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Quotes
Imagine the 1951 Studebaker with a lighted nose
“. . . We (started facelifting) the ’51, which was a terrible looking spinner job. It had a transparent, plastic spinner inside, and, God, they were terrible looking cars. . . . I remember how that […]
Media Analysis
Designer Bob Nixon distanced himself from the ill-fated AMC Pacer
(UPDATED FROM 10/4/2014) Collectible Automobile’s interviews can be a valuable means of documenting automotive history, but they can also lead us astray due to inaccuracies. For one thing, the memories of key participants can fade […]
Quotes
Eugene Bordinat: Robert McNamara was too logical
“[P]robably the guy that was most admired [by Ford Motor Company executive Lewis Crusoe] was [Robert] McNamara. He was a very concise speaker, he was a logician and prided himself that he was. He knew how […]
Quotes
What Bill Mitchell didn’t like about John Z. DeLorean
“I didn’t like his aloof egotism. He’d sit in a meeting and open his briefcase and brush his hair, and he’d dress floozy, you know, and he called us the establishment. He was a queer […]
Links
Stan Mott’s life of creative risk taking could get you thinking
Dean’s Garage has posted an autobiographical essay by Stan Mott (2022) in the wake of his recent death at the age of 89. His story illustrates how the creative spirit that draws designers to the […]
Quotes
Retired GM designer mused about gender and penny-pinching
“What distressed most of us was that we could never be identified as just designers. We were always the ‘la femmes,’ or we were the female designers, and that — we were designers, and men […]
Quotes
John Najjar on how the 1958 Lincoln and Continental were designed
“Our mission with Ben Mills [division general manager] and Will Scott [division plant planner] was to develop a 1958 Lincoln. Then, in that era, bigger is better, longer is better, wider is better, shock the […]
Quotes
Virgil Exner Jr. on his father’s approach to tailfins
“He liked the cleanliness of the idea. He liked the aerodynamics of the idea, and in his mind they were genuinely aerodynamic. Later on, Chrysler proved that in wind tunnel tests. They ran cross-wind tests […]
History
Five (arguably) unresolved mysteries of postwar independent automakers
(EXPANDED ON 1/27/2023) Many books, magazine articles and blog posts have been written about the independent automakers’ struggle to survive in the 1950s. Even so, I have come across a number of unresolved mysteries relevant […]