Du Pont Automobiles from Around 1929

Du Pont Motors was a luxury automobile maker founded by a member of the famous du Pont chemical company family of Wilmington, Delaware.  Its WIkipedia entry is here, which notes that between 1919 and 1931 only about 537 cars were ever made.

The present post mostly presents 1929 and 1930 models from early in the era of professional automobile styling.  However, I do not know if Du Ponts were ever professionally styled.

Gallery

1919 Du Pont Model A, Mrs E. Paul du Pont at the wheel.

1929 Du Pont Convertible Coupe with Rumble Seat.  Hoods were long and rather plain-looking, creating a heavy appearance.

Model G convertible coupe 1929 -- the factory designation was probably different.

Transformable Berlin, 1929.  The slanted V'd windshield was an avant-garde touch not seen on other American luxury cars that year.

Another view of a 1929 Du Pont Transformable Berlin.

Series G Special Sport Sedan for 1930.  Another raked-back windshield, but not V'd.  Note the integrated trunk.  The passenger compartment greenhouse and its windshield do not work well together.

1930 DuPont Model G Convertible Victoria by Waterhouse, photo via RM Sotheby's.  The slanted windshield looks better here.

1929 Du Pont Model G Roadster by Waterhouse - Hyman consignment photo.  Du Ponts would have looked better if they had a character line of some sort just below the hood opening and continuing to the rear: that plain hood design was a negative design factor aesthetically, but distinctive for marketing purposes.

Now for the  sporty 1929 Du Pont Speedster.  An ad showing the front quarter -- note the rounded grille with horizontal bars.

1929 Speedster, side view.  The fender design might be logical, yet I find it awkward, unattractive.

Model G Speedster rear quarter view, photo via Philadelphia Free Library.

Miller 122 Indianapolis 500 race car from 1925.  It's quite possible that the Speedster's grille design was influenced by the Miller's.

1933 DeSoto Rumble Seat Roadster.  Its grill was also Miller-inspired.

Gardner -- Towards the End

Gardner (Wikipedia entry here) was a moderately successful 1920s American brand that became unprofitable by 1927 and ceased production in the 1931 model year.   The company was based in St. Louis, far from Detroit, and seems to have been an "assembled" car using mostly parts acquired from various suppliers.

The present post deals with some 1927 through 1930 model year cars that were attractive for their time.  But body designs probably did not benefit much or at all from professional stylists, a category that in those days was involved with custom body building and at General Motors' new styling group.

A surprise awaits at the end of the Gallery section below.

Gallery

A 1927 Gardner sedan.  A trim design typical of the times with a trunk to help balance it visually.

Roadster from 1927.  Most Gardners seem to have had two-tone paint schemes.  This one is simple, but elaborations appeared the following year.

Another roadster, probably a 1928 model photographed in San Francisco by a newspaper photographer.

Another 1928 Gardiner Model 75 Roadster.  This image is from a publication, possibly Automobile Quarterly.  The small, rectangular panel on the door has the main body color here, but was of the second tone in the the case of the image above.

Catalog side view of a 1928 Model 85 Sport Roadster.  Its two-tone scheme is more elaborate than on Model 75s.

Bob Gardner photo of his 1928 Model 85 Sport Roadster.

Factory image of a 1929 Model 130 four-door sedan.  Attractive for its time.

Clip from the February 1930 MoToR magazine showing a front-wheel drive Gardner displayed at the New York Auto Show.

Catalog side view of the front-wheel drive Gardiner.  I did not know that Gardner built front-wheel drive cars, but a few prototypes existed.  This was because Gardner was involved with the Ruxton project, and the body and running gear were that of the latter brand.  The hood, grille, headlights, fender-running boards and some trim differed.  Compare to the image below.

1930-vintage front-wheel drive Ruxton four-door sedan, Barrett-Jackson auction photo.  Ruxtons seem to have had longer wheelbases.

Early Plymouth Reliant and Dodge Aries K-Cars

By 1980 Chrysler Corporation was well into one of its periodic financial crises.   It was saved in part by a federal government loan.  A more concrete salvation factor was the 1981 model year launch of a line of front wheel drive compact cars (wheelbase: 100.3 in (2,548 mm)) that proved to be popular.  I wrote a general post about these "K-cars," as they were called, here.

For 1981, the K-cars were the entry-level Plymouth Reliant and the slightly more expensive Dodge Aries. A Wikipedia entry dealing with them is here

As my post indicated, variations of these basic cars appeared later.  The present post offers a brief look at some 1981 and 1982 models.

Gallery

Press release showing the four-door Dodge Aries.  Styling was the then-fashionable "three box" theme of angular main body elements where rooflines were flat and windows large.  Aerodynamically refined shapes began appearing in America a few years later.

PR release showing what has been termed either a two-door sedan or a coupé.  (It looks more like a coupé to me, but some of my reference materials call it a sedan.)  The thick C-pillar was another fashionable styling feature.

Rear quarter view of a for-sale 1982 Aries.  Very angular with rectangular details.  More coherent thematically than seen on many current cars and SUVs.

Its instrument panel was angular also, instruments being in square frames.

For some reason usable Plymouth Reliant images are hard to find on the Internet.  This might be from a 1981 brochure showing the basic models.  A station wagon was added for 1983.

1982 Plymouth Reliant with fashionable vinyl top covering.  Reliants and Aries mostly differed is their frontal styling -- grilles had different patterns and Reliants were squared-off in front whereas Aries fronts were slightly angled to the rear.

Chrysler's Forgotten Eagle Vision

I call it the "forgotten" Eagle because I myself had let it slip from my mind until I stumbled across an image while researching on the Internet.   The Eagle was a brand conjured up around the time American Motors Corporation was purchased by Chrysler: its general Wikipedia is entry is here.    I wrote about the use of a Renault as the basis for the 1988 Eagle Premier model here.

