Forgotten Classics: Muddling Through with Bristol

We begin our Bristol detour with the shatteringly unattractive Bristol 450 above because while as a racer with a nonstandard chassis design it seemed an exception to the Bristol rule, in all its essentials it followed the Bristol philosophy.  That philosophy could be summed up as, “Make do and muddle through.”  Bristol engineers contrived alloy bodywork which looked like it had been hastily assembled in a dark cowshed, complete with narrow-tracked wheels deeply inset from voluminous slab sides, stuck-on headlights, and a narrow roofline trapped between odd fins... But we’ll get back to the 450 later. The Bristol car saga began when the aircraft concern decided to get into the car business to take up the slack from declining aircraft production after WWII.  They jump-started their effort by collecting drawings and engine parts for the pre-war BMW 6 cylinder cars, as well as the consulting services of engineer Fritz Fiedler (initially shared with Frazer Nash, which later split), as war reparations.  The first postwar Bristol 400 was essentially a prewar BMW 327 with a 328 engine.  Note that even the twin-kidney grille was carried over. This was the aircraft maker's shortcut to a foothold in the specialist (read "expensive") car market.  As was also the case at Saab, the Swedish aircraft maker which entered the car business around the same time, there was a serious emphasis on aerodynamics in many of Bristol's designs. This was especially evident once they moved past the Model 400, which was largely a BMW copy, and issued the 401 series, which was derived from styling studies by Superleggera Touring in Italy.  The 401 from 1950 was essentially a 400 with Italian styling.  While Bristol claimed to have made its own contributions to the styling, these seemed limited to making a taller roof for men wearing bowler hats. The rare 402 convertible version below also had the Touring-derived lines, and like a handful of dropheads by Pinin Farina had a sleeker, lower profile. All were appallingly expensive, at more than twice the price of a Jaguar. 

With the 405 in 1954, Bristol seemed to be getting into its stride.  Still with the BMW-derived chassis and engine design from the 1930s, it offered low-slung, streamlined alloy bodywork which finally had a character of its own.  The twin-kidney BMW grille had vanished, replaced with a possibly jet-inspired, deeply-inset intake emphasized by a Cyclops fog light.  At the rear, there were neatly integrated fins, and on the sedan, a glassy fastback roof.  The drophead (convertible to Yanks) was even nicer, with a wide door to access the interior.  A shorter 404 coupe version of the chassis showed up first in 1953, but the proportions were odd, emphasized by the short door which impeded access and made it look like a chopped 405 sedan, which looked more like Scheme A.

No matter, because over in Chicago, import dealer S.H. "Wacky" Arnolt had cooked up a deal to get Bristol to supply the short 404 chassis (initially with 403 brakes but later with optional Alfin drums) for the Bertone-bodied Arnolt Bristol which was offered in the USA and Europe.  Unlike other Bristols, all but one of the 142 Arnolt Bristols had left-hand drive.  All shared distinctive styling by Franco Scaglione, with a peaked hood and air scoop to disguise the height of the long-stroke engine, and peaked fenders to harmonize with that hood.  SIx of these were coupes; the rest were roadsters or stripped-down competition bolides, and they did well racing at American tracks. More important, while 142 seems like a modest number of cars, it approaches 3 times the number Bristol sold of the "standard" 404, and it was around half the price of that car.  It could have put Bristol on the map in the US, if Bristol had been interested... 

But let's get back to that 450 racer, Bristol’s only entry in the arena of sports car racing.  Characteristically, they took the shortcut of adapting an outside design, in this case the ERA Type E single seat racer, possibly because of the lightweight tubular frame with 4 wheel independent suspension, or because this ERA used a Bristol engine.   It flopped at Le Mans in 1953, but it would have been a sure-fire winner in our Worst Car Design contest…if anyone had remembered it.  But the next year Bristol came back with a refined car that while not a beauty, had an aerodynamic integrity reflecting wind tunnel studies, and won its class.  This revised 450, like the 405, and like contemporary designs from Saab in Sweden, showed that aircraft engineers could bring unique perspectives to bear on car design, and at Bristol they raised muddling through to a high art…

