William Mitchell was vice president of design at General Motors from December 1958 through July 1977 (Wikipedia, 2025). I have previously raised the question of whether he stayed in his position too long (go here). […]
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 […]
In response to soaring import sales in the early-1970s, US automakers made brave promises of a counterattack. In retrospect, many of those promises sound decidedly hollow. For example, in the wake of a critical review […]
For its September 1973 issue, Motor Trend published a pro/con feature asking whether “romantic” styling was dead. In other words, did new considerations such as safety and pollution laws as well as more emphasis on […]
Motor Trend magazine’s 1974 road test of seven personal coupes may have been rather vapid in many respects, but it did offer one useful critique. Writer Jim Brokaw complained that the largest models — the […]
The 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado arguably represented the first time that General Motors executives panicked in response to weak sales from a car styled under head designer William Mitchell. Whereas the first-generation Toronado was a remarkably […]
Peter DeLorenzo (2023) continues to insist that design is the “Ultimate Initial Product Differentiator” in the American automobile market. Among “mainstream” vehicles he singles out the Cadillac Lyriq for bringing “high-concept executions to the street.” […]
“GM’s product development cycles in the 1960s, which had been among the shortest, were becoming among the longest in the industry, according to GM’s own in-house history. More content dictated by federal regulations was part […]
“Oh, he was powerful. God, I admired [him]. He just knocked the tar out of anybody. He’d get it fixed. If he couldn’t, he’d call New York and say, ‘Fix these…[.]’ Then, I inherited some […]
(EXPANDED FROM 3/26/2021) Whatever else one might say about the 1971-73 Buick Riviera, its styling did represent a heroic level of resistance to the brougham look then sweeping through the U.S. auto industry. Instead of […]
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