(EXPANDED FROM 5/4/2022) One of my stylistic pet peeves is the 1963-65 Plymouth Valiant’s front fenders, which had weird, hairpin-shaped character lines. They undercut what in many respects was one of the cleaner compact designs […]
I checked out David Crippen’s (1989) oral history of Virgil Exner Jr. to see if he offered any useful factual details about two lingering historical debates — why the Studebaker Lark as well as the […]
(EXPANDED FROM 3/3/203) The 1956 Mercury represented the end — at least for the next four years — of Edsel Ford’s original conception of the brand. Since it was introduced 1939, Mercury had been positioned […]
Only rarely will Automotive News publish a historical piece. One such occasion was when it ran a feature about former Chrysler design head Virgil Exner. The thing I find most striking about this article is […]
Question-of-the-day features tend to be vapid, so I usually ignore them. However, I must admit to getting drawn into a Jalopnik query about what are the ugliest cars on the market today (Bellwood, 2025). The […]
(UPDATED FROM 9/20/2021) A few years back Hemmings published a for-sale ad about a 1966 Duesenberg prototype designed by Virgil Exner (Stohl, 2017). The car shared major styling themes with another one Exner subsequently designed — […]
Top General Motors’ designers William Mitchell and Chuck Jordan showed glimmers of adaptiveness in an interview with Motor Trend (1971) magazine. However, the luxury of hindsight allows us to see some of the blinders that […]
(EXPANDED FROM 1/23/2023) This post’s comment thread has received a burst of new attention, so I thought it would be worth expanding upon my original argument. I wrote this article in response to debates about […]
(EXPANDED FROM 7/2/2021) Patrick Foster has questioned whether the 1964 Rambler Tarpon show car would have sold better than the Plymouth Barracuda if it had reached production. His rationale was that neither compact sporty coupe […]
Once upon a time the Henry Ford museum sponsored an automotive design oral history project. Among the people interviewed was Roy D. Chapin Jr., who led American Motors from 1967-77. The Automobile in American Life […]
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