I’m not here to car-body-shame. Hell, some of my favorite cars are ones that most people deride as being homely. Automotive beauty is in the headlight of the beholder, after all. But every now and then I’ll see something that even I just can’t abide. And today that un-abideable thing is the grille design of the 1953 Opel Olympia Rekord. I realize that, according to our demographics, about 48% of our readers drive 1953-1957 Opel Olympia Rekords. Wait, am I reading that right? That can’t be right. What is the Olympia Rekord ownership rate for Autopian members? 73%? What the hell? Who did these charts?
Anyway, I’m going to assume that either those numbers are off and/or even if they’re right, our Opel Olympia Rekord owners are secure and have a healthy sense of humor about their cars. Because I really find the early grille design of the Opel Olympia Rekord downright … disturbing.
I realize the Olympia Rekord leaned heavily into American-inspired styling of the era, but it’s worth remembering just how much that aesthetic was. Auto design in early 1950s America was a riot of excess, a cacophony of chrome ornaments and bulges and a mix of visual references that ran the gamut from jet and rocket-age inspiration to parts that resembled dinosaurs. Still, it often worked, though the sheer size of the cars was a big factor there. Scaled down to European sizes, things tended to feel even more overdone, and that may be what we’re seeing here in the 1953 Olympia Rekord:
Most of the car isn’t bad; nothing too exciting, but nothing feels that wrong. Until we get to the grille. I mean, look at that thing:
It’s not so much a grille as it is a cruel-looking maw, full of teeth and disappearing deep down that car’s gullet. In fact, people at the time referred to it as a Haifischmaul-Kuehlergrill, or a shark’s mouth. I should note that not all Olympia Rekords had this grille; later ones opted for something far less disturbing:
That’s much tidier. And it makes that face feel less unhinged. I think my issue with the 1953 grille is what it reminds me of; take a look at the grille and tell me if you can see what I can’t help but see:
Is anything coming to mind? Anything maybe, like this?
You know those solid waste shredding machines? Those hoppers with the rotating rows of indestructible teeth, just waiting to mulch pretty much anything into ribbons? I’m sure you’ve seen the videos:
Look at that! Unstoppable power for turning somethings into nothings. It’s the final fate for so many things, including cars, and it feels like an angel of death for the material world. They’re alarming things, and that Opel grille feels like one of those to me. It has that same chute-like shape, with its deep recesses, and its full of metal teeth that curve back enough that its easy to imagine them rotating, sucking in everything as this Opel drives along, pulling rocks and squirrels and birds and trash and bicycles and everything into its horrific maw, grinding and mulching, ever hungry, never satiated, driving eating mulching tearing shredding driving driving sucking chewing destroying driving driving driving
Forever.
Hey, where’s my Opel!? Why didn’t I get an Opel!?
…also I mostly get Whale Shark. Anyone else?
Yup. Whale Shark.
I like it.
I’m sure someone would have come up with a pink tongue hanging out of it, eventually.
Recoloring it pink in the topshot was just evil.
*inserts natural habitat mouth* gif
Now picture it with googly eyes for headlights.
This is nothing.
May I remind you of:
Lincoln’s Bifurcated Baleen Whale Grilles of the early oughts.
Lexus’ Predator Grilles – including the LX Barbecue Grille Grill
BMW’s oversized Beaver Tooth grilles.
The current Mustang – particularly when it’s in FX package guise.
Everything from Audi and Toyota these days.
I think you’re mistaking grille size with the innately disturbing 3-dimensional aspect that makes this look like an actual mouth with teeth. It’s a hideous melding of unpleasant biology with machine.
The cars you mention just have big grilles.
The later model’s grille looks like it’s cringe-wincing after being shown a photo of itself when it still had dental headgear in middle school.
I dunno, I kind of like it. It looks like it *really* channels the air into what must be a very cool engine.
It looks like it will also channel rocks, debris, various wildlife and medium-sized German children directly into the engine bay.
