When we last visited Worst Car Designs we'd highlighted 3 comprehensively awful designs, and made a few comparisons with better designs from contemporary designers. This approach offered a chance for the reader to take a rest from the relentless onslaught of bad taste, and offered your scribe a chance to avoid making decisions on other finalists for the Bad Car Design Hall of Fame. But the time of reckoning approaches. Here, in rough chronological order, are selections made by your scribe with the help of a few readers. We're starting with the early Postwar period and running through the Seventies, violating the promise of a 3-part series, but permitting all candidates their hard-earned moment in the spotlight.
Citroen 2 CV, 1948:
Homely it may be, but the cheap and cheerful Deux Chevaux (2 fiscal horses, and 9 real ones at first) was ruthlessly focused on the program for a minimum cost transport for farmers to get their produce to market. The ingenious suspension with its horizontal springs parallel to the car's long axis allowed those farmers to drive over rutted fields without breaking eggs, and the headlights pivoted on stalks for easy adjustment when heavy loads like goats and pigs tilted the floor. Tubular seats could be easily removed to hose down the interior. Like other Citroens, it offered front wheel drive and a comfy ride, the latter a good thing, as it took awhile to get where you were going.
Buick (all lines), 1958:
In the midst of Late Fifties Wretched Excess, GM design chief Harley Earl was seized by an obsessive, prematurely nostalgic longing for…Late Fifties Wretched Excess. Manufacturing costs might've been reduced if they'd just chromed the entire car and then painted over the chrome for the few interstices of color...
Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special, 1959:
Harley Earl flailing away again in a panicky over-reaction to the success of Virgil Exner's Forward Look from 1957. But where most Chrysler products were pretty clean once you got past the big tail fins (okay, maybe not the Imperial), the GM crew decided on a policy of "some's good, so more's better." The Sixty Special shown was the most overdecorated of that year's Caddies, but the attitude affected GM's bread and butter Chevy line as well…
Chevrolet Impala, 1959:
Citroen Ami 6, 1961:
Here's a graphic demonstration of how the Ami's compliant suspension worked at speed…well, anyway, how it worked when you were pushing the 24 horsepower air-cooled twin as hard as you could. The engine was an enlarged version of the 2 CV; with twice the power and almost 200cc added, it likely seemed a muscle car to Deux Chevaux owners. But it wasn't enough the lift the car into the middle ground between the range-topping DS and the 13-year old flivver. And while the 2 CV looked the part of minimum transport, the Ami 6 was odd and pretentious all at once. The drooping tongue of the hood's leading edge related to the grille not at all, and the flanks were cluttered with odd embossed flutes and indentations. The sliding windows had long been replaced with winding ones on Citroen's competition at Simca and Peugeot, and on early cars the rear door windows were fixed. The oblong headlights were an innovation shared with the German Ford Taunus.
The rear featured the briefly fashionable reverse slant rear window seen in the late 50s on Mercury, Lincoln Contintental and the 1960s Ford Anglia. On the Ami it featured an odd crease in the vertical support, and just reinforced the overall lack of a theme.
Dodge Dart, 1962:
Some Dodge dealers hated this Exner-designed Dart even more than the '61 we featured in Part 1 of this series, because it had been hurriedly downsized in response to a story that Chevy would be downsizing the Impala. As it turned out, this didn't happen, and the new smaller Chevy was the Chevy II (Nova), intended to compete more directly with Ford's Falcon than the Corvair was doing. The '62 Dart was a version of that year's Plymouth, which, like many cars of this period, seemed inspired by the Corvair, with chrome-edge horizontal planes and minimal (for Detroit) decoration.* The Plymouth (below) was cleaner than the Dodge, which managed to look like the offspring of the compact Valiant / Lancer (the white car above) and an electric shaver.
The Chrysler team may have done the right thing for the wrong reasons (shaving length, width and 350 pounds) with their big car lines, but when the first fuel crisis hit a dozen years later it looked wise in retrospect. At the time though, sales dropped, and Dodge and Plymouth dealers had to content themselves with watching the light, powerful cars clean up on Nascar ovals and at the drag strip.
