What Were They Thinking?: 2006 Chrysler Imperial Concept

Once in a while I do an internet search on "Imperial" or "Chrysler Imperial" and notice items mentioning a possible resurrection of the model.  Some have even appeared fairly recently, in 2014, and a few are nearly current.  If Peter De Lorenzo is even halfway correct in his many assessments of Fiat-Chrysler's state, such a reappearance any time soon -- if ever -- is doubtful.

The most tangible evidence of a new Chrysler Imperial was a 2006 concept car.  Here is what one Chrysler fan site had to say about it a few years later. It includes quotations from personnel involved in the project.

My reaction to the first photos I saw of the Chrysler Imperial Concept was: What Were They Thinking?

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First, two views of the 2005 Chrysler 300C.  This sales-success car's platform was the basis for the Chrysler Imperial Concept.

Front three-quarter view of the Concept.  Its wheelbase was three inches (about 7.6 cm) longer than the 300's, its length 17 inches (43.2 cm) longer, and its height 6 inches (15.2 cm) taller than production 300s.  My take is that the car is too massive.  Given a station wagon (break) rear end, it would work well as a luxury SUV such as we are starting to see from the likes of Bentley and Jaguar, but it fails as a sedan.  The short hood and truck-like snout are not helpful.

The Concept has no B-pillars, not even stub ones.  The curved sheet metal suggesting a rear fender begins too low, adding to the appearance (along with the reality) of bulk.

Rear three-quarter view.  The pinched, quasi-boat-tail trunk lid also helps make the car seem taller than it should be.

I doubt that a resurrected Chrysler Imperial based on this design would have sold very well.

Baroque/Rococo Car Styling: Late 1950s and Now

Around 1955-60, American car styling was at the height of one of its periods of cumbersome shapes and elaborate decoration.  This was the result of the end of an evolutionary trend from cars being collections of discrete features to "envelope" bodies where fenders and other details were parts of comparatively simple overall shapes (see my book dealing with this in detail).  Casting about for new directions, American styling executives hit on the use of jet fighters and science fiction space ships as the basis for shapes and ornamentation.  This was further elaborated by the fad for sometimes arbitrarily placed two and three color paint schemes.

Reaction set in during the early 1960s when simpler designs reached the market.  But automobile styling has as much or more to do with fashion than functionalist ideological purity, so one can observe several swings between simple designs and elaborate ones.  For example, the 1970s saw American cars tending to the Rococo.  And the present auto scene is yet another round of styling ornamental overkill -- worse than in the '70s, rivaling the late '50s, and a worldwide practice to boot.

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Late 1950s Era

1958 Buick Super Riviera Coupe
General Motors' famed styling boss Harley Earl had run out of fresh ideas shortly before his retirement.  His 1957 redesigns for Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac were rounded and heavy looking compared to Virgil Exner's taut, tail-finned Chrysler Corporation line.  Because of the lead-time required for total redesigns, Earl ordered his staff to add lots and lots of chromed trim in a crash project as a means of making the unsuccessful 1957s more marketable for 1958.  The result was Rococo Bad Taste, as the Buick pictured above demonstrates.

1958 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Holiday Sedan
Like Buicks, '58 Oldsmobiles received a good deal of seemingly arbitrarily shaped and placed decorative trim.

1959 Chevrolet Impala Sport Sedan
The entire GM was redesigned for 1959, cars from all divisions sharing the same basic bodies.  The Chevrolet shown here had the thinner, less-rounder tops intended to make the cars seem less bulky than before.  But the late '50s tendency to flamboyance is obvious in the strange rear-end ensemble.

1960 Imperial - MJC Classic Cars photo
Meanwhile, Exner's Chrysler line's styling got increasingly overdecorated.  By 1960, the luxury Imperial brand was basically heavy and rounded with flabby tail fins and a fussy front end.

1961 Imperial
The final facelift of the Exner era saw the Imperial's fins enlarged slightly as well as being canted outwards and having a more pointed tail.  The frontal design is more angular, but decorative complexity was added in the form of detached headlight housings.

Recent Examples

2016 Toyota Prius front
Totyota's Prius was redesigned for 2016.  This was a time not long after Toyota management had been stung by criticism that the Toyota product line was too blandly designed.  So orders came down that in effect stated that the cars should be styled to be as un-bland as possible.  The result thus far has been a good deal of elaborate, confused angularity tacked onto wind tunnel tested basic bodies.

2016 Toyota Prius rear
Here too the added angularity is at odds with the underlying aerodynamic design.

2015 Lexus NX - two cars
Toyota's prestige Lexus brand is also beset by angular over-decoration, as can easily be seen on these Toyota RAV4 based compact SUVs.

