Future in the Rearview Mirror: Pininfarina's World of Tomorrow

Pininfarina moved to the forefront of Italy's (and that meant the world's) independent car design studios during the 1950s.  By 1960, Battista "Pinin" Farina's firm had amassed a portfolio of notable designs for show cars as well as production models for Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari in Italy, Peugeot in France, BMC in Britain, and Nash in America.  They had moved into large scale series production of bodies for Alfa Romeo, Fiat and Peugeot. At the beginning of a new decade that would become associated with radical change, Pinin Farina and engineer Alberto Morelli proposed a radical rethinking of automotive form.  It was the PFX*, and it proposed a diamond-plan layout for the 4 wheels, simplifying suspension and drivetrain with a single steered wheel at front (no Ackerman effect required to adjust inner and outer turning radii) and a single wheel driven at the rear by a diagonally-mounted 4 cylinder engine (no differential needed either).  The goals were to get the noise and heat of the drivetrain behind a spatially-efficient passenger cabin, reduce aerodynamic drag, and increase directional stability with those tall fins.  The car was exhibited at 1960's Turin auto show, but did not attract any orders from major manufacturers...  

By 1961, Pininfarina had compounded "Pinin" and Farina into a single name, and ditched the diamond-plan wheel layout for the Pininfarina "Y", which appeared at that year's Turin show. The engine was at the rear, but in a more conventional arrangement with a differential driving the two parallel rear wheels.  At first, PF kept the stabilizing fins...  

...but later shaved them off the car so the body forms presented a more unified, flowing appearance.  

Pininfarina, along with other coach building houses like Vignale, offered so many futurist bubble show cars during this period that automotive journalists began to wait for "next year's Turin egg." The PFY survived, and was exhibited during Monterey Car Week nearly three decades later.

As the Swinging Sixties shifted into high gear, Pinin Farina, who died in spring 1966, seemed to realize that the concept cars which might best attract attention from car manufacturers would be ones based upon racing and sports cars. There were some innovative sedans, notably the 1967 BMC 1800 Aerodynamica that influenced the Citroen CX of 1970, but the PF cars that captured the public's imagination, and perhaps design contracts from car makers, were stunners like the 1969 Abarth Scorpione 2000, designed by Filippo Sapino. In it, PF adapted a rear-engine chassis, and echoed the monospace wedge popularized by competitor Giorgetto Giugiaro, with sci-fi motifs blasting car design into the Space Age...

Sapino's design had subtleties that rewarded close examination. It wasn't really a monolithic form, but only appeared that way in plan and elevation. Breaks in the planes surrounding the one-piece lift-up cockpit canopy allowed air flow into the hooded air intakes flanking the cabin.  A deft touch was the use of the slanting plane connecting the front fenders to house the pivot for the single windshield wiper.  At the rear, PF made an asset of the increasingly outdated rear-mounted engine (mid-engine designs had already taken over racing) by exposing the engine to view, and detailing the trademark Abarth exhaust like a rocket motor.

During his brief time with Pininfarina before becoming famous at Ghia, Sapino also designed the 512S Berlinetta Speciale, the first Ferrari show car to move away from flowing curves to an almost-monolithic wedge, amended by the modeling of the front fenders as well as the deep air intakes which flanked the one-piece canopy with its combined windshield and roof surface. 

The view below shows how the roof rises slightly between the air intakes, and how the fenders rise above the hood surface, unlike on the Scorpione from the same year. Despite the name, the car was actually based upon the chassis of a wrecked 612S Can Am car, and the engine block in the original show car had no internals, so the car was towed up a hill for the Pininfarina photos in the wild outdoors. While the Berlinetta Speciale was not a functioning car, it would have sufficed as a prop in a science fiction movie about racers in the 21st Century...  

If Ford's GT40 was, at 40 inches from road to roof, the lowest car ever offered to the public, Pininfarina's Ferrari 512S Modulo was one of the lowest cars never offered to the public. Strictly a concept car to wow crowds (and especially auto industry execs) at shows, the 1970 Modulo, penned by Paolo Martin, measured 36.8 inches from road to rooftop.  It was wide at 80.3 inches, anticipating (perhaps) later mid-engine production Ferraris like the Testarossa. Despite the mid-mounted 5 liter V-12, wheelbase was a tidy 94.5 inches, only a bit more than the compact 250 SWB from the Sixties, also designed by PF.  Access was again permitted (grudgingly) by a one-piece canopy over the true monospace wedge form organized around the red-accented planar break encircling the car.  With 550 hp on tap, zero to sixty came up in 3.1 seconds.  With nearly floor-to-ceiling side windows, passing 18-wheelers must have been a cinematic experience... 