But then they dropped the whole line of development.  The tubular chassis and independent rear suspension from the 450 never showed up on any other Bristol during the 20th Century, and after Arnolt sold his last Bristol-based car the US connection was dropped.  In 1958 the 406 appeared, but it was basically a notchback 405.  Bristol replaced the obsolete six with a Chrysler V8 in 1961, and there were some interesting Zagato coupes including a sleek 407 (below), but  Bristol stayed with the 1930s BMW ladder frame to the end of its 411 line in 1976 and beyond, with the 603 series produced in tiny numbers through the 1990s.  By then retro cars were the only way you could sell a 1930s chassis design, and the Morgan Plus 8, for example, offered a modern V8 with an unashamedly 1936 look.  In the Postmodern Era the way to sell an obsolete idea was to celebrate its obsolescence; Morgan sold a lot more of its riotously obvious 1936 idea than Bristol did of of a car that was 1936 under the skin...

Photo credits:

All photos wikimedia except: 

Top photo: autoimages.org

Image of red Arnolt Bristol Bolide and blue coupe:  Rich Taylor reprinted in Consumer Digest

3nd from last (Bristol 450 roadster): Bristol Owners Club Heritage Trust.

Last Photo: the author

The Etceterini Files, Part 8-----Bandini: The Art of Endurance

Endurance recalls the Bandini saga not only because Bandini contested several endurance races (the Mille Miglia, the Sebring 12 Hours) but also because Bandini lasted longer in the business of making sports racing cars than most of its Italian competitors. Ilario Bandini's workshop in Forli, a city in the Northern Italian province of Emilia-Romagna, was one of the first after World War II to begin producing race cars based on Fiat mechanicals.  In 1946 Bandini offered the 1100 Siluro, a cycle-fendered torpedo which would soon find competition from similar cars offered by Cisitalia and Stanguellini.  By 1950 New York importer Tony Pompeo had imported the first Bandini 1100 Sport, with wind-cheating envelope body by Rocco Motto and Fiat engine block, to which Bandini added a twin cam head with inclined valves adapted from Alfa Romeo designs.  The photo below shows driver Giovanni Bracco with that car in New York.

But Pompeo wanted to get Bandini to offer a 750cc car, and sent him an American Crosley engine to study and modify.  Bandini liked this engine, to which he added his own twin-cam head design. It became the basis for most subsequent Bandini engines, which eventually shared little with the original Crosley template.

By the time Zagato bodied the Bandini 750 Veloce coupe in 1955, the Crosley-based twin cam engine had become the standard Bandini power plant.  Here's a shot of the curvaceous coupe racing at Sebring in 1960. The curved side glass and rear window vents resemble the rear-engined Zagato Fiat Abarths which came a bit later, but the overall proportions on this front-engined car give no clue to the tiny size.

Bandini built only one Zagato coupe, but followed it with a number of the sleek Saponetta with engines of 750, 850 and 1000 cc, starting in 1957.  The name Saponetta ("little bar of soap") may have referred to the car's slippery contours. Alloy bodywork produced in Bandini's workshop formed a tight, elegantly elongated shell over the somewhat conservative chassis design, still with a rigid rear axle and drum brakes.  Still, the car succeeded as a racer, and some came to the USA.

The closest thing Bandini made to a practical road car, the '63 1000 GT pictured below featured 4 wheel independent suspension and front disc brakes along with its wind-up windows, heater and bumpers.  It was also the first Bandini with a 5 speed gearbox, and if it had advanced beyond the prototype stage would have made an interesting alternative to the overpriced ASA 1000GT (see our post for Feb. 2, 2016) and the underpowered Lancia Appia GT Zagato.  While bodywork resembled Zagato’s efforts on Abarth and Lancia, it was by the undeservedly obscure Corna.

The independent-minded engineer, having been one of the first etceterini builders to look beyond Fiat for engine blocks, may have been the first Italian builder to apply the mid-engine formula to sports cars.  Drawing upon a design for a Formula Junior racer, Bandini adopted the mid-engine configuration in 1959, earlier than Abarth or Ferrari.  The 1000P was in limited production until 1965, and was successful in hillclimbs.  In the photo, one of the last 1000P spiders sits next to the last Bandini built, a 1000 Turbo from 1992.

