From the archives: Driving back to the future

During our pause, we’re re-publishing the occasional article from deep in our archives. This March 1990 column by our founder, Jeremy Myerson, discusses how car design can look backwards and still bring something fresh to the market. It’s particularly prescient in highlighting the Mazda MX-5, which was doubted by many at the time but has since become a hugely successful model line that remains popular today, a quarter of a century later. We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments about the article and how car design has moved since then.

The unveiling of a speculative prototype Jaguar designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro at this spring’s Geneva Motor Show has once again revived arguments over the soullessness of modern car styling. Giugiaro’s company, Italdesign, wasn’t asked by Jaguar to give its familiar, time-honoured visual motifs a more overtly-modern shape. But, having failed a few years ago to win the contract to design the current Jaguar XJ6, Giugiaro — the serious car designer’s designer — decided to go it alone.

The result can be criticised for diluting the rich visual culture of the traditional Jaguar with the latest Japanese-influenced styling trends, but Giugiaro was at least addressing the old-fashioned issues of using styling cues to give cars a distinct and individual personality — something largely missing on today’s roads.

I drive a Volkswagen Golf, one of Giugiaro’s best-known designs, but my choice is still a compromise in a mass market of lookalike vehicles. I can barely tell cars apart these days; so amorphous and anonymous has car styling become. It is a case of world economics and technology leading design into global blandness, which holds dangerous lessons for other product types.

Some time ago, fashion designer Katharine Hamnett wrote an article in the Mail On Sunday suggesting that the Rover Group should comb through its British Leyland back-catalogue and re-issue classic cars from the Fifties and Sixties for the mass market. However, as with reproduction of famous furniture, the latest technology should be employed, with the incorporation of more advanced features than were originally available to the customer.

Mazda’s two-seater Miata, just launched in the UK and closely resembling Lotus’ original Elan, is an indication that somebody, somewhere, was listening. However, the general reaction at the time was to laugh the idea out of court. “What the public wants now is the future, not the past,” argued the car manufacturers. This thinking is reflected in the two main training schools for auto stylists — the Royal College of Art in London and Art Center in Pasadena, California.

I always search in vain at their degree shows for styling exercises which incorporate culture and history and react to the growing consumer need for diversity and individuality — rather than trotting out the well-worn streamlined, aerodynamic, gull-wing-door ideas. But Hamnett’s proposal to recycle history does have appeal. So much so that the Japanese are now designing retro vehicles which are modern versions of old, bulbous 1950s cars. The Nissan S-Cargo is a good example — it is very much in keeping with the current nostalgia in design. Odd, isn’t it, how the true progressives are the ones looking back?

If you asked Stephen Bayley — the car fancier’s car fancier — who he’d most like to swap places with in twentieth century design, it would probably be Harley Earl. Earl, the subject of Bayley’s Dream Machine book, headed the Art and Colour section at General Motors between 1927 and 1959. He was responsible for the look of some 50 million cars, introduced the word ‘Styling’ into the auto vocabulary, and invented all those visual clichés — tailfins, chrome, two-tone colour, wraparound windshields. Harley Earl started his career in Hollywood, which perhaps explains his love of ritzy, lustrous styling. His indulgent work is now probably anathema to an energy- and environment-conscious era, but he nevertheless struck a chord with American car owners.

Nobody today is coordinating a love affair with the car in quite the same way. The realities of auto manufacture are such that the body shells are now developed on computer to be produced in Europe, the East, or the Americas — wherever labour costs are cheapest. There may be some tweaking or refinements of interior specifications for individual markets. But within a certain price and performance bracket, cars all end up looking largely the same. The close collaboration between manufacturers makes this so. Rover and Honda are a good example. The new Rover 200 and the Honda Concerto, both sold in the UK, are essentially the same car.

Small, expensive manufacturers are still doing innovative things in terms of design: one immediately thinks of ideas by Peter Stevens at Lotus, who designed the new Elan, or by RCA tutors Ken Greenley and John Heffernan for Aston Martin. But where is the mass market styling flair which transformed Henry Ford’s rugged invention into the symbol of lifestyle this century? Given current efforts, I remain in the lobby which argues that more fiscal measures should be introduced to actively discourage car driving, and that city centres should ban them altogether and bring back trams.

Header image source: Italdesign media centre.