Raymond Loewy's Hupmobiles

Famed pioneer industrial designer Raymond Loewy is best known for his association with the automobile manufacturer Studebaker.  But his first car-making client was Hupmobile.  As the linked article indicates, Hupp was moving into the middle and upper-middle price class during the late 1920s in a poorly timed effort to expand its product line.  The Great Depression hit and Hupp, like most other carmakers, scrambled to make its product line appeal to a shrinking market.  So it hired Loewy who came up with a clean, conservative redesign for 1932.  Then for the 1934 model year, he styled a body with aerodynamic features, a fashion coming into play in those days.

Let's see what he came up with (click images to enlarge):

Gallery

Above are images of Loewy's 1932 Hupmobile design.  The most distinctive feature being front fenders that fairly tightly wrapped around the tires.  Some observers retrospectively call these "cycle-fender Hupps," but the term is relative: true cycle-type automobile fenders lack the curved transition to the running board and wrap the tires even more fully.  Otherwise, the Loewy design was a cleaned-up version of normal 1930 vintage style.

Loewy's 1934 design was fairly radical for its time.  The most conspicuous features aside from the rounded-off shape are the three-piece "wraparound" windshield (a similar windshield design was on the 1934 Panhard) and the headlights blended into the hood.  The upper photo seems to include professional models and the lower features El Brendel, a comic popular at the time.

This advertisement shows the rear of the car (though the back windows are depicted smaller than they really are).  The ad includes a pitch for Hupp's aerodynamic design by noted aeronautics professor Alexander Klemin.

Sales of 1934 Hupps were disappointing, so the facelift for 1935 models included a reversion to a conventional one-piece windshield and a redesigned grille and front bumper.  I suspect that Loewy was not involved with this facelift, so invite Hupmobile mavens to set the story straight in Comments if I'm wrong.

Arnolt-Bristol by Bertone

Stanley H. Arnolt (for some reason known as "Wacky") had enough spare money that he created an automobile company that had several hundred cars built during the 1950s.  Nearly all had British based mechanical parts and bodies crafted by Bertone, an Italian coachbuilding firm.  Arnolt's first such effort was based on the MG TD sports car and the next made use of the Bristol. The Wikipedia entry on Arnolt deals with the history of his automobile efforts.

Both cars were nicely styled, but I think the Arnolt-Bristol (built 1953-1959) was the more exciting of the two. One source describing it and presenting some nice photos is here. Another account dealing with the Arnolt-Bristol can be linked here.

Below are some good photos of an Arnolt-Bristol that I found on this site.

Gallery

Here is an introductory view.  Note that this car has no bumpers.  (Some had tiny bumpers that made them street-legal, but offered no serious collision protection.)

Here is how the car is seen from normal eye-level.  One of the sources linked above mentions that the hood and cowl were high due to the dimensions of the engine and its placement on the chassis.  It went on to state that Bertone helped camouflage the bulge by raising the fenders higher than they otherwise needed to be.  The result, in my fairly humble opinion, was a distinctive design that oozes sex, speed and a certain amount of power.  I loved it the first time I saw a photo of it.

A side view.  From this position the car's height and ground clearance are obvious.  It still looks good, but not so sensational.

Seen from towards the rear, the upwards body bulge and high fenders come into play again.  Not quite as nice as the front views above, but in the early 1950s stylists tended to pay less attention to a car's tail.

Streamlined Renaults of 1934

Streamlining was in the styling air as it became evident that the the economic contraction of the first few years of the 1930s was something more than part of an ordinary business cycle -- in fact, it was the Great Depression.  Rather than hunker down financially, most automobile makers spent heavily for new, non-traditional designs in an effort to attract buyers.  The idea of improving aerodynamic efficiency was gaining ground during the 1920s as roads improved, allowing cars to attain higher speeds, so an easy step to entice reluctant consumers was to incorporate hints of streamlining in new designs, if not serious aerodynamic improvements.

This was even true in France, which experienced a delayed entry to the worldwide economic crisis.  So I'd like to feature a body style introduced by Renault at the October 1934 Paris auto show that was a first tangible step in the streamlining direction for that firm, a step roughly in line with what a few American manufacturers were doing at the time. (I exclude the larger step made by Chrysler with its Airflow that was introduced for the 1934 model year.)

I said "tangible step" because effort was made to go beyond essentially cosmetic streamlining features such as fender skirts and slightly inclined radiator grilles such as appeared a year or two earlier; I'll explain in the photo captions below.

One detail I find interesting is the fact that Renault was able to afford to put these changes into production, given their total output in those days -- about 55-60,000 cars per year. And that production was divided amongst three different body/chassis types: the low-end "Quatre," the mid-high range "Stella," "Nerva" and "Viva" lines (variations on the same package) and the semi-streamlined "Grand Sport" shown below. I don't have enough data at hand, so my guess is that French cars, small and large, were relatively more expensive than American equivalents. Otherwise, how could Renault and other firms remain in business and keep up with the technological and styling theme times?

