Four-Door Fiat 500s

Fiat's "500" model designation dates back to 1936 and the tiny Topolino (little mouse), as it was called.  The most recent version was launched in 2007 (Wikipedia entry here).  From a styling perspective, it is an attractive small car (wheelbase 78.7 inches, 2000 mm).

But the new 500 obviously had limited carrying capacity, so a few years later a larger (wheelbase 102.8 inches, 2610 mm) model, the 500L, was introduced.  According to this, it was considered to be a minivan.  I did not know that.  Seeing them on the road here in the USA, I assumed they were four-door sedans.  For one thing, they lack the expected minivan sliding side door.  A more apt description is that 500Ls are mini-crossover SUVs.  That's because they have normal hinged doors along with a small third side window and a sort of squared-off rear. It was the third window's design that struck me as being awkward, especially since I assumed them to be sedans (which they virtually were).

This shouldn't have surprised me, however, because the Mini Countryman featured a similar window treatment since 2010.

Shortly after the 500L appeared, Fiat launched the 500X, an actual four-door sedan.  Even though they've been marketed in America for a couple years, I never really noticed them until I was in Italy recently.  Perhaps that was due to low sales volumes here or possibly because the styling is closer to that of the base 500 than the more distinctive 500L's.

Like the 500, the 500X is attractively styled for its size, whereas the 500L is not.

Gallery

A 2008 Fiat 500 (reference photo).

2018 Fiat 500L.  It is slightly longer than the 2012 version due to a facelift.

Side view.  As the link above mentions, the 500L package is slightly more cab-forward than on other 500s.

Rear quarter view.  Its rear cargo zone is larger than those on other 500s, but is not large if rear seats are not folded.  The aft side window transitions awkwardly to the C-pillar and rest of the forward part of the passenger greenhouse.

2015 Fiat 500X, a four-door hatchback sedan.  Slightly shorter than the 500L, it lacks the cab-forward proportion, being about the same frontal design as regular 500s.

Rear quarter view.  Nicer looking than BMW's Mini from this perspective due to its more conventional C-pillars.  Note the roof rack.

Side view comparison of a 2019 500X (here) with a 2013 500L (below).

The 500L's larger cabin area can be seen here.  All things considered, it is a slightly more versatile and practical package than the 500X, but not as attractive.

C-Pillar Black Divider Swath Fad

Some of the library books about industrial design from the 1930s that I read when I was young seemed to go along with the contemporary Architecture ideology that designers should strive for functional, truth-to-materials purity in their creations.   No doubt there were car designers in the USA and, more likely Europe (due to the Bauhaus influence), who pursued such ideals.  But the men in charge of styling departments knew that a major function of a car's design was to sell in appropriate numbers.  And to do that, a certain amount of attention to fashion had to be paid.

To be in step with fashion means that popular features introduced by a competitor might be borrowed to appease potential buyers who value being au courant.  I myself was caught up with that when I was in my teens.  If a car maker wasn't offering four-door hardtop convertibles or the correct type of wraparound windshields, then I would urge my father to not consider those products.

Nowadays when wind tunnel tests largely determine overall body shapes, exterior stylists are reduced to coming up with distinctive cladding features to differentiate brands and models.  Usually this takes the form of sheet metal sculpting and angular front and rear detailing elements.

A recent fad is for black patches or swaths, sometimes with chromed edges, placed on cars' C-pillars as a kind of faux (non-structural) division between the roof and the lower body of the vehicle.  Even though I left the Church of Functionality decades ago, this latest styling touch strikes me as being utterly phony: an important line has been crossed.

Below are some examples.

Gallery

1953 Packard Balboa Concept Car
Here we see a sculpted element at the base the C-pillar that clearly separates the passenger compartment roof from the lower body.  Because it is sculpted, it gives the appearance of being structural, and therefore is "believable."

2017 Chevrolet Bolt
The recent separators of roofs and lower bodies are clearly cosmetic.  The Bolt's separator conflicts with the rest of the styling and adds visual clutter.  The car would look nicer without it.

2018 GMC Terrain
I couldn't locate a factory photo that clearly illustrates the Terrain's divider.  But you might be able to see that it, along with strongly tinted side windows, hints at being wraparound rear windows. UPDATE: It wasn't visible in the photos I consulted, but it turns out that in that C-pillar black zone there lies a very small window intended for passengers in third-row seats.