Pininfarina maintained its position as an independent design consultant for major manufacturers well into the 1990s, producing 21,000 Cadillac Allanté 2-seat convertibles with PF-designed bodies from 1987-93, as well as designs for Alfa Romeo, Peugeot and Ferrari.  But none of them were as exuberantly futuristic as their show cars from the Sixties, perhaps reflecting a less optimistic vision of the future that technology was going to offer. There was less production work as the century turned, and less design work as car manufacturers which had done so much outsourcing of components brought design in house. In December 2011 Pininfarina announced that it would discontinue automotive production, ending over six decades of innovation.

*Footnote:  The PFX mechanical layout and body design are depicted in more detail in "Architect-Designed Cars: Part 2", in these posts for 5-21-17.  The Abarth Scorpione 2000 concept car was given the essay treatment in "Pininfarina Abarth Scorpione 2000: It Looked Like Rocket Science", from 6-6-16.

Photo Credits:

Top (PFX) & 2nd (PFY):  Pininfarina

3rd (PFY):  allcarindex.com

4th (PFY): George Havelka

5th thru 7th:  Pininfarina

8th:  George Havelka

9th:  Pininfarina

10th: George Havelka

11th & Bottom:  Pininfarina

Bertone's Bookends: Alfa Romeo BATs

The early Fifties marked a time of change for Alfa Romeo, founded in 1910, and for Carrozzeria Bertone, which had been founded two years later.  Alfa introduced its first mass-produced car, the middle-class 1900, in 1950, in time to address the demand for cars in an economy rebuilding after World War 2.  Nuccio Bertone had taken charge of his father's coach building house after that war, and was seeking design as well as production contracts with auto firms.  Alfa released the new 1900 in chassis form for special bodies by Pinin Farina, Castagna and Touring, in order to attract attention to the new line.  Bertone, with new chief designer Franco Scaglione*, a student of aeronautics, aimed to create a car with a minimum drag coefficient (Cd) in order to exploit the performance potential of the Alfa inline four, one of the first mass-produced engines (along with the Jaguar XK) with dual overhead cams.

When their Berlina Aerodynamica Technica (BAT) appeared in 1953, it stunned crowds at auto shows.  The nose was low and the hood dipped below the curved fender forms, with headlights concealed behind doors flanking the twin-nostril grille.  The first car, BAT 5, set the pattern for the series with its covered wheels, compound-curved greenhouse, integrated fins formed into the light alloy body panels, and teardrop shapes repeated in the cabin plan and body section.  The BAT name seemed appropriate to English-speaking enthusiasts, because the car's fins, intended to increase directional stability, reminded them of bat wings.

The cabin was purposeful without being stark, with hooded instruments directly ahead of the driver and seats contoured to provide side support under cornering loads...

Bertone had attracted production contracts from Chicago's S.H. Arnolt for a series of special-bodied MGs and then the famous Arnolt Bristol in 1953, but was still trying to land an order from Alfa.  In 1954, the firm showed Scaglione's BAT 7, with a lower-penetration nose, cleaner flanks, and more fully enveloping fins.  Decades before "biomorphic design" became a catchphrase, the BAT 7 reminded onlookers of some kind of exotic sea creature. It's shown below, and at the center of the trio of cars in the top photo.

The photo above shows how the fins wrap over the roof.  Headlight mountings were changed so the lights descended from the top of the air intakes; the photo above shows them retracted. Scaglione lowered the nose of BAT 7, and the car achieved the lowest drag coefficient of the three original BATs, a figure of 0.19, stunning even by today's standards. Top speed was over 120 mph. Headlights are pivoted downward for use in the photo below. Absence of bumpers helped the lines and the aerodynamics, and kept weight down, but highlight the fact that BAT 7 was not aimed at everyday use.

The interior view shows the contoured seats with side bolsters, the rear-hinged "suicide" doors and right-hand drive unique to BAT 7, and also the lateral and rear visibility problems posed by those enveloping fins.  By now Alfa management was paying attention, and had awarded Bertone the contract to design and build a new coupe on their upcoming Giulietta chassis.  That car, with a new all-aluminum twin cam engine of just 1300cc, would find a new market for small performance cars, and shake up the industry.  

