Dynamist Blog

Cars of the Future

olds51rkt.jpgIn his talk last week, Grant McCracken explained how superstar industrial designer Raymond Loewy misunderstood the early-'50s zeitgeist, making his 1954 Studebaker a humiliating commercial dud. Americans, Grant argues, wanted cars that reminded them of rockets and jets--vehicles for individuals and a society "going somewhere." Loewy's streamlined design, I would argue, did try to capture movement--only it was rooted in pre-war imagery where sleek locomotives, not airplanes, were the touchstone of progress.

After his public humiliation--Studebaker unceremoniously fired him--Loewy took out his frustrations in a speech that was later published in The Atlantic. Ranting against the bad taste of his fellow Americans and the car designers who encouraged them, he said things like, "The world will soon forget that under these gaudy shells are concealed masterpieces of inspired technology. What we see today looks more like an orgiastic chrome plated brawl." (Not so long before, Loewy, with his unnecessarily streamlined pencil sharpeners and flair for publicity, had been the epitome of middlebrow not-so-good taste.)

What Grant didn't mention about Loewy's speech/article is that much of it was about what cars will be like in 2005--and that it's online, in the publicly accessible portion of The Atlantic's great web archives.

In predicting the car of the future, Loewy gets some things right, notably the increased emphasis on safety, but he gets a lot wrong, right from the start: "Experts estimate that fifty years from now there will be 120 million automobiles on the roads for approximately 98 million Americans." (There are roughly 300 million Americans, with about the same number of cars.)

If you're a fan of mid-century images, particularly of cars, I recomment Ephemera Now, with running comments here. My favorites aren't the cars, though they're prettier, but the bizarre paintings of televisions in oddly glamorous places.

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