2018 Honda Odyssey
No chromed edges here.  Just a clearly tacked-on element that clashes with the aft side window and actual shape of the C-pillar.

2018 Lexus RX L
Lexuses have featured extreme angularity in recent model years.  Here the black swath gives the C-pillar a wedged shape that it lacks in reality.

2019 Nissan Altima
This black element is comparatively discrete and almost yields a coherent theme.  Some work is needed where it touches the side window.

The Joys of My Porsche 914

I discussed the styling of the Porsche (Volkswagen-Porsche in Europe) 914 here.  For a change of pace, I offer an example of what it was like to own one.

My one and only sports car was a new 1971 Porsche 914 that I drove from June 1971 to November 1974 while I was living in the Albany, New York area.  It's pictured above near the New York State capitol building in July or August of 1971.

The good part was that it was a genuine sports car that had more civilized features than a ragtop MG, etc.  The gal who did my computer programming for the State planning agency was a purist who thought that a true sports car driver had to SUFFER.  You know the drill ... rag top, floppy side curtains ... so it was with initial reluctance that she bought a new Datsun 240Z coupe.

The 914 was fun to drive.  I liked the low driving position (but would hate it now).  A very slight steering wheel movement resulted in a noticeable turn.  Not tiring to drive on the several long trips I made in it.  The 4 cylinder version had the same gas tank the 914/6 required, so theoretical highway range approached 600 miles.

Not so fun at first was the very stiff gear shifter.  Over time it either loosened or my right arm got stronger.

My car got punished.  Someone whose Chevrolet lacked a front bumper rear-ended me at slow speed, folding the rear trunk lid -- repair was not thorough -- it leaked or wept slightly.  On the New York Thruway heading east from Buffalo once, the windshield took a rock.  The replacement's sealing was so-so and the surrounding chrome strip was loose in one corner ... had to screw it down.

A couple of years in, I was in the process of starting the car.  Stepped on the clutch peddle and its cable snapped!  That's when I discovered that the angled floorboard behind it under the mat was made of plywood (I'm not kidding!).

There was an electrical item with cardboard covered tubes that failed somehow in the middle of Illinois and later gave some trouble.  If the motor died, a fix was giving one a them a whack.

The fuel pump was located in front of the left rear wheel well.  After a winter or two of road salt, its electrical lead corroded through and the car behaved like a vacuum cleaner when its cord gets pulled.   Same thing happened a year or so later.

The weight bias toward the rear could be dangerous in winter.  On a Delaware County country road with borderline snow/slush, the rear end broke away and I couldn't break its rhythm.  Eventually the rear and front traded places.  There was incoming traffic, but fortunately the car slid to the right into a snow bank.

By the fall of 1974 the sleeve over the exhaust system that provided heat had rusted through in places due to all that winter road salt.  So my defogger could defog only about two inches worth at the bottom of the windshield.

This last was what prompted me to trade it in for a 1974 VW Dasher with front wheel drive for safer and easier snow driving. I had it Ziebart rust-proofed and was all set for another Albany winter.  A month or so after that, I was hired to work at the Washington State Budget Office's population unit and went home to Puget Sound county.

Had the timing been slightly different I might have kept the 914 and put some money into restoring it because western Washington is pretty easy on cars unless one lives right by the ocean with its salt spray that can damage the paint.

2019 Volkswagen Touareg: A Relatively Clean Design

An impression I get is that the most overly-decorated cars these days are made by Japanese companies.  Germany's Volkswagen, on the other hand, has tended to keep its designs cleaner.  I recently saw a new VW Touareg SUV on a freeway, and it inspired this post.

Actually, the Touareg does have a lot more sculpting and ornamentation than previous VWs, but a disciplined design theme was imposed to yield a calmer appearance.

Let's take a look.

Gallery

Setting the stage is this 2017 Honda Civic hatchback.  Side sculpting is angular with triangular spots.  The rear end has a large collection of angled shapes that don't relate well to one another.  Such over-detailing and confusion has become all too common in recent years.

This 2019 VW Touareg  carries some angled detailing, but not nearly as much as on that Honda.  Note the horizontal bars in the grille area and on the (possibly) fake air vents in front of the front wheels.  This horizontal theme ties the design together and lessens the visual confusion of the kind seen in the first photo.