2017 Lexus IS 250
Here much of the middle part of the body is clean.  But the frontal design with its oversized air scoops and too-contrived back-to-back Lexus L grille shape is out of sync with the rest of the car.  The rear is not much better, but I'll let that pass for now.

2016 Nissan Murano
The aft end of this SUV is a confused jumble of excessive curves and angularities.

2014 BMW i3
This stubby all-electric car from BMW probably seems cute to some potential buyers.  My take is that the entire car is a visual mess.

2015 BMW i8
BMW's sporty electric car is more pleasing than the i3, yet is still over-decorated.  The top styling aft of the trailing door cut includes too much detailing in too cramped a space.  The black-painted areas add more busyness than is probably necessary, but were included (along with the flash of blue) to denote the "i" electric series  --  these traits are also seen in the previous photo.

What Were They Thinking?: Buick's 1985 Wildcat Concept Car

General Motors' Buick Division has made considerable use of the name Wildcat over the year, as this link attests.  There were three Motorama dream car Wildcats in the mid-1950s, production Buicks with the Wildcat name in the 1960s, and finally another concept car in 1985 that is the subject of this post.

The General Motors web site has this to say about the '85 Wildcat that was developed while Irv Rybicki was in charge of GM styling.  Rybicki's production designs tended to be cautious, but this concept car was quite the opposite.  Perhaps that was because it was a pure show car and not the type of concept car intended to preview production styling features.

The '85 Wildcat was odd looking -- poorly proportioned, and its front and rear designs looked like  they belonged on the opposite ends, as will be shown below.  This was largely due to its mid-engine layout.  I saw this Wildcat at Expo 86 in Vancouver, and it did not impress me.

The Wildcat's puffy fenders and aerodynamic pretensions strike me as being characteristic of GM styling studio thinking in those days.

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The front is strongly cabover.  The curve that's not interrupted by a cowling looks like a mid-1940s fastback (if the glass is disregarded).

The rear looks more like a front: pretend the backlight is actually a 1950s style wraparound windshield.

In the best hot rod tradition, the "mill" is exposed.

This is the car's "door."  Not practical in a rainstorm.

Side view when everything is buttoned down.  I just can't help thinking that the front is at the left.

What Were They Thinking?: Pininfarina's Lancia PF 200 "Jet Fighter"

The saying goes that "even the best of them make mistakes."  Battista "Pinin" Farina (1893-1966), founder of the Pininfarina carrozzeria, is revered as a master automobile body designer.  I, however, tend to think of him as a stylist capable of the very best work, yet who often enough produced mediocre and even bad designs.  While it's likely that others at his firm had a hand in design, especially by the 1960s, Farina the padrone was ultimately responsible for product approval even if he did not do any of the work.

I am not aware of any book-length biography of Farina, so I can't be sure how active he was in the early 1950s when he was approaching age 60.  But my guess is that he was still heavily involved styling the cars his company built.

Which brings us to the strange 1952-55 Lancia Aurelia PF 200 (where PF = Pinin Farina), a Lancia model B52. A little background information can be found here and here.  It is pointed out that the PF 200's styling seems to have been inspired by jet fighters -- the almost-round grille opening looking similar to nose air intakes of the Russian MiG-15, the French Dassault Ouragan, the American F-84 Thunderjet and others.

Farina, it seems, was temporarily afflicted with the same disease as Detroit stylists.  Car design having evolved from collections of discrete items (separate headlights, fenders, trunks, hoods, etc.) to all-encompassing "envelope" bodies (the 1949 Ford, for instance), stylists began looking at jet fighters, science fiction space ships and even insects for inspiration.  At this time, Italian designers tended to treat automobiles as automobiles and not rocket ships.  However, they did stray from time to time, and the PF 200 is a good example of that.  At least only about half a dozen were ever built.

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This is a 1952 PF 200 Coupé.  Its wheelbase is long and the passenger greenhouse is comparatively short because the car only seats two people.  The wraparound backlight assembly seem to be inspired by 1947-52 Studebaker Starlight Coupes.  The trunk lid tapers in a boat-tail manner, though storage space might have been reasonably adequate, given that the sheet metal forward of the lid extends well into the greenhouse.  There is an odd decoration forward of the rear wheel opening.  It is associated with an air intake presumably for brake cooling, though its openings are mere slits.  In summary, the car is poorly proportioned and details are mostly odd and badly located.  What on earth could Farina been thinking?

Here is a PF 200 spider ("speeder," roadster) from about 1953.  The body is about the same as that of the lower body of the Coupé in the photos above.  The spider's windshield is not curved; rather, it is flat and can be pivoted down.  Note the different front protection arrangement (though neither car has more than sketchy frontal protection).

