As a kid growing up in the 1980s, nowhere was the gulf between American and European car design more starkly demonstrated than in the faux-wood-panelled station wagon (an estate to us), made famous by Clark Griswald’s Family Truckster in National Lampoon’s Vacation.
Huge, kitsch and blocky with spongey suspension and cornering that needed to be phoned ahead, here, inexplicably, was a car that seemed to have been inspired by a bookcase. It was proof that despite the automobile’s status as the defining global product of the 20th century, America did things differently.
This slightly sneery “them and us” stance doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, and the actual reasons why such different approaches to car design developed on opposite sides of the Atlantic are not often considered. It’s a question that comes to mind as Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950–2020 gets underway at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan; an exhibition that uses a selection of sketches, concept cars and production models to tell the story of how the American car came to look the way it did.
Design, as they frequently say, doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and nowhere is the automobile more embedded in a country’s wider culture than the United States. While Europe sank into a post-WWII depression, bringing smaller, cheaper and economical cars like the Mini, Beetle and Fiat 500 in its wake, America in 1950 was booming and optimistic.
The car companies had already proven they were capable of mass-scale production, it was now down to the design departments to create demand for a prosperous American public ready to put 200 years of hard living behind it.
Art majors were hired with a brief to push the envelope, developing dream-like concepts, initially in pencil using fine art techniques, that took inspiration from the jet age and played on the new sense of possibility and personal freedom.
It certainly wasn’t a time to play it safe. The tail fin trend of the 1950s, led by Cadillac, had its roots in the wartime Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane, while chrome accessories became a stamp of opulence and glamour. The Lincoln XL-500 Concept Car from 1953 combined tail fins with a glass roof to accentuate the sense of wonder. Convenience was another new obsession, which carried through to in-car gadgets; inside the XL-500 was a full-size, wired telephone and a Dictaphone — perfect for the thrusting young executive driving back from the city office to the rapidly expanding suburbs.
The Elwood Engel design for a Gyroscopically Stabilized Two-Wheel Car shows just how free the briefs these designers were given were, as a no-limits future opened up in front of them.
This was also the period of the Interstate Highway System and the space race. It’s no surprise that the 1958 General Motors Firebird III with its twin-bubble cockpit, ultrasonic key entry and joystick controller launched a year after Sputnik. Ford’s Nucleon Atomic Powered Vehicle, meanwhile, doesn’t sound like a car you’d want to be near in an accident.
Of course, the industry had plenty of eyes on what was happening in Europe, too. The ambitious, rocket-like and shark-inspired Corvette Stingray Racer was almost a direct response to Italian cars of the era.
Into the 1960s, and the sheer scale of the US continued to have an influence on the cars themselves. Comfort was a priority for the longer journey times; handling was better suited for driving in straight lines; while sturdiness and size matched the remoteness of the landscape. Even the roads were bigger than in Europe, where older cities were starting to pedestrianise.
The Cadillac Eldorado became an exaggerated example of how the curves of the 1950s gave way to the brawny, sharp-edged aesthetic and towering grilles that would make American cars famous for the next 20 years, taking its cues from no less ambitious a source than the classical architecture of Ancient Greece. Now that’s swagger.
With cheap gas in the tank, the Ford Mustang arrived in 1964 as the aggro counterpart to the European Grand Tourer and a symbol of the new American road trip which had its roots in denim shirts and truck-stop diners rather than neckerchiefs and espressos on the Amalfi Coast. It’s a theme carried on by cars like the Plymouth Barracuda to create another uniquely American genre: the muscle car.
Such un-American concerns as safety regulations, speed limits and the oil crisis of 1973–’74 saw efforts made to at least offer smaller, cheaper and more economical models to compete with imports. As the 20th century rolled on, the once wild differences in style in Europe and the US became less pronounced. Some might say that design on both sides of the Atlantic veered towards a globalised run-of-the-mill. In 1998, the Chrysler Chronos concept took its inspiration from a model dating to its 1950s heyday and the cyclical nature of car design began to show itself.
The most recent car in the Detroit exhibition — the Ford GT — is so enmeshed in the modern supercar style that only its circular rear tail-lights give away the fact it was born in the USA.
Today, size has won out all over the world, where the SUV is king of the road almost everywhere. But America still does it bigger; the giant Ford F-150 pickup truck has been the country’s best-selling vehicle since 1981.
This exhibition tells another story, too, of the unknown and unheralded designers who set the American car industry in motion. Such was the secrecy of the automotive industry in Detroit, it’s thought that 99 per cent of all original design drawings were destroyed by manufacturers.
At least here is an opportunity to appreciate American car design through much more forgiving eyes, and perhaps for the first time for many on this side of the pond, applaud it.
dia.org/detroitstyle
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