car design thread

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More 'official' Ferrari sketches. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Salem debuts their supercar:
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Yea, that’s a good idea, let’s have the public design the car.

 

Bet you didn't see this coming. From Pagani.
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Any Citroen fans out there?

Plan 19 From Outer Space


Portrait of a space invader.

Source: driving.ca
Saturn 5 rocket? Alien UFO from outer space? 1955. Looking other worldly, the DS19 had a major impact and influence on many automotive designers. Ask any 50 year old + designer for a list of the top ten cars ever designed, and the DS 19 will most likely be on that list. The fact that Giorgetto Giugiaro put it on his best designed list should be enough to dispel any residual doubts.

The Citroën had a major impact and an influence on my personal design vocabulary. While I was a young boy when it was introduced in mid 1950’s America, think about the automotive landscape during that period. Chrome laden shoeboxes at best.

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Source via reddit
General Motors design, led by Harley Earl was embracing the longer, lower, wider, more chrome school of design. Ford was attempting the aircraft inspired rocket ship look with varying degrees of success and Chrysler was pondering the Forward Look for 1957. The major players in Germany and England were still trying to find their design signatures in the Post War automotive era.

And along come the French with the DS19. Unparalleled technology and design daring. NOTHING looked like that car. Nothing. And in fact, in today’s automotive landscape, it still stands out, 70 years later. Ponder that for a moment. It was, and still is a rolling middle finger to everything automotive.

The design and look of the Citroën certainly didn’t hold back on judgement nor execution. They aimed for the stars and put it into orbit. It was polarizing to put it mildly, and one either loved it or dismissed it as too ‘futuristic’. Unfortunately, the buying public chose the latter and never embraced nor appreciated it as the automotive art form it was. Long in wheelbase, sleek in profile, it proved to be too much for the average car buyer.

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Source: GM Design
My first foray in the Cadillac Studio during the 1980s, I tried both overtly and subtly to use the fundamental DS19 design principles of a long wheelbase with clean simple surfacing as a design theme. And as we liked to say, “the dogs weren’t buying the dog food”. There simply was no appetite amongst the design leadership for such nonsense. I managed a scale model with accompanying sketches, but no one was interested, and in hindsight they were probably correct in anticipating a lack of consumer acceptance. “You don’t get smart by being young”, Bill Mitchell once said. But I did get it out of my system.

The DS19 was a pure expression of the automotive art form. Clean surfaces coupled with a unique proportion. It was way too much, too soon, for the average consumer.

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Source: Esquire
Would I have done things a bit differently? Being a designer, yes. But the beauty of the DS is its bold statement. No consumer clinics on this one, nor research asking about likes and dislikes. A pure raw statement. The rear end and taillight execution jump out to my eye, but I think the car still looks great all these years later. Brilliant is the word that best describes it for me.

 

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