenage members to be resourceful. Davids knew he wanted to put a fully enclosed bubble-top roof formed from 1/16th-inch-thick plastic over a fully finished interior, a feat that had never successfully been attempted in the competition. Not only that, but in his design, the car’s rear had a dramatic duct-like channel molded into the roof that carried through the rear glass into the trunk, an absolute showstopper—if he could pull it off. To make a roof from his hand-carved molds, Davids needed a vacuum former, but having no money, he hit the scrapyards and salvaged an electric motor from an old refrigerator and a surplus vacuum pump from a B-52 bomber, kluging a working machine together. “I made 20 to 24 attempts to make the roof, from which I got two, one that was perfect and one that was almost perfect. I put the perfect one on the shelf and used the almost perfect one to build the model around. When I was ready, I finished the model with the perfect one.” Ron Pellman, who entered four competitions from 1956 to 1960, the final year taking second place and a $4000 scholarship, remembers scouring his native Buffalo, New York, for materials. A local lumberyard was willing to plane him some 7/16th-inch-thick poplar boards into which he cut, piece by piece, the rough outline of his car in sections. He then glued the sections into a multilayered sandwich, dripping india ink into the glue so that the seams would help act as guides as he began chiseling, planing, and sanding the model to its final form. Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Finding a chrome shop willing to finish Pellman’s tiny bumpers to competition standard proved fruitless. Finally, a tradesman in a shop down by the Niagara River that did hard-chroming of engine parts for Great Lakes freighters was willing to give it a try—and spent a solid week chroming, filing, filling, and re-chroming the parts until they gleamed with smooth perfection. Recalled Pellman with a chuckle, “I asked him what I owed him, and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Son, you could never afford it.’” The Guild had a few family dynasties, including Simone’s who, with his two brothers, entered a total of 15 models, winning a combined $10,000 in scholarship money. He credits part of his win to getting insider intelligence from his older brother, who was treated to a tour of GM’s design studio while attending the 1959 awards. “He came home from Detroit and said, ‘Forget the tailfins—they’re gone.’” Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu In order to ensure a geographic and age distribution of winners, the Guild divided the nation into regions and its entries into junior (11–14) and senior (15–19) divisions. In order to be eligible for the national scholarship competition, you had to do well in the region, then box up and mail your model to Detroit—instructions were included in the newsletters on the best way to safely crate it for shipping—to be judged for the national competition on a points system that split the criteria between the quality of the design and the workmanship of the execution. Special telegrams notified the 40 finalists for the scholarships—20 each in the junior and senior divisions—who were invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild National Convention and Banquet. Parents were not allowed; the Guild members traveled from the far-flung corners of America on their own, with GM personnel detailed as escorts to help the kids transit at layover airports and train stations. Simone vividly remembers his trip in 1961 from his home in Rhode Island. “I have to admit, I was in shock. I didn’t know nothin’, I was 15 and had never been out of Providence before.” He flew in a small plane to the old Idlewild Airport in New York, where a GM representative met the wide-eyed teen and walked him to his next flight. “The Boeing 707 had just come out, and they put me on a brand-new 707 jetliner—and here’s the kicker: We went first class.” Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Following a dinner of filet mignon, they flew to Detroit, where Simone was directed to a Cadillac Fleetwood limousine that whisked him and some other arriving Guild members to the downtown Book-Cadillac Hotel. There, the group was intercepted by a team of tailors that measured the kids with military efficiency. “Overnight,” remembered Simone, “they made me a whole suit with the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild logo on the jacket.” The next day, after a sightseeing trip around Detroit, the finalists were ushered to the banquet hall where Fisher Body gathered around 800 managers from GM’s vast design, engineering, and manufacturing organizations as well as top scientists, newspaper writers, politicians, and celebrities. Guild members in their matching new jackets sat in rows on a long, terraced dais while the event was presided over by emcees who were luminaries of the day, including Father Knows Best actor Robert Young, broadcaster Lowell Thomas, and TV newsman Walter Cronkite. Seated in the crowd were typically some of the towering figures in GM history, including Alfred P. Sloan and Charles F. “Boss” Kettering. Judges included Harley Earl, his successor Bill Mitchell, Chrysler design director and tailfin czar Virgil M. Exner (a Guild winner himself), and rising young design star Chuck Jordan. The evening culminated in the scholarship awards for the top three models in the junior and senior divisions plus five honorable mentions each, usually announced by the president of GM or his second-in-command to uproarious cheers from the audience. Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu For the next few days (as GM photographers quietly snapped detail photos of every model to be studied later for possible inspiration), the young Guild members were squired around the region, visiting GM’s gleaming Technical Center, touring its design studios, and seeing and touching the dream concepts they had only read about in magazines. Dinners were lavish affairs at local country clubs. Pellman remembers going to a furniture factory and taking a Detroit River cruise to the Boblo Island Amusement Park. There were informational presentations by officials from the FBI, visits to Fisher Body assembly plants, and trips to the nearby Selfridge Air Force Base to sit in jet fighters and meet their pilots. “If you won, you were on a roller coaster ride for a week,” said Davids. Winners were interviewed in newspapers and on the radio, and even appeared on TV talk shows. Their high schools received their own towering trophy, and their models went on a national victory lap of dealerships, corporate offices, and exhibitions, at times aboard GM Futurliners that once roamed the country touting the corporation’s industrial exploits. Many builders didn’t see them again for two years. Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu “It opened up a lot of doors for me,” said Davids, who went on to live a number of lifetimes, including fabricating body panels for Craig Breedlove’s 526-mph Spirit of America land-speed car, earning several college degrees, doing a stint running GM’s experimental design studio, operating a casino, launching a company in the late 1970s to design and manufacture some of the first hand-held electronic games sold in toy stores, and starting a winery specializing in pinot noir. Other Guild alumni, like Jordan, Exner, Richard Arbib, who worked for years at GM as Harley Earl’s right-hand man, and Pontiac, GMC, and Hummer design chief Terry Henline, forged long and successful careers in the auto industry, often after Guild-funded degrees from the famous ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Still others went to work in aerospace, academia, product and packaging design, and varied pursuits in engineering and manufacturing. William A. Fisher’s plan to seed the American economy with capable, tenacious, hands-on thinkers had worked brilliantly. However, even in 1963, the end of the Guild could be predicted. “It was a happy moment,” said Davids, “but the Beatles came out the year after I won, everything was changing, and kids were getting kind of crazy. There just weren’t enough who were disciplined.” Entries dropped precipitously through the 1960s, records Jacobus, from more than 4000 in ’63 to fewer than 2000 in 1967. Model quality also declined. Besides the social changes, which included more distractions and time demands on young people, GM was eyeing the multimillion-dollar costs of the program as new safety and emissions regulations threatened to squeeze Detroit in a financial vise. Image Unavailable, Please Login Cameron Neveu And so, along with the fading of the program’s originator and patron, William A. Fisher, who died in 1969, the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild expired as well. A reunion of Guild members at the ArtCenter College in Pasadena in 2016 led to an effort by former members to conserve as many models as possible, and there are now permanent displays in several museums around the country (see below). As time thins the ranks of the Guild’s surviving members, it’s worth remembering an era when so many teenagers dreamed of a career designing cars. And when the auto industry was clever enough to devise a productive scheme to harness and focus that youthful energy, simply because it recognized that its future, as well as the nation’s, depended on it.
The automotive design profession lost a real giant this week. William (Bill) Porter passed away. Former GM Design and Design educator. Some of Bill's work are classics already. He was responsible for the 1968 GTO, '70.5 Firebird/TransAm and the '96 Buick Riviera to name a few. His knowledge of Design History and Design as well as architecture and classic furniture were limitless. What a force to be reckoned with, in the body of a gentle soul and genuine great guy. My first assignment at GM in the Advanced Pontiac Studio with Bill as the studio chief set the positive tone for the rest of my career. What a mentor. Besides cars and design we talked about food endlessly. What memories. He will truly be missed. RIP Bill. You made a difference. RIP Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I thought/think the ‘70.5 was a landmark design. Full stop. The Firebird & Camaro were some of the best. Ever. The first gen Camaro/Firebirds are good cars but IMO, not as strong as the ‘70.5.