This set of photos shows a 1953-vintage PF 200 Coupé.  Internal grille details differ as does the front bumper arrangement (it's slightly improved).  No rear brake air intakes.

The main difference from the 1952 PF 200 is the treatment of the aft part of the greenhouse.  Rather than the Starlight Coupe- like backlight, we find a nearly-flat backlight nestled between sail panels that extend to the rear of the car.  Quarter window positions are blanked, though there seem to be four louvres to help exhaust cabin air.  The boat-tail trunk lid styling is also gone.  The poor-quality lower photo was taken at the 1954 Paris auto show.

What Were They Thinking?: Jaguar XK150

The "What Were They Thinking?" post category here does not refer to Jaguar planners (essentially William Lyons himself) regarding the XK150, produced 1957-1962.  I'm thinking of the reaction of potential buyers and the public at large.

And at the time it was announced I was shocked, thinking it a bloated travesty of the classic XK120.  Road & Track magazine, the automotive bible of my youth, road tested the 150 Roadster in its September 1958 issue.  Its only comment regarding styling was: "Externally the 150 is still unmistakably an XK, but the general lines and appearance have been softened and refined.  More importantly perhaps, the seating position has been tremendously improved, the cockpit is roomier, controls are easier to operate and visibility is better."  I wonder if the fact that Jaguar had been placing ads on the back covers of R&T had anything to do with this mild reaction.

The November 1957 R&T (also with a Jaguar ad on the back cover) had a road test of a XK150 coupe, having this to say regarding styling: "Although observations on a test car's looks sometimes do not sit well with readers, here goes: The front end, a close examination of which discloses that every component has changed, retains its classic beauty.  The 'cab' has an appearance of lightness, correctly symbolizing the improved vision through the wider windshield and rear window.  Its 4-inch gain at shoulder height is too evident, reminding one more of a mature mother cat than a lithe young huntress.  The rear, heaven help us, needs customizing!  Its collection of chrome clutters the excellent basic shape.  (Letters will be answered as time permits.)"  Slightly more critical, but "nuanced" as political thinkers are wont to say these days.  The parenthetical "letters" comment suggests that R&T readers were letting the editors know that the 150s styling was controversial.

The August 1957 issue (Jaguar ad on the back cover) had a story announcing the XK150 coupe.  Its treatment was clinical, no judgment being placed on the styling.

The XK150 was essentially a new body on a slightly modified XK120/140 base.  Wheelbase and width were the same as the 120s dimensions or nearly so, the 150 being 4 inches (20 cm) longer, largely due to heftier bumpers.

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Jaguar XK120
The initial example of the XK sports car line.  A classic design.  I even approve of the spatted rear wheel openings.

Jaguar XK140 advertisement - 1956
XK140s got heavier bumpers and more chromed trim.  The spats disappeared for good, and the coupe's top was bulkier.  Altogether a slight, yet tolerable, degradation.

Jaguar XK150 Drop-Head Coupe
Fatter hood and curved windshield make the central body ponderous.  The raised fender line is more in line with mid-1950s styling fashions. But note the awkward curve of the front fender -- a lift over the wheel opening that reverses slightly to become a straighter path to the rear fender up-kick.

Jaguar XK150 Fixed Head Coupe
Even though the there is plenty of glass, the overall shape of the top seems a bit too heavy-looking.

1960 Jaguar XK150 Fixed Head Coupe - Barrett-Jackson photo
R&T was right regarding the rear-end ornamentation.  For example, the tail light assemblies could have been trimmed to align with the profile of the trunk and the vertical chromed strip should have been eliminated.  I think the rear window should have been a little less wide; the top's appearance would have been improved without significant degrading of outward visibility.

From the perspective of nearly 60 after its announcement, the XK150 doesn't irk me as much as it did when new.  Much of that has to do with the fact that the 120 has also receded from view (they're seldom seen on streets and roads these days) dulling my sense of comparison.  That said, the 150 is not a good design.  Bulky, with awkward detailing.  William Lyons surely abandoned his good taste with this one.

Fastback SUVs: Honda Gives Up, Germans Try It

I have no problem with creative thinking in the automobile industry.  Of course, many creative car concepts aren't very successful.   Consider crossover SUVs with fastback styling.

The SUV (Sport-Utility Vehicle) in its crossover (sedan-based, as opposed to truck-based) form is essentially a Station Wagon (or Break, as it is called in some countries).  Moreover, it is a station wagon with a tall body where the driver and passengers are higher off the road than would be the case in a standard sedan or conventional station wagon.  But a fastback body profile negates the station wagon aspect of the accepted SUV concept, a potentially risky marketing move.

