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Cars you didn't know existed until very recently.


philibusmo

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23 minutes ago, lesapandre said:

That is Loewy himself on the right of the photo. His office designed all Rootes 50's cars from Minx to Humber - the most successful  probably being the Sunbeam Talbot 90.  It's possible it is his own car - he used to drive his own custom designs. 

He took his scalpel to the E-Type including shortening the wheelbase - a lot of this stuff was used as rolling adverts for his business and touting for consultancy and design work. Here:

http://www.carstyling.ru/en/entry/Jaguar_XKE_Coupe_1966_Raymond_Loewy/

A lot of his car stuff is flashy in a Palm Springs kind of way but nevertheless a prodigious talent.

Best design - the 1962 Studebaker Avanti.

He designed a lot of models for studebaker which is why some of his earlier rootes models look like scaled down studebakers 

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Yes. Less well known in the UK. He did all the Studebaker cars post-war to the mid-50's and is credited with introducing the 3-box design. His '54 saloons sold poorly, really too restrained for the US moving into a world of chrome excess so they moved design back in house and 'normalised' their designs.

The Jaguar E custom has a couple of features that turned up on the new XJ6 in 1968 including the signature much larger square grille snout and the crimp line around the top of the rear wings. Cool guy Mr Loewy.

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Let's just take a moment to acknowledge that it was Bob Bourke (for Loewy Studios) who designed all those beautiful Studebakers. Bourke created perhaps the most beautiful American car ever built, the 1953 Studebaker coupés, and for decades never got any credit for them whatsoever.

Loewy was a great self-promotor whose talent lay more in spotting and hiring other talented designers, rather than being a talented designer himself. This is, after all, the man who is most famous for designing the Coca-Cola bottle - which he didn't, but he never failed to take the credit when it was offered. Loewy's 'own' cars, such as the E-type, BMW and Cadillac, show what he was capable of when it came to car design, and it simply wasn't a patch on the skills of Bourke and his team.

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Remember the hitherto-unsuspected Suzuki Kizashi that cropped up a few pages back?

MrsDC managed to spot one in the wild this evening!

IMG-20200305-WA0004.jpg.2923f2105f88c3c63fe4bf092f122dc3.jpg

She wasn't aware of its oddball status on here; just that it looked kinda strange and had a peculiar name.

Turns out 'Kizashi' means 'great things to come' - though it can also translate as 'omen' or 'warning'.

Appropriate, maybe...

This may be the only example in NI, so I was ridiculously excited in a vicarious way.

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On 3/4/2020 at 10:56 AM, lesapandre said:

He took his scalpel to the E-Type including shortening the wheelbase - a lot of this stuff was used as rolling adverts for his business and touting for consultancy and design work. Here:

http://www.carstyling.ru/en/entry/Jaguar_XKE_Coupe_1966_Raymond_Loewy/

A lot of his car stuff is flashy in a Palm Springs kind of way but nevertheless a prodigious talent.

Best design - the 1962 Studebaker Avanti.

That E Type looks awful.

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22 hours ago, Sir Snipes said:

That E Type looks awful.

Raymond Loewy is a legend in design history, but the man who helped shape such iconic works as the Greyhound bus, spectacular streamlined Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives, Coke bottle, Lucky Strike cigarette packet, and one of the most beautiful American cars – the Studebaker Starliner – had strange aesthetic judgements when it came to restyling his own cars.

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On ‎3‎/‎9‎/‎2020 at 3:49 AM, Austat said:

Chevrolet-hatch-05-scaled.thumb.jpg.65d33e723fdbb4083289f09a4900bbf9.jpg

Cripes, that's a real oddity.

23 hours ago, bunglebus said:

That is a Shoveit isn't it? Sold under many names/restyles

Surprisingly not - this is an unholy matrimony of the Viva HC (sold in South Africa as the Chevrolet Firenza) melded with the hatch and rear panels from a Chevette (or one of its many worldwide variants).

There's been some slight reprofiling of the arches, but doors, wings, windscreen and front indicators are pure Viva HC.

 

Viva_HC_Side_Profile.jpg.c37e35e193c2d37c72d443bcb6210982.jpg

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The Saffer version of the Viva initially looked just like the UK version, since it was a CKD kit shipped from Luton and fitted with a choice of either Vauxhall's midgey 1159cc unit or overgunned with Chevrolet's 2507cc engine (surely one of the biggest range gaps ever)...

Chevrolet_Firenza_ad_1971.jpg.b8d7edc2f1c4b909980496a0616ddd88.jpg

The Datsun-esque 'dustbin' wheeltrims were, presumably, of GM South Africa's own devising.

But in order to revive flagging sales, the Chev Firenza was then facelifted in 1975, with the range cc gap now reduced through the introduction of the larger 1256cc Vauxhall engine, together with a smaller 1905cc version of the big Chevy engine .

1976_Chevrolet_Firenza_facelift.jpg.280e15608b1874626f6e149812557c47.jpg

The interesting thing is that this wasn't a local design; Luton had in fact come up with this as a proposed mid-life facelift for the Vauxhall Viva.

The idea was supposedly to give their cars a 'corporate' GM nose similar to the Opel Rekord and Commodore - but ultimately Vauxhall's executives shrugged it off in favour of adding droopsnoots to their incoming Opel-derived range, starting with the Kadett/Chevette and working on to the new Ascona/Cavalier and Rekord/Carlton. 

The Viva was instead left to soldier on for a few more years, largely unchanged since its debut in 1970.

 

Apparently, the Viva Hatch was another Luton design project that never saw the light of day on UK roads either.

Using the same floorpan and underpinnings as the Viva HC, but roomier inside than the yet-to-be-launched Chevette, it was seen as potentially part of a revitalised Viva range - possibly replacing the estate/sports hatch - but ultimately was thought to be too similar to the Chevette, and therefore likely to cannibalise sales of the new small hatch.

11.aroadgoingprotoypechevrolet1300hatchatvauxhallinluton.thumb.jpg.5fcadb658286074a1c6ef44474034808.jpg

But GMSA got wind of the binned prototypes, liked what they saw, and engineered them for production at the Port Elizabeth plant using a mix of UK-shipped parts and local content. Launched in 1976, along with the facelifted Firenza saloon the Hatch helped to keep the brand turning over until they were both canned at the end of 1978, in favour of Opel-based models.

A Viva hatch, hey?

But, speaking of South African oddities, there's also the legendary Firenza Can-Am V8, built to use up a job lot of surplus 302ci Camaro Z28 engines whenever GM pulled out of Trans-Am racing in North America...

Chevrolet_Firenza_V8_ad.jpg.fa8bfb3698084db85abe8ba083d88163.jpg

Now that was a bit of a goer.

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