Our Sponsors
Sport utility vehicles
Media Analysis
Is there a ‘Jeep curse’?
One of the more persistent narratives floating around the American auto history media is that there is a “Jeep curse.” Jack Stewart (2016) of Consumer Guide Automotive summed up what this means: “ownership of the […]
Multimedia
Scaringe presents Rivian as a Tesla without the controversy and chaos
With Tesla showing signs of stepping back from automotive production, Rivian has the potential to come out from under its shadow with a more affordable R2 model. Toward that end, the automaker’s founder R. J. […]
Our Sponsors
Gallery
1953 Chrysler Town & Country was the granddaddy of today’s large SUVs
The 1953 Chrysler Town & Country wagon was one of the more obscure cars of the early postwar period, but it was essentially the granddaddy of today’s large sport-utility vehicles. Not the only one, but […]
Design Notes
Will cars with ‘crying-eyes’ styling withstand the test of time?
(EXPANDED FROM 2/18/2022) The automotive media tend to treat even the ugliest styling trends like the courtiers who ignore when the emperor has no clothes. I thus found it refreshing to see Sajeev Mehta critique […]
Design Notes
1969 International was too little, too late to save brand’s big-truck ambitions
(EXPANDED FROM 5/12/2023) This post has received a burst of new attention, so I thought it would be a good time to expand it. I have argued what may not be very popular with fans […]
Design Notes
How Brooks Stevens’s designs for a postwar compact Willys evolved
(EXPANDED FROM 4/15/2022) Lately we have been talking about early-50s compacts, so I thought it was a good time to expand on aborted proposals from Willys. Prior to World War II this automaker had the […]
Design Notes
Early indications of Toyota embracing its inner Virgil Exner
(EXPANDED FROM 10/25/2021) The above photograph shows the beginning of Toyota’s embrace of sci-fi styling. In the foreground, the second-generation Sienna minivan (which was produced from 2003 to 2009) had simple but attractive styling (Wikipedia, […]
Links
How long will automotive styling be dominated by brutalism?
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 […]