Side view.  Yes, there is the side sculpting that's de rigueur these days.  But note that the main character creases are horizontal, continuing the theme developed at the front.  The shoulder-level crease is more modulated, subtly softening the horizontal parts.  I like the side window profile.

The Touareg's rear again emphasizes the horizontal, adding to the clean-yet-detailed styling solution. The angles on the tail light assembly are modest and integrated with adjoining sculpting, though a hint of styling cliché remains.

French "Hardtop Convertibles" from 1932

A popular body style in America from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s was the "hardtop convertible." Hardtops (as we called them), like true convertibles, lacked a B-pillar above the body beltline.  This gave them a racy appearance without some of the impracticalities of convertibles such as retraction mechanisms, increased susceptibility to damage, and so forth.

The first mass-produced hardtops were from General Motors, and I wrote about them here.  Chrysler had a few built a year or two earlier, but the style seems to have had its genesis in France 15 years earlier in the form of some carrosserie-sourced bodies.

This post deals with some Delage cars with bodies by Letourneur & Marchand.

Here at CarStyleCritic blog's world headquarters I have a fairly good reference library.  But it's not close to the size found in major car museums.  As for France, I have a nearly complete 1930s-subject set of Automobila Hors-Serie publications wherein René Bellu presented the French brands that appeared at the annual Paris auto show.  Bellu provided names of car models in some photo captions, but not all.  And he didn't always include photos of the models I'm dealing with here.  That's one reason why I can't be certain that model names I give in captions below are precise for any given model year.  My other sources are a book about Delage, an issue of Automobile Quarterly dealing with the marque, and scattered information from the Internet that is not always reliable.

To keep things simple, if not necessarily totally accurate, I will refer to two similar bodies by Letourneur & Marchand on Delage six and eight cylinder cars 1936-1939, whether or not those were the exact names used at the time they appeared.  One body type is the Aérosport.  The other had been called the "coach panoramique" by Bellu (who ought to know), referring to the lack a B-pillar.  This is the type that probably was called other names as well, but so far as I can tell had no distinctive official name.  I should add that the model years mentioned below are also problematical because I cannot fully trust some of the Internet-sourced data.

Gallery

This is an example of Letourneur et Marchand's "Yoyo" style on a B-pillorless body for an eight-cylinder Delage.  Internet images of what appears to be the same car have it as either from 1932, 1933 or 1934.  A photo in the Automobile Quarter issue dealing with Delage (Vol. 14, No. 2) has the design date as 1932.  Regardless, aside from the aft side windows being non-retractable, this car can be claimed as an early Hardtop.  (British coachbuilders were making pillarless coupe designs as early as 1933, but that is a subject for another post.)

The first Letourneur et Marchand Aérosport bodies appeared in 1936.  Shown here is a Delage D8-120 auctioned by Hyman, Ltd.  It might be the original one, completed in time for the October 1936 Paris auto show: note its 1937-style fenders.  Its passenger compartment greenhouse has the same side-window spirit as the car in the previous image.  Aérosports are a fastback style that includes a central splitter fin.  The windshield is awkward-looking -- too old-fashioned for the rest of the design.  I don't care for the sweepspear on the side either.

This is a 1936 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique.  Six-Cylinder Delages were shorter than the eights.  The side window profile is quite similar to the Aérosport, but the fastback element drops down more drastically.  This is to allow a separate trunk at the rear: all Coach Panoramiques had such a trunk.

The Delage D8-120 Aérosport in this photo has been identified as either from 1937 or 1938.

The above car was heavily restored a few years ago by Cooper Technia.  This photo shows the ash wood body framing.

1937 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique.

1937 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique auctioned by Artcurial in France.  This shows the rear end arrangement.

Something of an oddity, this 1938 Delage D6-70 has an Aérosport style body.  Note the fastback and the splitter fin.

Another body style twist has this 1937 Delage D8-120 with a Coach Panoramique body.  I saw another one of these auctioned by RM Sotheby's, but called an Aérosport on their web page.  It's possible that Delage and Letourneur et Marchand did call this an Aérosport because it was on a D8-120 chassis rather than the expected D6-70.  Nevertheless, it's a Coach Panoramique.  Note that the aft side window is retracted in the true Hardtop manner.

A body variation of a minor kind is on this 1938 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique: a sun-roof.

Mecum auction photo of a 1938 Delage D8-120 Aérosport showing the rear design.