All three original BATs appeared together for the first time at Pebble Beach in 1989.  Below we see the relatively tame silver BAT 9 in the foreground, with the metallic blue BAT 7 parked between it and the gun-metal gray BAT 5...

With BAT 9 in 1955, Scaglione and Bertone seemed to aim for a more practical, "daily driver" iteration of their BAT concept.  They reduced the scope and complexity of the fins, simplified body contours, and substituted covered headlights for the concealed, pivoting units of the previous two versions.  The traditional Alfa grille at the prow may have been a signal to Alfa management that the car was ready for limited production.  But Alfa was committed to large scale production of Scaglione's design for the Giulietta Sprint* (40,000 would eventually be built), and a healthy number of Scaglione's Sprint Speciale*, both of which would keep Bertone's assembly lines, which would soon rival those at Pininfarina, humming for years. 

The strong horizontal ledge Scagione introduced on BAT 9, in the foreground below, as well as the shape of the split rear window shown in plan view in the topmost shot, have been cited by the Blackhawk Museum Curator Tim McGrane as possible influences on GM Styling's design for the 1963 Corvette coupe. The window design on the Chevy is similar, but the horizontal crease on that car is located well above the wheels, and wraps around the entire car, as it does on GM's seminal 1960 Corvair.  BAT 9 four years before the earliest Sting Ray prototype, so American designers, who attended European car shows, had plenty of time to study it... 

After a long career designing and building cars for Alfa Romeo, including Giorgetto Giugiaro's  GTV (1963-76) and the Gandini-designed V8 Montreal (1970-77) as well as  bodies for Fiat, Simca, Iso and Lamborghini, Bertone designed and built the Volvo 780 coupes in the 1990s, and produced Opel cabriolets for GM into the 21st century.  The Alfa connection faded, until 2006 when Dr. Gary Kaberle, a dentist who had bought BAT 9 from a used car lot as a teenager and kept it for decades until selling it to support medical treatment for  his wife, provided a new opportunity for Bertone to design a successor to the BAT series.  Working under Stile Bertone's design chief David Wilkie, designer Valery Muller reinterpreted the original tapered, winged form as a series of planar intersections, fitting the bodywork after wind tunnel studies to a Maserati GT chassis (chosen for the long wheelbase) with modern Alfa 8C drivetrain. The overall impression was perhaps more science fiction than biomorphic...

…but the design provided the same restricted outward side and rear vision as BAT 7 had, five decades earlier.  Perhaps this mattered less in the era of rear vision cameras.  The BAT 11 was scheduled to make an appearance at the Geneva Salon in 2008, but the display was cancelled owing to the bankruptcy of Carrozzeria Bertone, the car-building arm of Gruppo Bertone. The new car was shown instead at a private party for designers, and I photographed it 4 years latter at Concorso Italiano in California, amid rumors that Stile Bertone might soon disappear.

The end of designing cars, and later of building cars, for the great Italian design houses like Pininfarina and Bertone was part of a pattern that included the decline of custom one-off bodywork in the 1960s, the disappearance of boutique car builders like Abarth, Iso and eventually De Tomaso that began in the 1970s, and the rise of in-house design and prototyping facilities at major manufacturers in the last years of the 20the century.  Added to this was that fact that firms like Bertone, Pininfarina and Zagato were run by family members with varying degrees of devotion to, and talent at, the disciplines of industrial design and business management. Gruppo Bertone declared bankruptcy in spring of 2014, and its collection of 79 concept cars, prototypes and classic Bertone-designed production cars was auctioned the following summer.  It turned out that the saga of Bertone's rise to prominence, as well as its eclipse as a force in the industry, was bookended by these Alfa Romeo idea cars. 

Postscript:  This essay marks the 5th anniversary of this blog, which began on August 25, 2015 with "A Review of the Monterey Auction Weekend."  235 essays and over 116,000 visits have followed that moment.  I want to thank everyone who has had a look, and send out the hope that the next five years are more promising than this last one.

*Footnote:  To view the BAT series in the context of other one-off cars, please check into our archives for "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", posted on 9-7-15.  Franco Scaglione's memorable designs for Bertone and others are surveyed in "Unsung Genius Franco Scaglione: The Arc of Success", posted on 12-20-17. 