 

This Saloncino competition coupe, a 1968 design, was based upon the 1000P chassis.  Like the 1000P, the Saloncino featured alloy bodywork designed and built, along with engine and chassis, in the Bandini garages.  Unlike it, the Saloncino remained a singular prototype.

The glassy, curvaceous shell resembled a 7/8 scale version of the Dino Ferrari 166SP...

…and put the mid-mounted engine and transaxle assembly on display.

This is the 1300 competition spider.  With the singular exception of a Masserati-engined 6 cylinder 1500 which raced at Sebring, this car from 1980 had Bandini’s biggest engine.  By now the design had outgrown the cast iron Crosley-based block, and consisted of an aluminum block, 4 valves for each of the 4 inline cylinders, a dry sump and fuel injection.  Fiberglass composite* bodywork was by Bandini.  Nearly all the other makers of etceterini had long disappeared by the time Bandini made this car, and all had disappeared when he made his last car in 1992.  Today, the Bandini family museum displays 10 Bandini cars.  The 46 known survivors include this 1300 competition spider.

*Possibly meaning a mix of fiberglass and aluminum panels, not carbon-fiber...

Photo credits:  Wikimedia

Forgotten Classic----Isotta Fraschini 8C Monterosa: Sunset for a Dream

Lovers of classic films may remember the 1929 Isotta Fraschini 8A laudaulet which appeared in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" in 1950.  In a way, the car was one of the stars of the movie...

In it, fading silent film star Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson) and screen writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) are chauffeured around Hollywood by servant Max (Eric von Stroheim)* while they plan Norma's return to the big screen.

When Norma finally gets a call from the studio, she imagines this is the moment for her big comeback.  But she is sadly mistaken; the film producers just want to borrow her Isotta for some scenes calling for a Roaring Twenties car.

The Isotta 8A and 8B were, like Norma Desmond, stars in the grand manner, with custom coachwork built to order on an imposing chassis powered by an overhead cam inline eight cylinder engine.  Styles included the elegant Flying Star below, which was built by Superleggera Touring on the 8A and 8B chassis.  This was in 1931; three years before the Mussolini government would force Isotta to abandon a potential manufacturing agreement with Ford, and turn its attention from car manufacturing to military contracts.

Like Norma Desmond, Isotta Fraschini wanted to recapture the glory days of the Twenties and early Thirties. During the war years, Isotta engineer Fabio Luigi Rapi encountered the advanced, rear engined lightweight V8s designed by Hans Ledwinka for the Czech Tatra firm (featured in our post "A Word or Two on VW" from Nov. 27, 2015).  When Rapi announced plans for a design to relaunch Isotta's car business in the postwar period, the designation "8C" gave the impression that it might be, like many postwar cars, just a warmed-over version of the prewar 8B.  Instead, it owed far more to the Tatra than to any previous Isotta.  Maybe for this reason, it was also given the name "Monterosa."  The first, somewhat clumsy prototype by Zagato featured side-mounted radiators to cool the rear-mounted V8…

Zagato's second prototype, with a conventional front-mounted radiator, was less slab-sided and more harmonious, and Isotta Fraschini announced its return to car manufacture with an exhibit at the Paris Show in October 1947...

But Superleggera Touring created the most balanced and coherent bodywork for the new chassis, in both coupe and sedan form.  The roofline and subtly integrated fender forms reflect some of the work produced by Touring for Alfa Romeo during this era by designer Felice Bianchi Anderloni.

The front-mounted radiator, while a bit too square, combined with the balanced massing to give little hint of the engine location.  

The 3.4 liter ohc V8, gearbox and differential were assembled of light alloy castings into a single unit which fit neatly behind the passenger cabin.  Output was 125 hp.

There was at least one convertible bodied by Boneschi, and perhaps two...

But the dream of production faded when Isotta was denied production financing; no more than 6 prototypes had been built.  The old firm declared bankruptcy in 1949, the year before "Sunset Boulevard."  Ironically, the movie was so successful that it might have done for Isotta Fraschini what "Goldfinger" did a decade and a half later for Aston Martin.  

*Footnote:  Another irony is that Erich von Stroheim didn't know how to drive, and so in the driving scenes the grand old car suffered the indignity of being towed down the street. 

