Interesting that you posted images of the car without the Chinese eyes... Have to say I didn't know there were two versions of this car Image Unavailable, Please Login
Stude caps, '59/'60 GM greenhouse; do we know what unsuspecting vehicle was sacrificed for this monster? BTW, seems Ray had the same taste in clothes as Bill M - LOL
Not interesting, my mistake. I meant to post the other headlamp design, but i missed that one. I'll get it right next time!
My avatar is a bit of a give-a-way that I like the design I could be wrong, but I think the Gordon-Keeble by GG predates the Pinin Corvair and of course, it was a production car.
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login BTW, seems Ray had the same taste in clothes as Bill M - LOL[/QUOTE] Mr. Mitchell was indeed a 'colorful' dresser. He even wanted to design his own line of clothing at one point. Mr. Loewy on the other hand...........
Grilles you NEVER saw: Holden, Falcon, Valiant, Mustang, Plymouth, Ford and more Retroautos By retroautos - 21 December 2021 The grille is arguably the most important styling feature of a car. It is where the car meets the world, literally, head on. Be it simple and clean, chromed and dazzling or an intricately styled combination of shapes, the grille is capable of delivering a potent message. You might not know the exact model of BMW when you see one in the street, but you know it is a BMW from its twin oval grille, a design feature since 1933. Image Unavailable, Please Login The upright Rolls-Royce grille conveys the marque’s global reputation for excellence which has endured for more than a century. Image Unavailable, Please Login Jeep’s seven elongated slots, pressed out of flat sheet steel, reminds us of sacrifice and victory in a World War. Image Unavailable, Please Login The elegant chromed bars of the 48-215 Holden capture the unlimited optimism of nation building pride. Image Unavailable, Please Login Some grilles are so successful that they are copied, often. Lincoln’s application of a Rolls-Royce front for its 1968 Continental Mark III defined the Mark series. Image Unavailable, Please Login Ferrari’s egg crate theme from late 1940s and early 1950s was repurposed for the 1955 Chevrolet. Compare this 1951 340 America Berlinetta and the Chevrolet styling studio line drawing from late 1953. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Get it wrong, however, and your car becomes the object of criticism and sales suffer. The 1961 Plymouth trapezoid shaped grille, designed when Virgil Exner was boss of Chrysler’s design efforts, was a key reason why the sales of its full-sized cars dropped by 25% that year. Does the Lexus grille appear similar? Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login And then there’s the Edsel, which quickly entered popular culture as a universally recognised visual and verbal shorthand for failure. Image Unavailable, Please Login Grilles have a humble origin. Appearing in the early 1900s they were a simple device, devised to protect fragile radiators from road debris and minor accidents. By the early 1930s grilles had become a key identifier of a brand and make. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Automobile manufacturers designed increasingly complex and artful “faces” to differentiate their cars and ensure they were instantly recognisable to the public. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Lincoln Zephyr: From Vertical to Horizontal It was in 1938 that a major and industry wide change occurred. Up until then, grilles were tall and slightly backward sloping, largely following the lines of the radiator hidden behind the metal shroud. Image Unavailable, Please Login Indeed, GM’s styling supremo, Harley Earl, believed that such grilles delivered a message of power and dominance. The 1938 Lincoln Zephyr, designed by E.T. “Bob” Gregorie, rendered that thinking outdated overnight. In his book Edsel Ford and ET Gregorie Henry Dominguez quotes Gregorie as admitting that it was a response to overheating problems in the 1936-37 models. The overheating was caused by a combination of the radiator’s placement and grille’s shape. Gregorie’s very effective solution was to place the radiator horizontally between the chassis rails and re-design the grille so that it was low and wide. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login It is hard to imaging now, but this was a radical shift in the front-end visuals of an automobile. When Harley Earl saw a photo of the Lincoln, Dominguez says he exclaimed “How’d we miss that one!”