Lancia Flavia Sport Zagato, 1962:
By the early 1960s, Zagato, always an innovator, was moving under designer Ercole Spada toward a more experimental approach. This resulted in some immortal classics like the Aston DB4 GT Zagato and the Alfa TZ, as well as some appealing oddities like the BMC Mini Zagato and the one-off prototype coupes for Rover and Volvo. The Lancia Flavia Sport Zagato, produced in hundreds of copies from 1962 to 1967, falls into the latter category and is an acquired taste. Features like the beveled grille, deliberately misaligned top window line, and bulky rear massing with concave trunk and backlight do not relate well either to the expected Lancia themes or to the overall form. From some angles the car looks a bit like some kind of prototype Saab assembled under poor lighting from carjacked Citroen parts…
*Footnote: For more on the Corvair and the cars it influenced, see "Getting Over the Corvair" in these posts, a 2-part series from 3-16-16 and 3-18-16.
*Footnote: For more on the Corvair and the cars it influenced, see "Getting Over the Corvair" in these posts, a 2-part series from 3-16-16 and 3-18-16.
Photo credits:
Citroen 2CV: citroenet.org.uk
Buick Super '58: rdclassics.com
Cadillac '59: stlouiscarmuseum.com
Citroen Ami 6 front: kinja.com
Citroen Ami 6 rear: wikimedia.com
Dodge Dart '62: Chrysler Corporation, reprinted in oldcarbrochures.com
Plymouth Sport Fury '62: wikimedia.com
Lancia Flavia front 3/4: wikimedia.com
Lancia Flavia rear 3/4: bringatrailer.com
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So wrong, in every way, about 2CV I have to question your criteria. Regardless of whether you like it or not - which was not the title of this post - it achieved what it set out to do very successfully; and how many 'bad' designs stay in production for over 4 decades, resisting all attempts at replacement?
ReplyDeleteVisually, the 2CV a deceptively good design, legend has it the result of an all-nighter by Flaminio Bertoni; maybe you need to think of it a re-designed TPV by the same guy who designed the Traction Avant and the DS
The 2CV was featured not as an example of bad design, but to provide an example of focused design, as contrasted with the unfocused frivolity of late-Fifties GM. More history on the Deux Chevaux appears in "Architect-Designed Cars: Part 1", posted here on May 7, 2017.
ReplyDeleteThat 2CV is there for comparison only is stated where exactly...? Even with your comment, I had to infer it from the introduction, as the subsequent text more describes rather than critiques it (and then on different terms – e.g. cost & practicality – as the others). As is, the two things that immediately leap out are “Worst Car Designs” title - and a picture of 2CV...
ReplyDeleteAnd what purpose does chronological presentation serve here other than to confuse? The 2CV is only a 'contemporary' design in the sense of it was STILL in production in 1958, and '62, and '67... A decade would be long time in car design anyway, but especially true of the post-war period. Even if that weren't the case, why cite the 2CV specifically? From not only a different era, but different society (and post war, economy) from a period when vehicles still exhibited national characteristics (e.g. 2CV, Beetle, 500 basically all localised solutions same fundamental need). Surely something like a shoebox Ford would be more suitable comparison from same period or for something non-US and truly contemporary, what about a DS?? (which strikes me as a potentially great comparison)
Actual link to other post would have been nice, tags/labels better yet as it seems to be part of another series
To end on a less critical note, with respect to the Lancia Flavia Sport, in fairness Zagato did fix many of it's problems in the 1967 Lancia Flavia Super Sport Zagato. Although too little too late, it does seem to have served as 'transitional species' that led to Fulvia Sport Zagato
Perhaps we need a reader alert: "Warning: Content may include ambiguity as well as irony, and items may be listed in chronological order to confuse the reader." In Part 2 of the Worst Designs series ("Plastic Promise, Plastic Peril", 7-31-16) we open with the Lotus Type 14 Elite, another car whose merits have been debated (pretty but fragile, noisy rear suspension towers) but which today is considered a design landmark like the 2CV. As with that car positioned above the late 50s GMs, it makes for a lively contrast with the more reliable, but ghastly, Lea Francis Lynx.
ReplyDeleteWe've featured and praised the DS thrice in different contexts, and featured the Flavia Super Sport in a review of other Zagatos on display at the Swiss Museum of Transport (7-4-19). As the custodian of a PF-designed Flavia 2000 coupe, I thought Spada's forms and details had great coherence. But apparently no commercial potential; we're often wrong abt. that over here...