Cars with National Flag Color Motifs

Now for a brief change of pace.

From time to time cars appear with accessory or post-market color details related to the national flags of their country of origin.  Nowadays these are often in the form of decals rather than paint.

This post was inspired by a Maserati I recently noticed and photographed.  It and other examples are shown below.

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A few years ago some Fiat 500s appeared with thin Italian flag color stripes as seen here.

A factory option was a Gucci-themed 500.  Italy's red and green oppose one another on a standard artists' color wheel.  That is, when placed together the result can be a garish clashing.  Gucci colors are toned-down green and red.  This is done by mixing a little green into the red and a little red into the green.  This slightly neutralized result allows the colors to be juxtaposed without serious clashing.

Perhaps more often seen are Minis with British flag decals on their roofs.

Here is the Maserati that I saw and captured with my iPhone.  The only stripes are on the hood, the car's stern being stripe-free.

Besides hood stripes, this Maserati has three grille bars mimicking the Italian flag.

Badge Engineering the BMC 1100 (ADO16)

I wrote about some badge engineering of the original ADO15 Mini here and about the larger, later ADO16 Morris 1100 here.

Like the ADO15 Minis, the later (starting 1962) ADO16s appeared with several brand nameplates.  Mechanical differences aside, from a design perspective we find a case of "badge engineering" -- largely superficial detailing differences intended to denote brand identity as cheaply (in tooling costs) as practical. The Wikipedia entry dealing with the ADO16 lines is here.

Besides the higher-volume production Austin and Morris ADO (British Motor Corporation's Amalgamated Design Office) 16s, that platform was used for the lesser BMC brands MG, Riley, Vanden Plas and Wolseley.

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1963 Austin 1100

1962 Morris 1100
Morris and Austin 1100s featured different badges and grille bars, but otherwise looked the same.

MG 1100
Use of a version of MG's traditional grille required some slight changes to the hood and front sheet metal.  The car shown in the press release photo also sports a two-tome paint job.

1965 Riley Kestrel
The Kestrel's side chrome strip is the same as the MGs.  Front end changes accommodate a slightly stylized traditional Riley grille plus the side "whisker" treatment carried over from the earlier Mini-based Riley Elf.

1967 Vanden Plas Princess
This more sombre appearance was intended to denote a top-of-the-line, dignified 1100.  Aside from the side strip being painted, the Princess got a slightly different hood, grille and lighting treatment.

1967 Wolseley 1100
Wolseley's changes are more in line with the Riley's.  Yet again, BMC stylists were allowed hood stamping adjustments.  The grille openings and light placements are nearly the same as the Kestrel's, again minimizing tooling expenditures.

BMC 1100s: Bigger, Cleaner Minis

I suspect that even semi-casual observers of the automotive scene are aware that BMW's Mini line has been getting a bit less mini as the years pass.  This sort of thing is fairly common, as I noted here with regard to Honda's Civic.

This also happened to the original Minis in the form of a new, larger car based on the Mini's platform concept.  That concept was the work of Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis, CBE (1906-1988), biographical information here.

The original Mini (produced 1959-1967), was known internally at British Motor Corporation as ADO15 -- Amalgamated Drawing Office project number 15. The Wikipedia entry is here.  It was followed by ADO16, produced 1962-1974, and like the Mini was badge-engineered and sold by several BMC brands.  More information can be found here.

An early ADO16 was the Morris 1100, subject of this post.  These cars were larger, higher priced, and more "styled" than Minis.  The Mini design gives the appearance of being more an engineering exercise than a styling one: only the grille looks like it passed under a stylist's pencil.  The Wikipedia entry on the ADO16 mentions that the Pininfarina firm was involved in its styling.

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The web site I grabbed this image from states that this is a 1962 Morris Mini Super.  Regardless, its appearance is typical Mini -- mostly a passenger compartment atop tiny wheels.

This seems to be a publicity photo of a Morris 1100 from 1962 or shortly later.  The 1100 is large enough to have four doors, though the hood and wheels remain proportionally small.

Side view.  The body panels are not as crude or basic as those on the Mini.  There's even a subtle character line crease along the side and stamped, raised wheelhouse surrounds, unlike the tacked-on chrome surrounds on the Mini.

Publicity photo of an Australian 1100 showing the more refined body shaping as viewed from the front.

A for sale photo of a 1966 1100 showing the rear.  Again, cleaner and more refined than the original Mini.  Reminds me of the MGB.

Due to its small size and proportions, the Morris 1100 is not a beautiful car, and most likely never could be.  What we see here are really two designs spliced together.  One is the above-the-beltline greenhouse that seems more appropriate for a large, more standard size vehicle.  The other is the lower body that is in synch with the size of the wheels, thereby creating a sensible composition for that half of the car.

Mini Minor, Mini Styling

Although millions were sold over a production span of more than 40 years and it is considered by many to be an iconic car, few of the original Morris Mini Minors ever made it to the United States.  So that makes it somewhat surprising that the new Mini brand launched by BMW has done so well here; not that many American knew about the original Minis.  A comprehensive Wikipedia entry dealing with the first Mini series can be found here, so we'll mostly focus on the car's styling.

The Mini was conceived as a basic car that would cost little to build.  Where it innovated was the requirement laid down by management that its length should be 10 feet (about 3 m) long and that the passenger area measure six feet (1.8 m) long, a large ratio at the time (late 1950s).  The design task was handed over to Alec Issigonis who conceived the idea of using front wheel drive and mounting the motor transversely, rather than in a fore-aft orientation as was the industry norm.

Mini buffs probably know if or to what extent stylists were brought into the project.  Given 1957 vintage body stamping capabilities in Britain plus the "package" mentioned above and the need to have the car cheap to build, the result was a crude, stamped-out general appearance.  The only evidence of styling input that I notice is in the grille, its surrounding area and the shape of the taillights.

So the Mini counts in my book as one of the few post-1950 mass production cars whose appearance was actually designed rather than styled.

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A general view showing the awkward body panel joins, semi-exposed door hinges and other traits.

This rear view is positioned so the the sliding glass panels on the front door are visible; side windows did not crank down.

A better view of the front.  What struck me when I first saw Minis was how tiny their wheels were.  This was probably done for packaging reasons; larger wheels would have intruded too much into the passenger compartment.  But the result was definitely an aesthetic minus.  Automobiles generally look oddly proportioned if the height of the car is much more than about twice the diameter of the tires.