My friend Mr. Rand talks about becoming a car designer from Autoweek: How This Automotive Career Pulled Me In Maybe such a vocational journey begins not in the pages of a young person’s school books, but with the sketches in the back. BY DAVE RANDPUBLISHED: MAR 31, 2025 4:30 PM EDT Image Unavailable, Please Login GM ARCHIVE If you’ve read this column in the past, you likely know it’s primarily about automotive design. But have you ever wondered how someone becomes a designer in the first place? It’s not like it’s a typical career path—one that your guidance counselor suggested because you weren’t doing so well in trigonometry. In fact, it’s a career that most are unaware of, and if there is some recognition that vehicles must have been designed at one point, well that’s what engineers do, right? Image Unavailable, Please Login Which One Was the Decade of Styling? Image Unavailable, Please Login Detroit’s New Industrial Exhibit Honors Design Ask any number of automotive designers what attracted them to the field, and you’ll likely get an equal number of answers. There is no single path to who and how one gets involved. The one common denominator though, seems to be a passion for automobiles. But even here it’s not always the same. Some are true gear heads who like nothing better than to wrench on their car. Others tend to be walking encyclopedias of all things automotive. And others who always drew cars in the back of their school books. Image Unavailable, Please Login DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS GM’s Roger Hughet designed this concept, which led to the 1971 Cadillac Eldorado theme. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Those who do make the connection that they can actually make that passion a career may eventually find their way to the few schools that teach transportation design, many already with a degree before they come to that realization. With a design curriculum, some will realize that their passion is better directed to an engineering approach. And others may find they simply don’t have the ability, or the commitment to the rigorous studio course load. Because it’s here where a student learns to express design ideas visually. The ability to draw and illustrate (now by software) is as important as the ideas themselves—after all, images are how the designs are judged. But the designer’s process, how they approach a design, how they think, is even more so. I remember coming away with the thought that these guys knew what the future looked like! As a child of the ‘60s I was fascinated by the space program, rockets, and anything that could be called a spaceship. In the early part of that decade, American cars still had tailfins so it wasn’t a stretch to see them as road-going extensions of NASA because designers had been leveraging aircraft themes for decades and then the jet/rocket age. How could a kid’s imagination not be captured by this shiny, rainbow-colored eye candy? Image Unavailable, Please Login The Car of the Future—That Never Came Image Unavailable, Please Login A Big Mouth Can Wreck a Pretty Face It was around this time that my aunt had contacted General Motors about her car-crazed nephew and because of this I received a vanilla envelope of 8x10-inch glossies of their concept cars of the day—cars like the Cadillac Cyclone, the Firebird III, and some glass topped Corvette that predated the Stingray. Also included was at least one image of a designer’s rendering of a futuristic landscape of an ultra-modern building behind some fantasy vehicle. It’s hard to describe how much of an impact this had on me (I think I was around 8 or 9), but I do remember coming away with the thought that these guys knew what the future looked like! Image Unavailable, Please Login CADILLAC Cadillac Cyclone Concept. And I wanted to be one of them. I don’t know if that’s typical of aspiring automotive designers, but the thought of creating what the future looked like, at a time when the future was always going to be better, was so compelling to me that I was hooked. At that age I was determined to be a car designer. (Note: on the recent occasion of her 104th birthday, I thanked my aunt for having such a large impact on my career. She of course remembered the whole thing.) And perhaps because of those photographs, or maybe because my parents drove their cars, I also wanted to work for General Motors. Image Unavailable, Please Login GENERAL MOTORS Author Dave Rand at the driver side window of the Pontiac Sunfire concept clay model in 1990. By the mid ‘60s I was convinced that GM simply led the industry in design (I still feel the same about that period, perhaps GM’s high-water mark), and this only furthered my desire to one day work for them. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below And so I did. You can only imagine what it felt like to my 9-year-old self to ultimately be made the head of GM’s Global Advanced Design. I sometimes think back and wonder what path I would have taken if I hadn’t been so fixated on designing cars. I’m not sure being so directed was a good thing, and what I might have missed out of because of it. Yet at the same time I realize my good fortune in actually achieving what I wanted to do. And because I was lucky enough to know that you could make a living doing this. I suspect there are still talented people out there who have the potential yet may never make the connection that there are automotive design careers out there. Image Unavailable, Please Login GENERAL MOTORS Allen Young’s 1964 rendering of the Cyclone concept. And that’s a loss for the individual whose talent may never mature, as well as the industry. Our educational system doesn’t always encourage disciplines that fall outside traditional pursuits. But those with a passion seeking an alternative path may well find their journey begins not in the pages of their school books, but with the sketches in the back. Dave Rand is the former executive director of Global Advanced Design for General Motors.