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author except the following:

Top:  wikimedia

3rd from top (BAT 5 rear view):  George Havelka

4th (BAT 5 interior): classicdriver.com

7th (BAT 7 interior): classicdriver.com

Microcars at Mid-Century: Before the Bubble Burst

The pattern for the post-World War II microcar phenomenon may have been set in the 1930s, when Fiat introduced its Topolino, or "little mouse", powered by a 569 cc water-cooled inline 4. The Topolino put Italy on wheels, and prompted specialists to offer high performance equipment. One of these, Siata, offered overhead valve cylinder heads, and eventually, a Gran Sport roadster with all their special equipment packaged in a lightweight body by Zagato. The 1937 example shown below set some of the themes for postwar sports cars offered by other Italian specialists in what would become the etceterini class, but also for the postwar appearance of microcars, scaled-down vehicles where economies would be achieved by weight saving and simplicity.  At first, these microcars, like the somewhat larger Fiat Topolino as well as the Siata shown here, would follow the format of simply scaling down the form as well as the mechanical layouts of conventional cars.  But the quest for efficiency would eventually foster unconventional approaches...

                        

After World War II, fuel shortages and flattened economies encouraged development of even smaller cars than the Fiat Topolino. In France, Rovin exhibited a tiny cabriolet powered by a 260cc, single cylinder engine at the 1946 Paris Salon. This cyclops-eyed D1 was superseded by the D2 with 423cc air-cooled twin, and twin headlights, the next year. The D2 qualified, like the Citroen Deux Chevaux, as 2 fiscal horsepower, and made about 10 actual horsepower.  Body design, like Zagato's work on the Siata Gran Sport, was clearly based on the idea of simply miniaturizing all the elements of a larger car...  

That was not the case with Renzo Rivolta's Isetta, which appeared in 1953.  In order to maximize interior space, the Italian manufacturer Iso* came up with a body form that the French would eventually dub "monospace".  At the time the egg-like Isetta appeared, the monospace form, with its elimination of separate hood and deck, had only been seen on delivery vans. The curving window forms echoed modern fighter planes.  Along with the body form, Iso reduced entry and egress to a single door at the front face of the car, a reminder that Iso manufactured refrigerators. The steering wheel pivoted outward when the door was opened, giving access to 2 seats.  A rear-mounted two-stroke, split-single, air-cooled engine just under 240cc provided power.  The Isetta was about 4.5 feet wide and 7.5 feet long.  For perspective, that's 2.5 shorter than the BMC Mini that would appear in half a dozen years...

Of course, because it was Italian, the Isetta made an appearance at the Mille Miglia, where it won the Economy Class.  Note that car was a four-wheeler, with the rear wheels so close together that a differential was not needed.

Of more importance than the Isetta's competition career was its value as a business plan for Iso and for BMW, which was licensed to produce the car in Germany, substituting their own 250cc single-cylinder motorcycle engine for the Iso unit.  BMW began production in 1956, just in time for the fuel shortages brought on by the Suez Canal conflict.  BMW sold ten thousand Isettas that first year, about twice the total production of Iso's Isetta cars and delivery vans combined.  The Isetta not only launched Iso as a car builder, it insured BMW's survival at a time when the sales of their expensive V8 luxury cars had faded.

Early versions of the BMW Isetta had the same bubble glass greenhouse as the Iso version. There was also a folding-roof convertible version, for those who needed more ventilation than the sunroof offered...

BMW introduced a 300cc engine in 1956, and late in that year released a new Isetta coupe with sliding windows, which allowed greater ventilation than the earlier bubble top.  A sliding window Isetta is shown below, parked in front of a rear-engined BMW 700 cabriolet.  These 700s were powered by a twin-cylinder, air-cooled engine, and were part of BMW's effort to fill the yawning gap between the Isetta microcars and the big, slow-selling BMW V8s.

In 1958, the year before the conventional-looking 700 appeared, BMW had tried to fill that gap with the 600 Limousine.  Anticipating the minivan at a smaller scale, the 600 had a twin-cylinder engine at the rear, an entry door at the front, and one door on the passenger side.

The photo below shows all doors and lids open. The pivoting steering column was borrowed from the Isetta.  The "Limousine" name seems comically ambitious today, but compared with the Isetta 300, the 600 might as well have been a limo.  Space utilization was good, but the car was not a huge hit with upwardly mobile Germans in the early Sixties...

Messerschmitt tried to cover the Isetta's market territory from 1955-64 with their KR-200 Cabin Scooter, which offered an aircraft-style canopy and 3 wheels. The rear engine was a single cylinder two-stroke unit.  Steering was by a handlebar arrangement...