The same car, but identified as a 1939 model on a different Internet site.  Very few such cars were ever built, so that detail probably doesn't matter much.

Zagato Panoramicas

Probably due to their odd, ungraceful passenger compartment greenhouses, Zagato's early post- World War 2 Panoramica creations are little known.  As mentioned here, it seems that Zagato became interested in the prospect of using plexiglas as fenestration material.  Despite the resulting styling theme's dead-end look from today's perspective, these cars helped the firm recover from wartime disruptions.

The Panoramica style was used on cars ranging from Fiat Topolinos to Ferrari 166 Mille Miglias, as can be seen below.  Some, perhaps most of the photos were taken by Zagato.  As for the dates, I relied on captions found on the Internet, though there might be errors.

Gallery

1947 Fiat 1100 Panoramica sporting a "test" Milan area license plate.  From this camera angle, the greenhouse design, coupled with the curved lower body, seems logical and fairly attractive.

But viewed from a normal perspective, the side windows (the parts made from plexiglas) seem much too high and the roof too thin.

1948 Ferrari 166 MM version.  The windows offer potentially greater outside visibility, but drivers seldom need to look at high outside objects while driving.  And there is the problem of blocking sunlight streaming through those high windows.

1948 Fiat 1400 with side windows in two panels, the upper parts apparently tinted to fight direct sunlight.

Before and after: an MG Y and a Zagato Panoramica version.  This required a different radiator and possibly some repositioning of engine components.  The custom body is essentially the same as that of the Fiat 1400 in the previous image, though the side windows lack panels.

1949 Alfa Romeo 2500 SS.  Like the Ferrari, the hood is long -- in this case taking up about half the length of the body.  Due to the greenhouse's proportionally small area, the plexiglas windows don't seen as odd as those on smaller cars.

Same car, rear quarter view showing its hatchback configuration.  Here too, the curved side windows seem less distracting (but hardly totally so).

1949 Maserati A6 1500 S.  Here we find what seems to be a plexiglas panel above the windshield.  There also might be one on the MG pictured above.  All the Panoramicas have tall greenhouses compared to many other Italian designs from those years.  By the 1970s, such proportions became common.

1950 Fiat 500 C.  A very small car given the same treatment.  Those tall windows and the resulting this roof make the lower body seem shorter than if side windows with a more conventional profile had been used.  This car also had a plexiglas panel above the main windshield.

Exploring Production?: 2001 Lincoln MK9, Ford Forty-Nine

Around the year 2000 Ford produced several concept cars that were given different brand names and ornamentation schemes, yet whose basic bodies were similar.

The featured car for this post is the 2001 Lincoln MK9 (more information here).  Announced the same year was the Ford Forty-Nine that I wrote about here.  There seemed to be others, as is related below.

Gallery

Front quarter view of the Lincoln MK9.  It is a two-passenger coupé.  The grille carries a grille theme Lincoln was using t that time.  Fenders are outlined using a thin chromed strip, recalling the classic 1961 Lincoln Continental fender treatment.

Side ornamentation includes a chromed, vertical engine heat vent by the A-pillar line.  Something similar was used by Jaguars a few years later while still under Ford ownership: Lincolns didn't get this feature.  Also note the interrupted horizontal character line along the side.

A tail light theme is being tested.  Being a show car, the MK9 seems to lack practical bumpers front and rear.  All things considered, the design is attractive, having no obvious flaws.

The 2001 Ford Forty-Nine is larger than the MK9, having seating for four.  Windshields differ, but the passenger greenhouses are otherwise similar.  The cars also have simple fender designs with similar profiles.

Seen from the rear quarter, the Forty-Nine has a similar feeling to the MK9.  The shapes of the greenhouses and window treatments are similar, the aft ends both are angled about the same, and both cars have thin character lines on their flanks.  When the Forty-Nine was introduces, some automotive press writers wondered if its design was destined for production.

And here is the 2004 Lincoln Mark X concept car.  Displayed three years later than the MK9, but continuing the same theme (more information here).  It's essentially a reworked 2002-vintage Ford Thunderbird, but with ornamentation cues from the Mark X.

Speaking of Thunderbirds, the 2002 model was previewed by the 1999 concept car pictured above (photo via Christie's).  In a sense, the Lincoln MK9 and Ford Forty-Nine did relate to a later production car, the 2002 T-bird.