Before there was “Christine“, there was “The Car”, a movie I remember seeing on late-night TV in the early 80′s. I’m sure it was a drive-in theater treat when it came out in 1977. Nothing like being chased by a huge, vaguely Ford-looking black bucket of Bondo.
BONUS: Hot Rod Magazine’s 40 top car movies. Nice to see Mad Max represented.
Via Jalopnik
I got tripped up by all the Toyotas. Pretty good little quiz though.
AND PASSED WITH AN AVERAGE SCORE. C
In 1974 movie goers were treated to Gone in Sixty Seconds, one long chase scene expanded into a full-length feature film. The movie barely had actors; it was just stunt drivers skidding and careening around, smashing fruit stands and plate glass. In this clip, we see the final jump sequence, repeated twice in slow motion, then once in real-time. By Jerry Bruckheimer’s standards it’s pretty tame, but at least it’s a real car and not a CG cartoon, like the one used for the final jump in the 2000 remake.
BONUS: James Hetfield flies down the hills of San Francisco in Metallica’s “I Disappear”.
Car Culture New Cars Worldwide Wagons
In the wet dream of Bob Lutz, the 2010 Cadillacs are a multi-stage rocket blasting across the salt flats under the watchful eye of the NASAesque GM launch team. The new CTS Sportwagon bursts forth as the first stage in a cycle that ends with a new coupe.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the please to read Chuck Closterman’s “Eating the Dinosaur
BONUS: The first few seconds of this Cadillac ad show a woman grinning as she drives a new SRX. I was pleasantly surprised to recognize Paula Merritt, a woman I knew briefly a couple years ago through a friend in Brooklyn. She used to play drums for Grandma’s Boy (now Bad Girlfriend) before moving to LA to further her modeling career. Looks like she’s doing well. Way to go Paula!
This Volvo “is aimed at the most demanding of customers: the independent woman in the premium segment.” So states the narrator for “YCC: Your Concept Car”, a look at creating an automobile specifically for women. Not to be confused with Rush “YYZ”, or F.U.B.U. “For Us By Us”, the YCC has such innovations as paint that is “just like a non-stick frying pan” and no easy access to the engine compartment. I assume this means that an independent woman in the “premium segment” couldn’t be bothered to know what’s going on with the car.
Over the soothing tones of new-age electronic jazz we learn it’s a “tough car” but not “brutal”. According to one of the women on the design team:
“You’re not buying a technical product; you’re buying by emotions.”
At :53 is my favorite part. A zoned out woman with a sweater casually draped around her shoulders wakes to tell us what our first impression of the car will be: “A feeling of, uh, grace… and, uh, space.” But she’s totally grace-less, speaking slowly and staring bug-eyed into the void.
BONUS: Trip out to the ambient music on this YCC promo video. Turn up the speakers for 9 minutes of hot buzz.
The grandiosity of the narration in this video is hilarious. It’s a 10 minute film documenting the design and testing of 1949 Fords. It’s no ordinary car. It’s “Designed From the Inside Out”:
Here is the idea, a motorcar, conceived as a space for the riders, space that is to be enclosed and powered…
Yup, that’s a motorcar alright.
I love how @6:30 the cars get handed to the marketing guys and angels in heaven sing their approval.
In this Disney film from the late 1950s we are introduced to the highway of tomorrow. I look at this and wonder if they could possibly have been that naive. An atomic reactor melting rock to tunnel through mountains? Complete robotic control of your car? Rocket powered cargo ships? Everything works smoothly and cleanly in the world of colorful cartoons. In real life I think there’d be problems with highways cantilevered on the side of the Grand Canyon.
Disney obviously hated the clutter, chaos and decentralization of the city. He dreamed of a centrally planned world where there were no conflicting interests, everyone agreed that his vision was ideal, and we could be whisked away from dirty reality and concentrate on shopping. No thanks, Walt.
From the Onion: Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus
I like how it comes pre-loaded with Primus “Sailing the Seas of Cheese”
I finished rendering my Avanti Wagon and entered it into the Studebaker Design Museum show. I haven’t done much 3D before but Google SketchUp was really simple to use. It didn’t give me everything I wanted though, so I ended doing some vector drawing on top of the model to get it to look right. Not quite as cool as Top Gear’s Porsche Shooting Brake but I’m happy with how it all turned out.
I wrote some marketing copy and created two ads for the 2-door Avanti Estate. The ads were loosely based on these illustrations posted on theavanti.com. I love the rough, vignetted edges on those marker drawings and the colorful rendering given to the backgrounds.
The ads are available as PDF files by clicking the small images, or here and here.
I’m ashamed to confess my previous ignorance of the Avanti’s designer, Raymond Loewy. He was THE industrial designer of the mid-20th century. In addition to designing for Studebaker, he designed buses for Greyhound, logos for Nabisco, Shell and Exxon, and even the iconic bottles that distinguished Coca-Cola from other sodas through the end of the last century. His design for the exterior of Air Force One is still in use today.
While I was working on the renderings I discovered thatAvanti Motors still exists and creates a limited run of new cars out of Mexico and Canada. I don’t think they’re planning a wagon though.
CORRECTION: A reader informed me that Avanti ceased production in 2006. An interesting note from Wikipedia:
Michael Eugene Kelly, owner of Avanti Motors Corporation, was arrested by the FBI on Dec 22, 2006 in Florida. Kelly is suspected of running a $400 million Ponzi scheme from 1992–2004 and is in jail without bail facing mail fraud charges.
I’m trying my hand at car design for a contest at the Studebaker National Museum. They have an August 7 deadline for submissions for a Studebaker for the 21st century. My concept is for an Avanti Estate, essentially a shooting brake, with 2 doors and lots of cargo space in the rear. A sport coupe with room for golf bags and groceries. The side-profile above is a start, and I’m going to attempt a 3-D rendering using Google’s Sketch-Up.
The other day I saw a group of 2002 T-Birds cruising the highway and realized how their design could be a model for how smaller cars can be made to appeal to US consumers. Too often Detroit models itself after the Japanese, as evidenced in the new Camry-clone Chevy Malibu, seen at left. I think the Malibu is a handsome car, much better than the previous version, but is it distinctly Chevy?
Eric Felten wrote a recent column in the WSJ about the lack of American style in American cars these days. He writes:
One could argue that there’s a certain advantage to making bland and indistinguishable products when, like GM, you suffer from negative brand equity. And it certain is negative these days: Company executive Troy Clarke recently told the Washington Post about focus groups that had reacted positively to photos of the Chevy Malibu — that is, as long as the Chevy logo was obscured.
The other design route is to model cars off tanks and Humvees, with bulky, grotesque plastic trim, making many Dodge and Jeeps resemble armored bank vehicles. Now I’m waiting for the inevitable Detroit equivalent of the Honda Fit. But why not take a different tact and create something as cool as the T-Bird, add back seats, and sell it as a sleek, efficient American car. A Reliant K for a new generation.