Honda's fastback crossover SUV Crosstour (first marketed as a Honda Accord) was launched in the USA for the 2010 model year and withdrawn from the market after the 2015 model year due to poor sales.  Presumably what potential buyers were seeing was a fat sedan with less carrying capacity than an equivalent SUV.

I should mention that in practice, SUV luggage areas are seldom loaded to the point where rear-view vision is obstructed.  That suggests that the Crosstour was probably as practical a hauler as a conventional SUV -- most of the time.  But not all of the time, and that might have been the design factor that reduced potential sales.

Even though it was known that the Crosstour was not a market success, for some reason BMW designed and launched its X4, a slightly smaller version of the Crosstour for the 2015 model year as did Mercedes with its GLE Coupe.  The Honda and BMW have about the same wheelbase -- 110.1 inches (2797 mm) for the Crosstour and 110.6 inches (2810 mm) for the X4, while the GLE is longer at 114.8 inches (1916 mm).  But the Crosstour's length was 195.8 inches (4973 mm) compared to the X4s 183.9 inches (4671 mm), a difference of about a foot (30 cm).  The GLE's length is nearly that of the Crosstour, 192.6 inches (4892mm).

It will be interesting to find out if the X4 and GLE Coupe do better in the American market than the Crosstour did.  So far, I have seen few of these on the streets and highways.

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Seen from the front, the X4 (central image) is stubbier, less graceful then the Crosstour (upper image).  The relationship of the GLE Coupe (lower image) to the Crosstour is similar.

Profile views show that the Crosstour has greater hauling capacity than the X4 thanks to its greater rear overhang.  The GLE also has short rear overhang and, considering the relationship of the rear doors to the wheel openings, less trunk room when the rear seatback is upright.

All of these cars seem more like four-door hatchback (5-door) sedans than crossover SUVs of any kind.

Additional comparative views of the storage zones of the Crosstour and X4.

Publicizing the Not-So-Successful Simca Six

The French automobile maker Simca originally was owned by Italy's Fiat and and sold what amounted to Fiat cars with Simca badges.  Eventually Simca passed to other hands, as the link mentions.  But when the Simca Six was introduced in 1947, the company was still Fiat's and the car was essentially a Fiat Topolino with an American-style grille, as this Wikipedia entry indicates.

That entry also notes that the Simca Six did not sell very well. Its styling was reasonably good given its era and the very small size of the car, so other factors likely limited its market success.

Nevertheless, Simca publicists did what they could to attract favorable notice, as the images below indicate. There was a What Were They Thinking moment regarding the final photo, however.

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Simca Sixes in a car show that seems to have been interrupted by a summer rain.

A Simca Six and pretty model posed under la Tour Eiffel.

Another Simca, another pretty model, this time in the Jardin du Carrousel.

Here is where it gets interesting.  This is the same car as in the previous photo (compare license plates) in an aristrocratic setting.  Plus the elegantly dressed model ... very nice.  But.  Look at the tire's dirty sidewall (unlike in the other photo).  Not in keeping with the image Simca was trying to project.  Maybe there was a final retouched publicity version of this photo.  If so, I haven't come across it.

Chevrolet's Odd SSR Convertible Pickup Truck

What Were They Thinking when General Motors ordered into production the Chevrolet SSR (Super Sport Roadster, 2003-2006)?

True, pickup trucks had become a significant share of the vehicle market.  And yes, both Chevrolet and Ford had introduced sedan-derived pickups back in the 1950s (the El Camino and Ranchero, respectively).  But the SSR, although essentially similar, offered a few new twists.  First, it featured a retractable top, making it a convertible pickup.  Second, the styling was based on that of Chevrolet pickup trucks from around 1950 and not a current passenger car.

For more background on the SSR, its Wikipedia entry is here.

As it happened, the SSR was a sales flop.  One possible reason might have been that, unlike the heyday of the El Camino, pickup trucks had become quite civilized, much less rustic.  So the market for refined pickups having pleasant interiors was already taken.  Furthermore, the SSR didn't offer a lot of cargo carrying room.  And the convertible feature sold the message that the SSR was actually a frivolity.

The styling was interesting, basically well done considering the package stylists were handed.  A few quibbles are in the captions below.

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These images show the top raised and retracted.  Front protection seems non-existent, though there must have been a bumper bar buried someplace.  Nevertheless, the hood would probably suffer damage in any but the most minor collision.  A stronger-looking impact panel would have given the SSR a more serious, practical, truck-like appearance.  The grille could be rearranged so that it still echoed 1950 Chevrolet trucks.

The same can be said regarding protection at the rear.  Here, the tailgate looks like it could easily be damaged.