FMR offered more prosperous, or at least more adventurous, customers the TG500, based upon the Cabin Scooter chassis, but with 30 cubic inch air-cooled inline twin offering more sporting performance.  The aircraft style canopy and tandem seating recalled fighter aircraft. And there were 4 wheels...

Also in Germany during these years, Hans Glas* in Bavaria offered his Goggomobile line of microcars.  The T250 sedan appeared in 1954, and featured a rear-mounted, two-stroke, air-cooled inline twin.  Visually, the T250 was a scaled-down conventional sedan, with 3-box styling and none of the adventures in space utilization offered by the Isettas.  Production of this design, with larger engine options, continued until 1969...

Italy's Piaggio concern, makers of the Vespa motor scooters, got into the microcar business in 1957 with the Vespa 400.  They elected to manufacture the car in France, where it might not have had such direct competition from the then-new Fiat 500.  Styling was conventional but charming, and power came from a 400cc, rear-mounted two-stroke, air-cooled inline twin cylinder engine. Production continued through 1961.

Autobianchi's Bianchina, based upon Fiat's Nuova 500 microcar which appeared in 1957, shared its conventional 3-box massing with the Vespa 400. It shared its rear-mounted 500cc (30 cubic inch) 4-stroke, air-cooled inline twin with the Fiat. Parked next to the Bianchina is an Abarth 595 version of the Fiat 500.  Front-opening "suicide" doors were replace by conventional ones after 1965, and the car was produced into 1975. 

The Fiat 600, introduced in 1956, had done its part to advance the trend toward rear-mounted engines already seen at VW and Renault, and which soon spread to Simca, Rootes Motors in England, and even to GM with the Corvair.  The 600 was at the upper range of our microcar class in overall size, and a bit above the 500cc engine size which many consider an upper limit for the microcar class.  If that's the case, the Abarth Fiat 850TC, with twice the power of the original 600, would be considered a muscle car in this category...

Like many motorcycle manufacturers during this period, Germany's Zundapp attempted to entry the microcar market with the Janus, which proposed front and rear opening doors to access front and rear-facing seats.  The mid-mounted single cylinder two-stroke engine offered interesting weight distribution and space utilization, but not much in the way of power.  Sales price was too high to be competitive, and less than 7,000 copies were sold from introduction in 1957 to 1958, when production ended.

Imitation is perhaps the sincerest form of flattery, and before the bubble of the microcar movement burst with the end of the Suez crisis and the return of Western Europe's economic boom in the Late Fifties, Isetta production had been licensed to Velam in France, as well as to car makers in Argentina, Brazil and Spain.  Heinkel built its own bubble car, with a sleeker and glassier form, but the same front-entry format, and single-cylinder 4-stroke engines of 175 or 200cc, in 3 and 4-wheeled guises.  The Heinkel Kabine was built from 1956 through 1958 in Germany, and from 1960-'66 by Trojan in the UK, and also in Argentina until the mid-Sixties.  BMW sold over 161,000 Isettas before their bubble popped in 1962.  Luckily for them, they  had a second act ready when the sales of the bigger, more conventional 700 Series sputtered.  It was called the Neue Klasse, and it led to the immortal 2002.    

*Footnote:  The Goggomobil and related Glas automobiles were featured in our post entitled "Forgotten Classics: Frua Designs for Hans Glas & BMW", from 12-2-18.  The Isetta's origins and engine design were profiled in "Born From Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", posted on 9-20-18.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by George Havelka except the following:
Top & 2nd:  the author