. Writing about it in their book A Century of Automotive Styling, Michael Lamm and David Holls noted it “created panic at GM”. They said that Earl immediately ordered the implementation of horizontal grilles across all GM brands, beginning with the 1939 Buick. Image Unavailable, Please Login Within two years every American car maker had pivoted their grilles 90 degrees. Some European makers resisted the trend, notably Rolls Royce and Mercedes, but eventually they too had to make the transition. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login What if? But what if Gregorie had shaped a different grille? Would his influence have been as immediate and as far reaching? A couple of surviving images from the Henry Ford Museum, dated March 1937, reveal alternative ideas Gregorie was considering for the Lincoln. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login The images of Gregorie’s alternatives started me asking “what if” for the many grille designs that were never seen beyond the high security doors of design studios. Compared with what made it into production, would these alternatives have been a better choice? Would they have added to a car’s success? Or would they have been a disaster and we can be thankful they were rejected? In this first of an occasional series of stories I take a look at the grilles we never saw, and the versions which appeared on the streets. I will leave it up to you to decide if the right decisions were made. 1959 Chevrolet: Anything Goes! Centrally located headlights were just one of the outlandish proposals in the panic which followed GM’s stylists getting a sneak peak of the 1957 Chrysler models. The designers explored many wild ideas in their efforts to reclaim their reputation as styling leaders from Virgil Exner at Chrysler. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login First Falcon: Two or Four headlights? Over a 15 month period, 17 styling proposals were developed for the 1960 Falcon. None pleased Ford’s senior executives, so they asked two of their talented young stylists, Don De La Rossa and Gale Halderman, to see what they could create. In a couple of weeks, they delivered the definitive Falcon shape and grille. Here’s a picture of a two-sided grille which, with a few alterations, it was what appeared in showrooms in September 1959. Four headlights were never seen on any Falcon. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login “Fintail” Mercedes: Upright or horizontal? Back in 1956 when Mercedes was contemplating the styling of what would become the “fintail” model, they were undecided about the grille, as seen in these two photos. Would it be their traditional upright design or the fresher horizontal approach that mimicked the just released 300SL? They went with tradition. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login VF Valiant: All about perception Here’s an interesting idea for the VF Valiant. The slightly inboard placement of the headlights within the grille markedly changes the front-end appearance. The lights appear too close together. And yet, the same inboard location was used for the VG. The difference? The VG uses smaller rectangular lights which blend seamlessly into the horizontal theme of the grille, enhancing it, actually making the car look wider than the VF. Such are the “tricks” talented car designers use to “cheat” the eye. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login LC Torana: Get the point! The early designs for the LC Torana six cylinder included a narrow grille which widened where it met the headlights. “We called it a ‘dog-bone’,” recalls Peter Nankervis, who was the Torana studio chief at the time. “We did a number of variations of the dog bone design and also did a few exercises trying to make the car look wider with more horizontal lines,” he says in my book series Design to Driveway. Image Unavailable, Please Login It was John Schinella who suggested a protruding nose with a horizontally split grille. He wanted it to resemble a scaled down Pontiac GTO. The coloured bar across the grille and the way the grille was wrapped into the front fenders were all part of a strategy to visually widen the car. The wrapped section was initially much wider and longer. Rectangular headlights were also evaluated. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login XW Falcon: Like a Mustang In late 1966 Ford Australia’s styling team basically consisted of two designers, Jack Telnack and Brian Rossi. The duo worked long hours during the summer of 1966-67 to develop the XW Falcon. That it would feature an aggressive open mouth Mustang-style grille was a product planning requirement from the outset. David M. Ford (no relation) was a product planning manager at the time and he told me that “the XW needed to be seen as Australian and rugged while still using the positive worldwide image of the Mustang.” Image Unavailable, Please Login Telnack and Rossi considered variations of the basic grille. These photos indicate the attention to fine detail which is a hallmark of their approach to design. The duo was also working on the XR GT, XT range and ZB Fairlane at the same time as the XW, so they were extremely busy. “You have no idea how much effort, how much blood and sweat, Brian and I put into the XW project,” Jack recalled. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login VK Chrysler Valiant: Bold ideas The Chrysler design team had high hopes for a bold new grille for the VK model. But poor sales of the preceding VH and VJ combined with a lack of money locally and at Chrysler in the USA, meant those dreams came to very little. The VK was very similar to the VJ. The bigger, wider and deeper grille would have to wait for the CL model. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login 1974 Ford Mustang: Attempted break with tradition These two proposals for the 1974 Mustang were an attempt to break away from the forward leaning and aggressive “wide open mouth” grille which had been a defining feature of the Mustang since its release in April 1964. And as it turned out, the 1974 model, seen here, would not break that tradition. It took until 1979 and Jack Telnack’s persistence for the Mustang’s grille to gain a wind cheating backward slant. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login LH Torana: Wide open Retired Holden design director Leo Pruneau told me that the LH Torana’s grille was originally planned to be full width, wrap around into the front fenders and bisected by the bumper bar. “We could not achieve that look because of the body engineering issues, so we compromised with a more upright opening and a wider bumper bar,” he said. It went through a couple of variations until the final version was agreed. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login 1962 Plymouth: Sales slow down The 1962 Plymouth was the unfortunate outcome of a misguided downsizing of Chrysler’s full-sized cars combined with Virgil Exner’s attempt to implement a new design language called the S-Cars. It did not find favour with buyers and sales slipped another 25% on the already poor 1961 sales result. It is hard to know which is more attractive, the styling proposal or the real thing? Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Ford LTD: Defining image Ford’s P5 LTD boasted hidden headlights and when styling its replacement, the 1976 P6, the product planners were keen to continue the theme. Although it is disappointing that the hidden lights failed to make it into production, the simpler end result was one of the most distinctive grilles ever to grace an Australian car. Variations of the Rolls-Royce-esque shape became a defining feature of the LTD for the next 30 years. Image Unavailable, Please Login FJ Holden: So many choices! In January 1950, at GM’s design studios in Detroit, work on the FJ’s styling was well advanced. The primary focus was the grille, and twelve different proposals were developed, four of which are seen here. They are constructed of wood, cardboard and tinfoil and were fitted into the front of a surplus 48-215 that GM had at its Milford proving grounds. It took until May 1950 before a decision was made on which one would grace the front of “Australia’s Own Car” in 1953. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login There will be more Grilles You Never Saw in future editions of Retroautos.Retroautos is published and written by David Burrell with passion and with pride. A special thanks to John Kyros at GM Heritage and those who I quoted for their assistance. Retroautos’ stories and images are copyrighted. Reproducing them in any format is prohibited.
Thank you for that......I spent far too much time trying to equate those lights with "oriental" anything!
Let's not forget the legendary mid-1960s GOATS, that were recognizable from 500 yards away coming at you! Image Unavailable, Please Login
Split grille was kinda signature Pontiac - though took a brief break from the break circa '60 ... Image Unavailable, Please Login
1959 until the end. One year, 1960, no split grille. When I was running the Pontiac Image Unavailable, Please Login Grand Prix/Grand Am Studio in the early '90's, the Pontiac Studio and GM Legal got letters from BMW telling us to stop using the split grille as they thought it infringed on their front graphics.