Let's look at the Renault Grand Sports that were designed in 1933 or thereabouts.

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Here's a 1935 Nerva Grand Sport at one of the concours popular in France at the time. Note the sloped, V'd windshield, the sloped grille and the blending of the headlights into the fenders. These features surely improved aerodynamic efficiency somewhat. The sides of the car had partial streamlining despite what the swoopy fender line might suggest.

Another concours, this featuring a convertible version of the Grand Sport (note the English spelling of "Grand").

This side view shows that even though traditional fender profiling was preserved, fenders and running boards were in low relief compared to nearly all contemporary automobiles.

The view from above is useful because it shows that the front, hood and top were indeed noticeably more aerodynamically efficient than previous designs featuring vertical fronts, detached headlights and so forth.

This is a fragment of a publication I include to show what the rear windows looked like. Click to enlarge.

Compare the Renault to this 1934 Hupmobile. The Hupp also features embedded headlights and a sloping grille and windshield. However, the latter is a three-pane "wraparound" style rather than a two-pane vee. The sides of the Hupp are high-relief, typical styling practice until near the end of the decade.

This is Studebaker's Land Cruiser for 1934. Its curved rear and multi-pane back window design is in advance of nearly all 1934 competition and in the same spirit as the Renault. The rest of the car is conventional.

A version of this article was posted at Art Contrarian

What Were They Thinking?: Triumph Mayflower

One of the strangest designs from the early post World War 2 period was the 1949-1953 Triumph Mayflower (Wikipedia entry here).  The article mentions that "The body was designed by Leslie Moore, chief body designer of Mulliners of Birmingham with input from Triumph's Walter Belgrove."  And it also notes that the design was controversial in its day and that only around 35,000 cars were produced during its production run.

It seems that the concept was to create a small car that had luxury touches, an idea that has been tried with varying degrees of success in the years since.  One way to do this is to focus on the interior, using quality materials (real wood, for instance, rather than cheap grades of plastic).  Where the Mayflower's stylists went wrong was to assemble upper-crust exterior styling details on a small, short-wheelbase chassis.  Those details originated on large, long cars such as custom body Rolls-Royces and didn't seem legitimate when scaled down to Mayflower size.  Another possible error was to add the new (at the time) feature of the flow-through fender line.

Gallery

This is an advertisement placed in The Motor to let readers know where to find the Mayflower at the Earls Court automobile show (click to enlarge).  Features worth noting are the "razor's-edge" greenhouse, the flow-through fender line, the tall, narrow traditional grille and the oddly integrated headlights perched at the front of the fenders.

Another 3/4 front view, this from a photograph rather than an illustration.

A side view.

This rear view I found on the Internet seems to have been photographed at a car meet in England.

Aside from trying to put the proverbial gallon into a pint jar, the Mayflower stylists encountered a problem not understood at the time: It is difficult to graft a razor's edge upper body on to a more modern lower body, a case in point being the early 1980s Cadillac Seville (scroll down on the linked article).

Saturn: The First and the Last

(Apologies to the late Generalleutnant Adolf Galland for cribbing the title of his autobiography for the title of this post.)

General Motors was not in the best of shape when Roger Smith became Chairman and CEO in 1981.  When he retired in 1990, the corporation was in worse shape, in part due to Smith's many unfortunate decisions.  This is not to say that Smith's ideas were totally bizarre; in a number of cases he was simply going along with conventional management wisdom at the time.  One such item was to rely heavily on high-technology solutions.  Another was to adopt Japanese production practices.  A major consequence was the launching of what proved to be an entirely unnecessary new make of car, the Saturn.

The Wikipedia entry on Saturn is here and the entry on the first Saturn production model is here.  The publicized concept was that the Saturn was to be a hi-tech Japanese car-beater, but by the time Saturns reached showroom floors in Fall 1990, there was little in the way of hi-tech to be found.  The most radical feature was the use of fiberglass body panels attached to a metal cage.  The selling point was that those panels could easily be repaired or replaced.  Another selling point was that Saturns had a fixed sales price, this to eliminate buyers haggling with dealers, a sore point for most car buyers.  I never considered buying a Saturn, though I test-drove one of the early ones once, so I'm not sure how trade-in prices were handled.  Unless some fixed amount for each potential trade-in was set, the result would be that Saturn dealers could bargain on the trade-in value.  Readers who traded a car in when buying a Saturn are urged to tell how that was done in Comments.

Saturn sales were never as strong as expected, and eventually new models based on German Opels were introduced.  Before the brand was killed in 2010, Saturns had become re-badged versions of other General Motors cars; whatever uniqueness the brand had possessed was gone.

1992 Saturn S sedan

2007-10 Saturn Outlook crossover SUV
Shown above are the initial and final versions of the Saturn. From a small Japan-fighter the marque evolved to include large crossover SUVs sharing bodies with the GMC Acadia.