Photo Credits:

Isotta Fraschini 8A: Paramount Pictures, reprinted on coachbuild.com

"Sunset Boulevard" Actors inside Isotta: Paramount Pictures on pinterest.com

Isotta 8A at movie studio:  Paramount Pictures, reprinted on imcdb.org

Isotta 8A Flying Star:  Superleggera Touring, reprinted in prewarcar.com

Isotta 8C Zagato prototype:  Carrozzeria Zagato

Isotta 8C Zagato 2nd prototype:  Carrozzeria Zagato

Isotta 8C Monterosa Touring coupe:  classiccarcatalogue.com

Isotta 8C Touring sedan:  autos.howstuffworks.com

Isotta 8C engine:  woiweb.com

Takata Air Bag Disaster Part 2: Do Air Bags Really Work?

About a week ago we discussed the ever-expanding Takata air bag recall.  Since then, another person has been killed by a Takata air bag, bringing the total to 14, and the New York Times has published a front-page story on this scandal which highlighted the frustrations of consumers seeking a satisfactory solution.  During that week I also read a statistical study of the performance of air bags in accidents which was published by the American Statistical Association's magazine Chance in 2005.  In their study of accidents from 1997 through 2002 (before the first reported Takata explosions), Mary Meyer and Tremika Finney concluded that air bags did more overall harm than good.  Among their conclusions:  Air bags were most likely to do damage when deployed when car occupants were not belted in, that even used with seat belts they were more likely to cause injury in low-speed accidents and in non-frontal collisions, especially side impacts, and that they were least effective in accidents involving children, other people of small stature, or old people.  After digesting 15 pages of numbers and analysis, I came upon this memorable analogy: "Making everyone have airbags and then verifying the effectiveness using only fatal crashes is like making everyone have radiation and then estimating lives saved by looking only at people who have cancer.  Overall, there will be more deaths if everyone is given radiation, but in the cancer subset, radiation will be effective."  And remember, this study was conducted of accidents which did not involve apparent air bag malfunction; that is, no grenade-like explosions spraying the car interior with shrapnel.  One element of the safety equation was consistently vindicated in this study:  the use of seat belts. This brings our discussion back to the question of passive vs. active safety.  Here are some pioneers from the Active Safety Hall of Fame...

The 1956 Citroen DS19 was the first car produced in large numbers to standardize power disc brakes.  It also featured this early version of a collapsible steering column; when the front wheels were pointed straight ahead, the wheel was at 7 o'clock.  In a frontal impact, this directed the driver (before seat belts) to the center of the car.  

Nash had offered lap belts as an option as early as 1949, and Ford in 1955.  In 1958 Saab became the first manufacturer to standardize lap belts, in the GT750.

Volvo made a major step forward, and cemented its reputation for active safety, by standardizing the now-familiar 3-point seat belts in 1959. 

England's Jensen took a brave leap into the future in 1966, standardizing the Dunlop Maxaret anti-skid system, combined with 4 wheel disc brakes and all-wheel drive with a torque-sensing center differential, on its FF.  Mercedes-Benz offered a similar braking system, by then called anti-lock brakes, a dozen years later.  At the dawn of the 1980s, Audi offered a similar all-wheel drive system to the FF on the first of its Quattro series.

Unlike the case with air bags, the jury is not out on these features. We know that this stuff works, and that it works especially well when combined with pro-active driver education, and even better in societies where drunk drivers routinely lose their licenses.  Meanwhile, consumers who call Honda or Subaru about removing their air bags while awaiting replacements get told that removing the bags is illegal, because the air bags are part of "an integrated safety system."  And the New York Times reported that unlike during the unraveling of the VW emissions software scam, dealers are still allowed to sell cars with recalled (read "defective") air bags in them. Apparently we've all got to have that radiation whether we have cancer or not.  Someday, after Takata has gone into the bankruptcy it richly deserves, we may look back and see that using ammonium nitrate in air bags was about as sensible as using hydrogen as a lifting medium in airships.  I'm there already; it looks like it will take awhile for some car manufacturers to catch up.

