Eric Szabo had a lot going for him, according to the few English-language accounts we’ve been able to find of his career. Moscow School of Industrial Art graduate; designer for ZIS/ZIL and NAMI; depu...
In pondering whether Brooks Stevens really wanted to see the world move to rear-engine automobile designs last week, we presented conflicting theories about his work: that he genuinely looked down up...
Gonna be seeing a lot of Ford Bronco retrospectives ahead of the new Bronco’s introduction this year, so let’s start with the one that The Detroit News put together this week describing the Bronco as...
Virgil Exner Jr.’s Simca Special from the 1950s. The Photo courtesy Virgil Exner Jr. More than 60 years ago, a young Virgil Exner Jr. not only followed in his father’s footsteps by designing his own ...
Images courtesy Milwaukee Museum of Art. After all the talk of streamlined rear-engine cars in America during the Thirties – all the renderings and sketches and homebuilt prototypes and Stout Scarabs...
The Citroen DS had an uphill battle coming into the U.S. market for many reasons we won’t run down here. Suffice it to say, none of those reasons (save for maybe the headlamp issue) had to do with st...
The Citroen DS had an uphill battle coming into the U.S. market for many reasons we won’t run down here. Suffice it to say, none of those reasons (save for maybe the headlamp issue) had to do with st...
It’s a good bet that plenty of auto renderings from 1945 until, oh, 1979 or so – particularly the far-out space-agey ones of the Fifties – operated on the designer’s assumption that nuclear power wou...
No history of rock-n-roll cars would be complete without a mention of John Lennon’s Rolls-Royce, so let’s see what GQ had to say about it. To take a Phantom V – a stately wagon once possessed by both...
Images courtesy Ben J. Smith. Those who knew of engineer Ben J. Smith most likely knew of him for his retractable hardtop design for the Ford Skyliner, as we covered in our article on his life earlie...
Not long after we ran Peter Wozena’s minicar rendering, we heard from Scott Wozena, Peter’s nephew, who had another couple renderings of his uncle’s to share with us. “It makes me proud to see his ta...
…the result might look a little something like this rendering that Pete Wozena drew, dated May of 1956, which we came across in the Cooper Hewitt collections. The LaSalle II reference, by the way, is...
We recently came across some of G. Gordon Davis’ renderings on Facebook and not long after landed hip-deep in an amazing collection of Chrysler, Corvette, and various other concept renderings from th...
Since FCA introduced the Hellcat performance trim for the long-lived third-generation Hemi–and especially since it introduced the crate version a couple years back–bench racers have envisioned droppi...
First reported by Autoline’s John McElroy on Facebook, Futurist Syd Mead passed away this morning in his Pasadena, California home. He was 86 years old. Famous for his futuristic renderings seen in m...
All images courtesy Fred Hudson. The response to my question of whether to show Fred Hudson’s boat designs, as well as his Packard and AMC designs, was overwhelmingly positive, so don’t let it be sai...
All images courtesy Fred Hudson. While the decision to forego Predictor styling on a separate body and force Packard to share body shells with Studebaker might have spelled the end of that marque, it...
All images courtesy Fred Hudson. In 1956, with the Studebaker-Packard merger complete and the new company looking to bolster the buying public’s confidence in its ability to build and sell cars that ...
Apparently Chrysler and Lotus’s collaboration that resulted in the Lotus-tuned dual overhead-camshaft cylinder head for Chrysler’s 2.2-litre inline four was supposed to result in even more hybrid Lot...
Drawings by George Lawson, via Cooper Hewitt. The coming of age for the boomer generation in the mid-Sixties might have meant sales success stories like the Ford Mustang. But with all those freshly m...
If it appears Geoff Hacker’s been MIA lately, it’s because he was focused on putting together an archive of all of Dan Post’s publications on custom cars from postwar California. Dan Post was there a...
First off, props to Wray Schelin for taking on a circa-1945 Virgil Exner design as the inspiration for one of his student metalshaping projects. We’ve seen other such projects in the past – for insta...
Photos and images via Wray Schelin. Metalshaper Wray Schelin says he can teach an absolute beginner in metalshaping how to form a car fender in just a week, and he’s decided to back that claim up by ...
While the ModenArt exhibit that featured the works of Giancarlo Guerra, Afro Gibellini and Oriello Leonardi is now over, we did receive plenty of photos from the organizers of the exhibit and its ope...
Well, what do I know—I am a fine artist but not a car designer. But as a historian with 18 car histories under my belt I admire certain car designers throughout history and for a lot of them, part of...