You guys had the Woodward Split (TM!) - '59 widetrack looks in some ways more current than the '60 - particularly as "Art" ... Image Unavailable, Please Login
Least we not forget, the Olds Cutlass also had a split grill from 1969 up until the early 1980s. Could never understand why GM allowed Olds to use Pontiac's signature split grill design. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Yes, I know. Started out in the Olds Exterior Studio. Twin Port grilles there as well. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
The 1957 Ford Mystere Story December 24, 2021Leave a commentFord, Jim Farrell Image Unavailable, Please Login The 1957 Ford Mystere Story By Jim and Cheryl Farrell The Mystere was a concept car originally intended as the Ford stablemate to the Lincoln Futura during the 1955 show season. The ’55 show season began with the 47th annual Chicago Auto Show, which started on January 8, 1955. The Futura was there. The Mystere, however, was not—nor was it at any auto show that season. Here’s what happened. In July 1954, after designer Bill Boyer finished design work on the ’55 Thunderbird, he was asked by Ford design studio head Frank Hershey to design a new Ford concept car for the 1955 show circuit. Hershey was knee deep designing the ’57 production Ford with other studio designers, so the only direction he gave Boyer was that the new concept car’s design had to emphasize the distinctive finned swoosh that was planned for the sides of the ’57 Ford. Boyer made one sketch and showed it to his studio manager, Damon Woods, who loved it. Woods grew up in France and suggested they call the new concept car the Mystere after the French Mystere jet fighter plane. Package measurements were determined by Hershey, Bob Maguire (exec) and Woods. Studio designers were then given two days to adapt Boyer’s design to a full-sized blackboard rendering, which they had to redo when Hershey increased the wheelbase of the Mystere to 121” to make it look longer and more integrated. There was no engineering done on the Mystere. A 3/8-scale exterior clay model was made together with a full-sized interior buck. Designers who worked on the design of the Mystere were Woods, Boyer, Bill Braathan, Ralph Ortiz, Pierre Crease, John Van Tilberg, John Vanchovie, Ed Jaquet (student/intern), Jim Quinlan and Gale Halderman. The front end was changed from Boyer’s original design when it was determined the original front end design wouldn’t work. Because Ford’s Design Department shops were not yet completely staffed after the move to the new building the year before, the Mystere’s fiberglass body was built by Creative Industries who also made the Plexiglas top and the car’s chassis from steel I-beams. The Mystere had no engine or running gear. The Mystere was finished in December 1954. It was built to look as much like a jet fight as was feasible given the fact it was supposed to be powered by a gas-turbine rear engine (not installed). Other supposed features on the Mystere included an airplane-like interior with a U-shaped steering wheel with buttons and triggers controlling many of the car’s functions; a steering wheel that could be flipped from left to right side; keyless entry; buttons for the ignition switch; and floating instrument gauges. Meanwhile, at the same time the Mystere was being designed and then built at Creative Industries, Hershey, Maguire, Woods and other studio designers were busy finishing up their design for the production ‘57 Ford. After he looked at their proposal, Henry Ford II asked Ford’s design consultant George Walker to evaluate what Hershey and crew planned for the 1957 Ford. Walker said he could do better. HFII said “OK, do it.” So Walker recruited Joe Oros, one of his employees assigned to the Ford studio, and Gale Halderman, a recently-hired Ford designer, to help redesign the ’57 Ford. Walker, Oros and Halderman accentuated the Mystere’s exterior features even more on their ’57 Ford proposal. The end result is that there were now two ’57 Fords—the original one designed by Hershey and crew and the car designed by Walker, Oros and Halderman. HFII’s solution was to market both cars. The Walker car became the ’57 Ford Fairlane and Fairlane 500 (118” wheelbase), and the Hershey proposal became the Custom and Custom 300 series (116” wheelbase) ‘57 Ford. Even before design of the ’57 Ford was finalized, it became obvious the Mystere telegraphed the design of the ’57 Ford, especially the Fairlane 500. The solution was to postpone introduction of the Mystere until it was too late for other manufacturers to copy any of the Mystere’s features on their ’57 production cars. In May 1955, a year and a half before the production ’57 Ford was introduced, Walker was appointed head of the Ford Design Department, which he promptly renamed the Styling Center. Walker’s appointment was due at least in part to his redesign of the not yet introduced ’57 Ford. Frank Hershey promptly quit rather than work under Walker. Walker then named Maguire to replace Hershey as head of the Ford studio. Halderman was made a manager. A year later, Walker named Maguire to replace Alex Tremulis as head of the Advanced studio. Oros was then appointed head of the Ford studio. What happened to the Mystere? Although the public was never told why one of Ford’s most fantastic concept cars was introduced after the auto shows were mostly done for the year, promptly at 11:30 am, on Wednesday, October 5, 1955, Walker, proud as a peacock, introduced the fuchsia-pink and black Ford Mystere (with a pearlescent-white band over the top) at the Ford Rotunda. And two years later, at the end of the ’57 model year, Ford had outsold Chevrolet, cementing Walker’s job as head of the Styling Center and making HFII one extremely happy guy. Photos: Ford Design 1957 Ford Mystere Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Did the Ford Mystere influence Adam West's Batmobile from the 1960s? The glass roof is different, but the proportions look about right. All the best, Andrew. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