Photo credits:

Citroen DS19:  drive-my.com

Saab 750GT:  Saab ad, reprinted by swedecars.com

Volvo 122:  Volvo ad, reprinted by brightcreatives.nl

Jensen FF:  bringatrailer.com

Takata Air Bag Disaster: Passive-Aggressive Safety

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you a public service announcement.  If your car or truck was built in this century and is one of the following makes, it may have an air bag made by Takata that is the subject of an urgent recall.  These bags may explode in low-speed collisions or even in a sudden stop, spraying the occupants of the car with shrapnel.  The June 6, 2016 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek characterized the recalled air bags as "60 million car bombs."  That was in June; the recall has now encompassed some 70 million cars.  The following makes have been involved:  Acura, Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Fisker, Ferrari, Ford, GMC, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Jeep, Land Rover, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota and Volkswagen.  As the recall has expanded and the scandal surrounding it deepened, the NHTSA website has updated their list of makes, models and years affected.  You can go to "NHTSA / Recalls Spotlight:  Takata Air Bags Recalls" to see if your car is on the list…

The feature unique to Takata air bags, and to their failure, is the use of ammonium nitrate (the explosive used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing) as a propellant.  Prior to releasing air bag inflators in 2001 using this propellant, Takata used a tetrazole-based propellant called Envirosure. But tetrazole was expensive, and Takata apparently switched to ammonium nitrate for cost reasons.  Takata was the only air bag maker to take this path*.  Takata's own engineers warned about the instability of this material, especially as it takes on moisture and deteriorates over time, but engineers who left the company claim they were ignored.  Bloomberg Businessweek reported that when an engineer wanted to investigate the cause of a test rupture in 2000, he was "reassigned."  In late 2000, a Takata engineer complained that a report on Honda airbags was based on incorrect or invalid data, and in some cases nonexistent data.  The first U.S. case of injury caused by an explosive rupture was in Alabama in 2004.  In 2005, a Takata engineer in the U.S. complained that devices sold to Honda were being supported by data from nonexistent tests. In 2006, the Takata assembly plant in Mexico was rocked by 3 large explosions, which the company blamed on improper disposal practices.  The polite term "air bag rupture" does not hint at the kinds of injuries explosive-driven metal shards can cause.  Victims of air bag ruptures have suffered, and not always survived, severed arteries and in at least one case a severed spinal column. 

Air bags have been required on all cars sold in the U.S since 1989.  Long before the first airbags appeared on cars in the 1980s, there was a spirited debate about the virtues of passive versus active safety in car design.  The deepening disaster of the Takata air bag scandal has revived some of that discussion.  Fans of active safety features argued for across-the-board adoption of disc brakes, for example.  When antilock brakes came along  (earlier than you think, on the Jensen FF in 1966) we wanted those too.  We suggested that cars could adapt better to severe weather with wider adoption of front-wheel drive or torque-sensing all-wheel drive (another feature of the Jensen FF and later on the Audi Quattro, even before air bags were required). Perhaps even more important as part of the active approach, we suggested that adopting mandatory and comprehensive driver education programs in public schools would result in a bigger reduction in the accident injury and fatality rate than adopting air bags.   It made more sense, we thought, to design our driver education and also our vehicles around the idea of avoiding accidents, rather than to simply assume that drivers couldn't help passively blundering into mishaps, and mandating the provision of cars which were massive, inefficient, overweight crash tanks…complete with air bags which, it turns out, can act like grenades. 

The air bag industry claims that its products save around 2,500 lives in an average year.  But there were around 10,000 drunk driving deaths in the U.S. in each of the past two years, and there were roughly 3,300 fatalities caused by texting or cell phone use last year.  Law enforcement figures quoted on the Huffington Post indicate that cell phone use is a factor in 25% of accidents. It would seem that spending more money on driver education and law enforcement, as well as stiffening the penalties for drunk or distracted driving in the justice system, might still be a better investment than perfecting kinder and gentler explosive devices for our car interiors.