Dave talks about the new Lexus from Autoweek: What The 2026 Lexus ES Says About The Brand’s Future Lineup Maybe the shape of the new Lexus four-door lacks cohesion, but any manufacturer still creating sedans deserves credit. BY DAVE RANDPUBLISHED: APR 30, 2025 4:51 PM EDT Image Unavailable, Please Login VIEW PHOTOS LEXUS Toyota has released images of the new 2026 Lexus ES, and before you yawn and click on a different article, bear with me. The ES has been Lexus’ best-selling sedan for years, and it’s worth talking about because, well, it’s still a sedan and any manufacturer that hasn’t abandoned this body style for a crossover still gets some credit in my book. The current ES has been around since 2018 and admittedly is getting long in the tooth. But it retains good proportions for a front-wheel-drive architecture, as well as some nice surfacing, especially in the muscular rear quarters. Image Unavailable, Please Login 2026 Lexus ES Goes Hybrid and EV Image Unavailable, Please Login Is There a Future for Luxury EV Sedans? This car never shouted loudly, like the generations before it never made a strong visual statement. Given the car’s continued success, this appears to be what the customers wanted. The only exception is the infamous “spindle” grille which has been scaring small children for years and now, it seems, according to the company’s own research, potential customers as well. The 2026 ES has taken a cue from the battery-electric Lexus RZ crossover, the first production Lexus to signal the brand’s move away from that grille to more of a body-color dominated front with an implied spindle graphic. Image Unavailable, Please Login LEXUS 2026 Lexus ES500e grille is the new face of Lexus. Image Unavailable, Please Login TOYOTA 2025 Toyota Camry uses similar angled forms, different graphics. It’s subtler to be sure, but the current Toyota Camry also has some of the same elements, with different proportions, to make you wonder if Lexus has lost one of it’s most identifiable and distinctive elements. Clearly, no other manufacturer has copied it. The RZ influence can be seen in the rear also, with the thin horizontal taillamp. I’ve complained in the past that this trend is so ubiquitous that it’s getting harder to identify one car from another, which may explain why Lexus has chosen to spell out its name in the lamp instead of using their L-shaped badge as before. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below But besides this there’s little to object to as the rear is handsome and restrained with almost a Porsche-like vibe. Image Unavailable, Please Login LEXUS Crisper lines and faster profile for the 2026 Lexus ES vs... Image Unavailable, Please Login LEXUS A more organic, conservative look for the 2025 Lexus ES. The body side is where the new ES departs most from its previous incarnation. There’s a lot going on here, most notably the side slash that sort of depicts a vent but in reality, is just a molding. I’m convinced the public really doesn’t see subtle surface changes, but they’ll clearly see this. It doesn’t quite work in the way it zips down in the door, then goes horizontal before zipping down again toward the rear wheel, visually stopping the flow. It would have been so much better without that last zip. Also, the character line above it—starting forward of the front wheel and ending at the C-pillar—is troubling. It depicts the upper fender surface that eventually squeezes down uncomfortably by the time it ends, only to be taken up again by another break line in the rear quarter. Image Unavailable, Please Login VIEW PHOTOS LEXUS 2026 Lexus ES. This, in conjunction with the side molding, creates visual starts and stops that do the car no favor. I admire designs that attempt new ways of transitioning surfaces or breaking them up whendone successfully. It’s a difficult thing to execute, so it’s disappointing the ES hasn’t achieved the cohesion that could have happened with a few changes. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The interior, on the other hand works pretty well. It’s very clean and simple, with the now expected large center screen dominating the instrument panel, and some interesting faux bamboo inserts on the doors. Image Unavailable, Please Login How This Automotive Career Pulled Me In Image Unavailable, Please Login Is Styling Going out of Style? The ES has never been overtly luxurious—often described as the perfect car for real estate agents. That general look and feel carries over to the new ES, and that’s unfortunate as the Lexus LS, with its unique materials and beautiful craftmanship, showed the Germans a thing or two on how to do a sumptuous interior, without relying on European influences. Of course, the ES is at a different price point, but it seems cold in comparison. Volvo and Polestar, for example, have demonstrated minimalist and luxurious can be done at the same time. Image Unavailable, Please Login VIEW PHOTOS LEXUS 2026 Lexus ES has a large center screen that dominates the instrument panel, along with unusual green trim. The new ES in now available only as a hybrid or pure electric, and it’s bigger in every dimension, taller (with battery pack) and quite a bit longer (202 inches), which should help its prospects in China, where back seat comfort is a priority. The outgoing ES is already the most popular imported car in China, competing with the similarly sized BMW 5-Series and Mercedes E-Class, so it’s likely there was regional marketing and product planning input in the specifications and perhaps even design of the new ES. While the new ES may not show up on the enthusiast’s radar, this is an important car for Lexus. Image Unavailable, Please Login Now being only 4 inches shorter than the brand’s slow-selling flagship LS—and with powertrains options for multiple contingencies—it’s reasonable to consider that the new ES’ mission is to become Lexus’ largest sedan. Or maybe, with the ever-increasing focus on crossovers and SUVs, its only one.
Latest issue of Octane Magazine has a piece on Gene Bordinet former VPDesign FoMoCo. Bill Mitchell, Virgil Exner era protege. Image Unavailable, Please Login
