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Spinning My Tires is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy. E-mails are welcomed--if you have thoughts of your own to share, please send them. Additional Spinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page. 3/3/04 Back in February of 2003, I wrote about looking to the past to see the future. With that editorial, I was thinking more along the lines of somehow building soul back into the cars, a tangible feeling of quality in every single part. This month, with the introduction of the Ford GT and the new Cobra show car, I thought to myself, “It looks like Ford’s building the nicest replicas in the world.” What is it about yesterday’s cars that make them such a magnet for today’s designers? Is original design dead, or is it just a passing fad to mine the past for the present? It isn’t just cars, by the way. More than ever, music is leaning on the past. Many of the songs on the radio today are remakes of songs from years ago. As with cars, I wonder if it is simply a lack of creativity, a genuine love for the material, or just simple greed to generate a quick buck. If you have something new to add to an old standard, that’s great. But if you’re just doing a remake that closely resembles the original so you can have a guaranteed hit (because great music remains great no matter how old), well, that just looks like laziness to me. And clothing—bellbottoms are back, for Pete’s sake! Who would have believe that? Certainly not me, a person who can claim with pride that I was not responsible for dressing myself in the 1970s. Remember the 50s dream cars? They looked like rocket ships or boats or airplanes and featured bubble tops, turbine-themed everything, and used phrases like jet-age styling to describe the look. Well, the future has arrived, and the cars don’t look much like rocket ships and aren’t powered by turbines and can’t fly. Instead, the future cars look very much like yesterday’s cars and are powered by the good old internal combustion engine. Everything old is new again, eh? I think the trend really got rolling with the PT Cruiser. It showed up as a show car a few years before you could buy one at your local Chrysler dealer. I remember it, though I don’t really remember it being a huge hit with show goers. It changed somewhat by the time it reached consumers, but I think for the better. And it ignited a fashion statement that rattled the whole industry. Chrysler didn’t plan on building many PTs initially, fearful of public reaction. It turns out that they couldn’t keep up with demand, with early cars commanding up to $10,000 over sticker at some particularly greedy dealerships. The nostalgic look really seemed to touch something with car buyers. Of course, the Porsche Boxter, Volkswagen New Beetle, then the Ford Thunderbird, the new Mini and the Chevy SSR pickup truck followed. These are not replicas, per se, but recreations for the modern age. But like the PT, sales of all of these vehicles have crashed a few years after their arrival (except the SSR, which hasn’t been around long enough to tank). But now Ford with their GT and the new Cobra show car (which will likely be built following the GT’s production run) suggests that merely hinting at the shape of an old car might not be enough; why not just build a replica instead? The GT is an amazing machine, and I’ll admit that I’d love to have one in my driveway. I even kicked around the idea of building my own from a kit once or twice. But here’s a true factory-built and warranted replica. It doesn’t look like an update of a classic design—it is the classic design. Maybe it isn’t 40 inches tall like the original, but it’s so close as to blur the line between homage and flat-out copy. Is this the future of auto design? Again, I look back at cars like my Century. When it hit the streets in 1941, it was nothing short of sensational. There were the Cadillac aero coupes in the mid-1930s that hinted at the sedanette shape, but when the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac triplets hit the dealerships with that graceful torpedo body, everyone else raced to catch up and launch their own aerodynamically styled fastback coupes and sedans. In 1941, Buick sold more than 100,000 sedanettes on the Special and Century lines. Cadillac sold another 12,000 and Oldsmobile probably sold 50,000. That’s a lot of cars for 1941, the biggest year Buick ever had to that point, as a matter of fact. Pretty good for an all-new shape, I'd say. The new styling, in short, was a hit because it was fresh, new and unlike anything people had seen before. It was graceful, stylish, and, dare I say it, practical. It wasn’t as radical as Chrysler’s Airflows of the mid-1930s, but it was a step towards the cars we drive today. Aerodynamics was a buzzword back then, perhaps even more than it is today, and everyone wanted to look to the future with smooth, rounded shapes and raked windshields and jet-age styling. This styling set the trend for the remainder of the 1940s until the advent of the pillarless hardtop, another entirely new design that looked forward, not back. I’m all for cars that look distinctive. In fact, I’d rather have distinctive than aerodynamically sound or functionally ideal. Who wouldn’t want their car to look like a 1934 Ford instead of a box on wheels? But what will the future of automobile styling look like? Cashing in on nostalgia is a short-term cash-flow booster at best, and a long-term money loser at worst (Ford has already planned the demise of the unprofitable and slow-selling T-Bird, though they won’t admit that it is due to slow sales). What about a clean-sheet design that is unlike anything we’ve seen before? The public isn’t averse to change—look at the minivan, for example—but we do crave distinctiveness to go along with practicality. Give me something that a designer in the 1950s would look at and say, “Wow! We never would have thought of that!” In short, make a mark on the new century not by reliving the past, but by creating the future. There are some great minds and a lot of unbelievably talented people working at car companies. They often get strangled by risk-assessment departments who believe that offending nobody is better than amazing some people. Bland is OK as long as people will buy it. I’d wager that the first company to come up with something truly new and unique, something that is elegant, well proportioned and functional, will sell a lot of cars. Riding one wave and then sitting to wait for another is fine for the short term, and these nostalgiamobiles are pretty good at that. But auto styling has to go an entirely new direction, something that is outside the shapes that have become so familiar. It’s time for the members of this thing we call the 21st Century to get on board and make the future our own. Building 1940s hot-rods and 1950s sportsters on modern mechanicals won’t cut it forever… See you next month. E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net This page accessed Thanks, Fidget! |