Epilogue:    As of this writing, 13 people have died as a result of exploding Takata air bags.  In mid-June, Honda had confirmed over 100 injuries due to these air bags in its own cars.  There is no Federal test procedure for air bags.  I ordered a new passenger air bag for my Subaru in April; the Boulder dealership is just getting around to installing air bags ordered in February.  The dealer turned the passenger bag off, but stated that they could not remove it, as this action was illegal and might result in a lawsuit.  And of course, I wonder about the air bag in my steering wheel. Like the passenger one, it uses ammonium nitrate as a propellant, and I'm guessing it takes on moisture and degrades at the same rate.  Subaru claims that there's no problem with the driver's air bag.  Maybe they're taking Takata's word for it.  They're the same people who, 13 lives and a hundred plus injuries ago, were saying there were no problems with any of their products.

*Footnote:  TRW tried ammonium nitrate, but applied a freeze-drying technique to deal with the moisture threat, and special welding protocols to strengthen the inflator mechanism.  Takata took none of these precautions; owing to their high cost, TRW abandoned ammonium nitrate for more stable propellants in 2006.

Photo credit:  cargurus.com

Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 4: Final Finalists, 1970s to Present

The latest selections include my own favorite disasters, as well as some reader suggestions. We've limited choices to cars that at least had reasonably competent drivetrains and chassis designs, but were let down by packaging and visual presentation; that is, bad industrial design. And to head off those questions about why no Pontiac Aztek and no Hummer H2, I've decided that SUVs and trucks are not cars.  One would think that the advent of computer-aided design tools during this period would have improved the overall level of design so that there would be few egregious offenders.  But competition was fierce; runners-up are listed for some finalists.

Ford Mustang II Cobra, 1974-78

It's hard to remember that the Pinto-based Mustang II won the Motor Trend Car of the Year award for 1974; Ford's timing was good if its choice of base chassis was not, as the car came right after the first Fuel Crisis.  At least one reason this car was such a disappointment was that Mercury dealers got the German-built Capri with a more competent chassis and cleaner body design.  The "Cobra" Mustang II was a cynical attempt to trade on the glory of the Shelby Mustangs from 1965-70, though it offered no special performance or handling features. Possibly the decals, fake vents and Tupperware spoilers made you feel you were going faster. To measure how far the mighty had fallen, you might want to have a look at the 1962 Mustang prototype, "Ford's Forgotten Mustang I", in these posts for August 26, 2015.

Runners-up, Bricklin SV-1 (1974-76) & Triumph TR-7 (1975-81)

Mosler Consulier, 1985-93

Apparently Warren Mosler's transit from Wall Street financier to sports car builder did not involve a stop at anyone's industrial design studio. His lightweight, street-legal racer was intended (one avoids the word "designed') to be competitive in the SCCA, and it was definitely that.  The body, however, was relentlessly hideous, with slab sides, tacked-on bumpers, an abruptly vertical windshield, and openings for lights and vents which looked like they'd been hacked into the study model (if there was one) with a pocket knife. Probably the first carbon fiber bodied car sold to the public.  Race driver John Fitch had one; his verdict, "ugly, but fast as hell", has stood the test of time. 

Nissan Autech Stelvio Zagato, 1989-90

If you looked at the name first, you're likely wondering how Nissan and Zagato wound up together. On the other hand, if you looked at the photo first, you're asking, "What is that thing in front?  Did somebody leave the hood up and then whack it with a hammer?"  The short answers are that during the last days of the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s, Nissan hatched a program with Zagato to build limited runs of Nissan-powered exotica, and what appears to be a badly bent hood is actually two huge tunnels housing the rear-view mirrors.  Other Zagato Nissan prototypes were better looking than this Stelvio (we'll cover them in a future essay), but that's a fairly low bar to clear.  Note the odd wheel design with a single asymmetrical NACA duct, possibly intended to enhance the avant garde sense of off-center weirdness.  Note also the wide horizontal ledge running from the base of the mirror tunnel to the rear of the car, where it wraps under the tail lights. Perhaps this shelf, like the mirror tunnels, was intended as a place for birds to nest while the cars were gathering dust in dealer's back lots (the Japanese are, after all, nature lovers).  Amazingly, among the Zagato concept cars only the Stelvio was cleared by Nissan for production.  Not so amazingly, of the 200 cars planned, only 104 found buyers.

Runner-up:  Alfa-Romeo ES-30 Zagato, a good enough car, and a significant enough trend-setter, to deserve its own essay.  See below….