3rd (Rovin D2):  Automobiles Rovin, featured in Jalopy Journal

4th & 5th (Iso Isetta):  isomillenium.it

14th (Messerschmitt Tiger): wallhere.com

15th (Goggomobil 250):  wikimedia

16th (4 elevation shots of Vespa):  voicesofeastanglia.com

17th (Vespa ad): Piaggio, featured on voicesofeastanglia.com

20th (Zundapp Janus): reddit.com

21st (Zundapp Janus): Lane Musuem, on wikimedia

Bottom (Heinkel Kabine):  wikimedia

Hollywood Stars: Dutch Darrin's Designs for Packard

Howard "Dutch" Darrin was not averse to risk, and the fact showed up in his resumé as well as in his designs. A pilot for two years during the First World War, he encountered Tom Hibbard in 1923 after the latter had left his design partnership with Raymond Dietrich, a firm called Le Baron. In 1923 Hibbard and Darrin went to Paris and established the coachbuilding firm of Hibbard and Darrin, just in time to participate in the boom in expensive, custom-designed automobiles, a boom that ended with the 1929 stock market crash. In 1931 the partnership ended with Hibbard's departure for GM in Detroit, and the next year Darrin found a new partner in banker and furniture maker J. Fernandez.  The partners often purchased chassis for their own stock, rather than waiting for customers to supply a chassis.  Chssis bodied by Fernandez & Darrin included Delage, Hispano-Suiza, Isotta Fraschini, and at least one Buick.*  One of their rare efforts at something like a sports car is the 1936 Packard Twelve Tailback Gentleman's Speedster shown below.

In profile and in rear view, the Tailback Gentleman's Speedster resembled the boat-tailed Le Baron Speedsters* built on the Packard Twelve chassis two years earlier. The name Tailback is an odd tautology that Darrin have intended to differentiate the car from those Le Baron designs…after all, the tail of anything is always at the back.

The fender forms and vee windshield of the Tailback echo the earlier Le Baron Speedster as well.  The Le Baron's running boards, however, have been simplified into a small, chromed oval step just below the door.   This would prove to be a one-off for Fernandez and Darrin, who ended their partnership in 1937.

Below is a view of the 175 hp V-12 engine that powered this '36 Speedster.  Cylinder banks were angled at 67 degrees; displacement had been increased from 445.5 to 473.3 cubic inches and aluminum heads added in 1935.  It's a comment on the Packard management's conservative attitude that brakes were still mechanical (though like the clutch they were vacuum assisted) and front suspension was still a beam axle, though hydraulic brakes and independent front suspension had been introduced on the junior 120 line the previous year. The 3-speed manual gearbox was fully synchronized (a bright spot) with the shift lever on the floor.  The big V12 would disappear from the Packard line after the 1939 model year, leaving inline eights to power the top of the line...

In 1937 Darrin migrated to California and began again in Hollywood as a free-lance designer and coach builder. Looking to attract attention to his new enterprise, he began by purchasing Packard chassis and remodeling them into something he called a Convertible Victoria.  An early example, on the smallest eight-cylinder 120 chassis, is shown below, and dates from 1937.  Note the rakish cut-down doors, elegant vee windshield with thin chromed frame, and general absence of decoration.  In the latter aspect it predicted the 1940 Lincoln Continental. Movie stars like Clark Gable noticed, and began to order cars.

In 1939; Packard had discontinued its big Twelves, and decided to add to its prestige line by offering Darrin's Convertible Victorias as catalogued custom styles on the Custom Super Eight 180 through Packard dealers. Elimination of running boards provided further emphasis on tightly-controlled forms.  The 160 hp inline eight provided smooth power.  These cars were the last Packards with free-standing headlights. Packard was at its peak in the American luxury car market, and its products never got any more elegant than this. 

These custom offerings continued into 1942, but 1940 was the only year for the Darrin-built 4-door Convertible Sedan shown below.  The Convertible Sedan and a companion model, the Sport Sedan, were built on the long 138" wheelbase, while the Victorias were on the 127" wheelbase.  Front doors were hinged at the rear on the Victorias and Convertible Sedans. Only eleven of these Convertible Sedans were built.  In all, production of custom Darrin-bodied Packards is estimated at less than 200 units by historian Richard M. Langworth.

Note the photo of the same car below; the B-pillar was moved out of sight when the top and side windows were lowered.  Packard's cormorant hood ornament was a prominent feature.

The sister car, the Sport Sedan, is shown below.  It has the same long, low proportions ans spare, rounded, undecorated forms. Thin side window frames echo the elegant windshield frame, while the thick C-pillar and small twin backlights provide privacy for passengers in the rear compartment.  The radiator was repositioned on the Darrin Packards for a lower hood line, and the cowl framing was cast in aluminum.  Also note that on these Convertible and Sport Sedans, door and deck hinges are hidden.

No more than three examples of the  Sport Sedan shown above were built. Another Darrin design, also called a Sport Sedan, was built with more production parts. Note that the car shown below has exposed door hinges with doors opening along the B-pillar.  The "suicide doors" at the rear are more like Packard's standard sedans, as are the running boards and front fenders with side-mount spares.  

The grille and hood line on this Sport Sedan variation are taller as well, and the window sill line curves up to meet it.  It's still an elegant design, but not a striking as the original version.

