car design thread

And lest we forget, there were other parties equally guilty of 'crimes against the automobile'.
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He was what I would refer to as a 'colorful character'.
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Here's one i've never seen.......
1956 Chrysler Ghia Plainsman Wagon concept

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Enough with the ugly stuff.
This is the car that influenced the design of the '63 Stingray
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Not bad for 1962.
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No mention of Bill Mitchell? Seriously?
Or Fiorivanti?
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RIDES
The 12 Best Automotive Designers Of All Time
Chris West



https://hiconsumption.com/best-car-designers-in-automotive-history/?fbclid=IwAR1lkGHuNZinTiRx8zC2lLqx1zr7OkMa8W1QruT9NSL8GgK0gVCP7INwpvk

 

Interesting observation, Andrew. It certainly looks off center, but the highlight may be the culprit here.
Cannot imagine anyone at MB Design not locating there badge on the centerline.

 

I don't read the NYT but this was sent to me, and I can't disagree.




The Look of Cars Is Driving Me Out of My Mind
Dec. 1, 2021
By Farhad Manjoo
Opinion Columnist

A product manager at Mercedes once told me that he expected to see more
changes in cars and the car business in the next 20 years than we’ve seen
in the past 75. That was six and a half years ago, and so far, his prediction
has been spot on; I struggle to think of a consumer business now
undergoing a more total transformation than what’s happening in
automobiles.

The first revolution is electrification. Encouraged by environmental
regulations and accelerated by competition from Elon Musk’s electric car
juggernaut, Tesla, much of the industry plans to abandon its defining
technology, the gas-powered engine, in favor of electric motors and
batteries.

Then there’s autonomous driving. While the fully self-driving car remains
far-off, many cars are beginning to pick up the routine drudgeries and avoid
the sudden catastrophes of your daily commute. Cars can brake for
pedestrians, change lanes and keep pace with other cars on the road, even
in stop-and-go traffic. Some, like models bearing General Motors’ Super
Cruise system, don’t even require you to keep a hand on the wheel.

And finally, in another trend shaped by Tesla, cars are turning into
smartphones on wheels. They come packed with gigantic touch-screens
and loads of cameras and can gain features through updates over the
internet. The electric car start-up Fisker recently unveiled a model, the
Ocean S.U.V., that carries a monstrous 17.1-inch screen on its dash that can
be rotated into “Hollywood mode” — horizontal orientation for watching
movies and playing video games while the car is parked.

With so much change going on in the car business, I’d been looking forward
to visiting the Los Angeles Auto Show, one of the world’s largest. But it
wasn’t long after arriving on the show floor last week that I began to feel —
how to put this delicately? — bored out of my mind.

Cars may be undergoing huge changes on the inside, but you wouldn’t
know it to look at them. Everywhere I turned at the show, I saw the same
basic vehicle, a selection as bland and monotonous as a supermarket’s TV
dinner aisle.
Car enthusiasts have been complaining about homogeneity for decades, but
the problem seems to have grown dire. Most cars at the show looked like
most others in their categories, and because Americans have converged on
a very narrow range of auto categories, the sameness felt oppressive and,
ultimately, quite sad. Cars were once a playground for aesthetic
experimentation, a showcase for the world’s most inventive and daring
industrial designers. Now they really are like smartphones; every new
iPhone is only a slight evolution from the last one, and so is every new car.
“Compared to how crazy the stuff is that’s happening in the tech world of
cars, it’s bizarre how much they all look the same,” said Doug DeMuro, who
hosts an excellent car review YouTube channel.
The sameness may be a product of a trend that has roiled the industry
since the 1990s: the steady sales growth in S.U.V.s and crossovers, the
smaller cousins of S.U.V.s that are built more like cars than trucks, and the
decline of passenger vehicles, including sedans, hatchbacks and wagons.

Today the majority of vehicles sold in America are crossovers or S.U.V.s,
and pickups have also long been popular. Aesthetically, the pickups are
nearly indistinguishable from one another. Even Ford’s new F-150
Lightning, the electric version of the longtime best-selling vehicle in
America, looks pretty much like every other pickup on the road.
The S.U.V.s, and crossovers, meanwhile, come in two basic shapes: boxes
and bubbles. The boxes are the S.U.V.s, which range from huge (Jeep Grand
Cherokee, Ford Explorer) to really huge (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition).
The bubbles are the crossovers, whose sales have shot up over the past
couple of decades.

Until a few years ago, the Toyota Camry sedan was the best-selling
passenger car in the United States, a position it had held for nearly two
decades. The Camry has since been dethroned by a bubble.
As of October, Toyota’s RAV4 crossover was the nation’s best-selling
nontruck passenger vehicle of the year. Honda’s similar-looking CR-V is
just behind it. Automakers have been backing away from sedans. In 2018,
Ford said it would stop making sedans for the U.S. market.
Collectively, S.U.V.s and crossovers will account for nearly 55 percent of
vehicles sold in America in 2021, according to Stephanie Brinley, an
automotive analyst at the market research firm IHS Markit. Pickups are
projected to make up an additional 18.4 percent of the market. In other
words, almost three out of every four passenger vehicles sold this year
were trucks, crossovers or S.U.V.s.

There are many forces pushing for sameness. Constraints imposed by
safety regulations and aerodynamics have left car companies little room for
experimental designs. The bigger constraint is what customers want —
vehicles with roomy interiors that ride high, with the feel of a living room,
or perhaps a throne.
Brinley and others in the car industry expect consumer preferences to stick
even as everything else about cars changes. A very popular Tesla vehicle is
the Model Y, a pretty traditional-looking crossover. When Ford decided to
put up a strong rival to Tesla, it, too, went with a crossover: the new
Mustang Mach-E, which looks much like the Model Y and nothing like any
Mustang that Ford ever made before. By 2025, Brinley predicts, S.U.V.s and
crossovers will account for 59 percent of sales, and pickups almost 20
percent — meaning that four out of every five cars sold will be pickups,
bubbles or boxes.

I have written often of my love-hate relationship with cars. I love cars as
products; I hate them as infrastructure. I love watching the car industry for
its dynamism, its technological innovation and the way it has anticipated
and altered the public’s aesthetic preferences; I hate the industry for the
way it has dominated politics and urban planning, for the way it has billed
its products as a necessary part of modern life.
But every year the product side of cars offers less to love. The industry’s
biggest innovations are now driven by Silicon Valley — by advances in
batteries, cameras, networks and artificial intelligence. Cars are growing
brains, and I’m glad for it. I just wish they weren’t also losing heart, soul
and personality.