Alfa Romeo ES-30 Zagato, 1989-94

 

The ES-30 series, whose basic form was created by Robert Opron, who had designed the more organic and curvy GS, SM and CX while at Citroen, was produced in two models, the SZ coupe above (1989-91) and the RZ roadster below (1992-94).  The cars were the first truly new sports / GT cars to emerge from Alfa since the Montreal in 1970.  Emerging at the same time as Zagato's Nissan Stelvio, the ES-30 seemed, unlike unlike earlier Alfas, to be designed with the goal of stopping the eye rather than seducing it.  Like that Stelvio, the ES-30 adopted the strategy of exaggerating one or two features with cartoonish emphasis.  In this case, the wedge profile and short front and rear overhangs were emphasized with nearly vertical, flat front and rear faces. These matched the almost vertical flat sides.  From the rear, the cars looked nearly as high as they were wide… At the time some thought the designers had done a disservice to a great chassis, as the ES-30 had power and balance thanks to Alfa's 3.0 liter V6 married to the transaxle layout which first appeared in the GTV-6.  As the 70s wedge trend was finally giving way to ellipsoidal curves in the late 80s, many had hoped for something more along the lines of the last great Alfa Zagato front-engine road racer, the TZ-2 from 1965 (below).  But the ES-30 sold over 1,300 copies counting SZ and RZ together, while Alfa had only sold around a dozen TZ-2s, a low number even for a focused road racer.  Sometimes there is no accounting for public taste...

Morgan Aero 8, 2001-2010

Apparently designed without any awareness of the notion that form and detail should reinforce each other , the Aero 8 emerged from the factory with its headlights staring at each other across a concave gulf as though the car had tried to wrap itself around a tree.  Once you got past the fairly modern chassis with its BMW V8, the car was a mashup of miscues born of the attempt to marry 1930s swoop to 21st century technology.  The mid-1930s classics the Aero 8 attempted to evoke never had fenders with flush vertical sides, or ruler-straight sill lines.  They did sometimes have doors with external hinges, but nowadays, especially on anything this expensive, external hinges are just bad detailing.  The cross-eyed look stayed until 2007.

Runners-up: BMW Z-4 (E-85 series, 2002-08) and Nissan Cube (3rd series, 2008-present).

Like the Zagato Stelvio, Anders Warming's Z-4 makes a fetish of details which most designers try to hide, though here they are shut lines for doors, emphasized with concave "flame surfacing". The diagonal slash across the front fender bisects the BMW logo and continues the windshield angle, apparently to call attention to the upward curving line of what looks like a hinged unitized fender / hood assembly (like early Sprites which also have this curving line) but is not. The US-mandated center safety light is accentuated with a gawky bump in the trunk surface, with what looks like a combo spoiler / handle.  

The Nissan Cube is notable for having, for no discernible reason, different right and left side elevations.  On Nissan projects like the Cube and the earlier S-Cargo, the cartoonish quality they'd achieved inadvertently on the Stelvio became the whole point. A sight gag on four wheels, it would've suited Homer Simpson and family as a daily driver.

BMW i3, 2014 to present

Richard Kim's design for the i3 pushed the revival fad for black-out graphics to a new level; he used graphics not to enhance form, but to subvert it.  Note the way the black shapes crawling up the front bumper make the silver shapes look unsupported.   The famous twin-kidney grille is just graphics with a bright metal frame; it's blank and admits no air.  Similarly, graphic black-outs are used to erode the deep sill line, either in an attempt to make the car look low and sleek (not so much luck there) or to increase the impression of ground clearance.  This photo helped me understand the reasoning behind the spasmodic drop in the rear window sill line; it allows leftover space for side vision if you leave the dealer price sticker in the window.  Otherwise, your neighbors will never suspect that you actually paid $43,000 for this thing.

Runner-up:  Several readers strongly dislike the 2016 Toyota Prius, apparently because it finds new ways to torture innocent lighting fixtures into threatening shapes…

Photo credits:
Nissan Autech Stelvio:  japanesenostalgiccar.com
Toyota Prius:  Toyota USA, reproduced on pumptalk.ca
All others:  wikimedia

Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 3: Finalists from 1940s through 1960s

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:

…so much that Chevy gave up first place in the sales race to Ford that year.  The rain catcher trunks leaked, by the way.

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.

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