The interior of the green Sport Sedan substituted a restrained dash design of Bakelite and chrome for the wood-grain painted steel featured on earlier production-model Packards.  

                             

The 1941 model year Darrin Victorias show a return to running boards, and the addition of four chrome strakes to each fender, departing from the simplicity of the 1940 Darrin models. 

1941 was full of changes for Packard.  It was the last year of the traditional styling with separate front and rear fenders, except for convertibles like the Darrin Victoria above, and for custom bodies like limousines on the long-wheelbase Custom Super 8 chassis.  In April of that year, Packard introduced a new Darrin-designed, mass-produced Clipper sedan intended to replace the traditionally-styled mainstream Packards.  In addition to the sedan, Darrin updated the Convertible Victoria styling to reflect the sedan's fender lines. Front fenders flowed into the doors, and the rear fender shapes were integrated seamlessly into the body form.  A convex shape formed into the doors and sills hinted at the old running boards.  While the sedan was approved for mass production, the new Victoria never made it into even a limited run...

The 1941 Clipper sedan is shown below.  For that abbreviated first model year, the car was only available with the inline eight-cylinder engine.  Note the similarity of front and rear fender forms and the convex sill panels follow the one-off Victoria above.

The rear view shows how Darrin repeated curved lines and rounded forms to create unity; the chromed window sill molding tangent to the wraparound indent of the lower roof fades into the deck shape.  

For 1942 Packard introduced a companion model, the two-door Club Sedan, and added the option of six-cylinder engines.  Below is a publicity photo of a 160 Club Sedan with the eight-cylinder engine.

Two-tone color schemes were available, as well as bright shades like the red below, providing a contrast to the maroons, dark blues, greens and grays more often associated with this make. Owing to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Axis declaration of war, the 1942 model year was a short one for Packard and the entire US auto industry.  Civilian car production ended after February, with about half as many Packards produced as in the previous year.  Still, that was well over 30,000 cars.

The Darrin styling was extended to the long-wheelbase Packards for 1946 and '47.  Chrome bands extended the lines of the grill around the front fenders. This is a 7-passenger sedan; the limousine had the same body form with the addition of a divider window between the front and rear cabins.

Two-toning shows off the rounded forms of the roof nested on the streamlined forms of the lower body.  In terms of passenger capacity, this was the largest Packard of this period; station wagons had not returned to the company's regular offerings. Neither had convertibles...

For 1948 Packard's styling department turned away from Darrin's graceful design with a restyle that substituted slab sides for flowing fender forms.  The result was somehow a car that looked shorter, taller, and with its flattened version of the traditional grille, wider.  A convertible, shown below, was reintroduced to the line, along with a wagon called the Station Sedan.  In hindsight, many Packard enthusiasts concluded that this restyle of Darrin's work was money that would have been better spent on a hardtop convertible and / or a V8 to face the challenge of Cadillac's 1949 models.  Howard Darrin must not have been pleased; he had offered his design services to an automotive startup founded by a ship builder and an old industry hand.  But the Kaiser-Frazer saga is one for telling another day...

*Footnote:  Custom-bodied Packards by Le Baron, Dietrich and Brunn are featured in "Packard at the Peak: Ask the Man Who Owns One", in these posts for 7-30-20. The Le Baron-styled Model 1106 Sport Coupe Packard built for the Century of Progress exhibition is shown in our post entitled "Vanished Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress, 1933", posted on 5-31-20. The 1936 Buick Opera Brougham bodied by Fernandez and Darrin is featured in "Hillsborough Concours: Escape Road to the Past" from 7-29-18.  And one of Dutch Darrin's designs from the Fifties is examined in "Kaiser Darrin: It Could've Been a Contender", posted on 9-24-19.

Photo Credits:

Digital editing by Veronika Sprinkel:  veronikasprinkel.com

Top thru 4th:  Mecum Auctions

5th (1937 120 Victoria):  flickr.com

6th (1940 Darrin 180 Victoria): wikimedia
7th & 8th:  the author

9th & 10th:  wikimedia, credited to Zinc Photography

11th thru 13th: flickr.com
14th & 15th:  wikimedia, credited to Zinc Photography

16th & 17th: wikimedia
18th (1942 Club Sedan monochrome):  Packard Motor Company, Detroit Public Library files
19th: Mecum Auctions
20th & 21st: tumblr.com

Bottom:  George Havelka