The subject of the present post is the Eagle Vision, a Chrysler LH sedan platform model marketed model years 1993-1997.  Its Wikipedia entry is here.

Images of the Eagle Vision are below, most being factory-sourced.

Gallery

A 1993 Eagle Vision.  They essentially badge-engineered variations of the Dodge Intrepid and Chrysler Concorde models.

Front quarter view.  An attractive design, with its distinctive "cab forward" posture.  But not an exciting design.

Rear quarter view.  In the spirit of American early-1990s aerodynamic styling.

Frontal view showing the bumper and air intakes.

Side view of a for-sale Eagle Vision.

Side view of a Dodge Intrepid.  The Vision and Intrepid had the same wheelbase and almost identical lengths, though the Vision appears shorter ahead of the front wheel opening  -- probably due to the camera lens used in its photo.

Dodge Intrepid front end.  It is a highly stylized version of the classic Dodge cross-gunsight grille pattern. I prefer the Eagle's styling there.

More-Distinctive Late 1920s Grille Designs

Recently I wrote about 1927-vintage grille designs that can make it difficult for me and others to easily identify a car's brand.  By "grille" I'm largely referring to the chrome or nickel frame around what was usually an open radiator front.

Although each brand featured in that post had a distinctive grille ensemble, the areas in question were never large (often just the upper part of the frame), rendering differences subtle in most cases.

The present post presents some designs that offered more distinction than usual, making brand identification somewhat easier for the casual viewer.  Also, I've expanded the time frame to a few years on either side of 1927 so as to include some interesting examples.

Gallery

1927 Marmon - Hyman, Ltd. consignment photo
Marmon was a luxury automobile maker, but late-1920s grilles lacked distinction.  Here we find a rather heavy frame rounded at the top with a touch of sculpting and a brand medallion.  This is typical of the times for American cars.

1928 Packard - Bonhams auction photo
Packard was America's leading upscale brand in those days.  The shaping of the upper part of the frame is more sculptural than Marmon's, but in itself nothing very special.  Yet Packards were easy identify.  Why?  Because that grille frame design (with detail variations) was used on Packards for almost all of the firm's existence.  Consistency was a virtue.

1928 Buick - for sale photo
Buick's upper frame was superficially similar to Packard's, but not used as consistently as Packard.  Most grilles had horizontal lower framing, but Buick's is more shapely.

1926 Oldsmobile - Mecum auction photo
Even more shapely was Oldsmobile's grille frame.

1927 Chandler - Auctions America photo
Chandler, on the other hand, made its grilles distinctive by adding chrome vertical bars.

1928 Durant - for sale photo
Durant picked up on Chandler's idea and added a horizontal bar for good measure.  Chandlers and Durants were easy to identify.

The Unic Decline and Fall

Unic was a French automobile manufacturer founded in 1905 that abandoned car production during the 1938 model year.  Its English-language Wikipedia entry is here, and from there you can link to the more detailed French version.

There seem to be very few images of Unics on the Internet, so below are mostly pages I scanned from various issues of the former "Automobilia" magazine's special (hors-serie) publications by René Ballu dealing with French cars by year (Toutes les voitures françaises 1935, 1936, 1938).  These are from large files and might load slowly.  Images can be clicked on to enlarge if you computer allows it.

Gallery

Automobilia Hors-serie No. 9, Toutes les voitures Françaises 1935, Salon 1934 - page 90
Unics for 1935 were pleasingly styled and sported "shovel-nose" grilles (curved forward near the base) as seen on cars such as the 1932 Packard Light Eight.

Automobilia Hors-serie No. 9, Toutes les voitures Françaises 1935, Salon 1934 - page 91
The U6 had a six-cylinder motor, the U4 had four cylinders.

Automobilia Hors-serie No. 1, Toutes les voitures Françaises 1936, Salon 1935 - page 88
Bellu's headline indicates that Unic's obsolete production methods led to pricing the cars relatively high for battling the luxury competition, so sales increasingly suffered.

1936 Unic U6 Sport Coupé
This might be by Letourneur et Marchand, a major body supplier to Unic.  Note the typical 1930s French belt line.

1937c Unic 4-door - Wikimedia Commons image
By 1937 the basic sedan body style was definitely dated by American standards.  However, the absence of running boards gives this car a sporting sense.

Automobilia Hors-serie No. 6, Toutes les voitures Françaises 1938, Salon 1937 - page 92
Letourneur et Marchand were brought in to create a facelift grille design.  Unfortunately the bulged-out "fencer's mask" style that I wrote about here was already passé in America.

Automobilia Hors-serie No. 6, Toutes les voitures Françaises 1938, Salon 1937 - page 93
Worse, its design was unattractive and Unic stopped automobile production mid-1938.

Two More Lookalikes

Back in 2015 in a post titled "Styling by Wind Tunnel" I presented side views of nine sedans, all from different makers, that had similar profiles.  My thesis (that I often repeat) was that designers are forced by government fuel efficiency regulations to use shapes determined by wind tunnel tests.  Not surprisingly, the "best" shapes emerging from wind tunnels around the world are essentially the same.

Today's post is a brief follow-up.  I was in Hawaii in January and noticed two rental cars parked down the street from where we were staying.  One was a Chevrolet Malibu, the other a Kia Optima.  Both were painted white, and they looked surprisingly similar.

My photos are below.

Gallery

First a side view.  The Kia is in the foreground, the Chevy at the rear.

This is the view that prompted me to take these photos.  Rear spoilers and taillights are practically the same shapes.  And the remaining details are not very different.