No! Augstus! Not Again!
Cleaning out the pigeon filter every 5,000 miles was part of the routine maintenance schedule.
That went down to 2500 miles during severe driving conditions, like school zones.
Shredding-type machines are a top fear of mine. I won’t go within 20 yards of a woodchipper.
PTSD from Fargo?
My wife is from North Dakota. I have a pathological fear of woodchippers.
Fargo didn’t help lol.
I once did some work at a facility that had a conveyor section into a giant chipping machine. The entire thing was sketchy and I hated being anywhere near it all. I didn’t have a fear of industrial shredders until I supported that facility for six months and realized that if someone got caught in the shredder it would only register as a momentary light amperage blip in the electrical equipment data historian.
That conveyor is just the delivery device to acquaint my being with said chipping machine. Big nope to being anywhere near that thing.
The funny thing is that it isn’t the actual act of instantly being turned into sinew that bothers me, but the however long I’m resisting the slow-ish drag to my untimely end. That’s the nightmare right there.
Uhhhh, oh right, cars. Cars are cool.
That was one of the maintenance technician’s biggest fears, the slow ascent up to the Chipper’s maw. The fact that the chipper manufacturer painted all the teeth bright red just made it all the more menacing to look at, so it captured my imagination too and I couldn’t help but join the technician in his hatred of it.
This reminds me of the game Riven. As you explore the islands, you’re likely to be funneled into taking what seems like a fun-little mine-cart ride to another island — where you’re unceremoniously dumped into some sort of hopper at the end of the ride. Nothing happens other than wounding your virtual pride at that point, and there’s a lever nearby that seems to do nothing.
Then you have to figure out how to route power around in typical Myst-game puzzles in order to advance past the area you’ve been dumped — and inevitably while you’re turning valves and pulling levers, you’ll power-up and pull the lever on that platform you first arrived at — to discover that if the power had been turned on when you arrived, you might have gotten dumped into a woodchipper. Nice delayed “eeew” moment.
Bill Mitchell, for one, hated the idea of having to do an American compact in the 1950s, claiming that styling a small car was like “tailoring a dwarf” (it was the 50s, be happy it was only that offensive, could easily have been much worse).
I will say Nash/American Motors pulled it off pretty well, Ramblers and Metropolitans still had that 50s American flair without looking ridiculous (with the exception of the exaggerated tail fins on late 50s Ramblers, which Romney hated but allowed based on pressure from the sales department)
That car needs to see an orthodontist at LEAST, and possibly an oral surgeon for that underbite!
I want to contrive some kind of tongue to hang out of there and flap in the breeze.
But not a cartoony one. Needs to look realistic.
“That’s not a grill….. That’s how it feeds!”
Coming this summer to a drive-in theater in your town, the stunning new horror from Rusty Torch Pictures, The Day the Cars Fought Back!
Squirrels?
“We had a deal!”
In the 50s, especially Opel and Ford Köln as American-owned entities based their design not so much on how American cars actually looked, but on how the German designers imagined they should look.
This worked quite well for the Auto Union AU 1000 Sp (no Autopian day without mentioning DKW!), which looked a lot like a T-Bird except for its size.
https://silodrome.com/auto-union-1000-sp-car/
For the Olympia Rekord and Ford’s Barock-Taunus, not so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taunus_P2
And speaking of Ford, the smaller Taunus P1 had a Studebaker-style bullet nose with an actual globe at its tip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taunus_P1
My first car was a 1962 Rekord. I remember that car fondly.
Ah, yes, the common misperception of the Opel Rekord grille as teeth.
Actually, what you’re seeing is baleen, most recognizably present in great cetaceans like the Blue Whale whose baleen filters are often mistaken for teeth.
The Rekord, like the Blue Whale, was originally configured to run on krill. Germany was in a postwar depression and gasoline was in short supply and expensive. But krill are positively abundant and cheap, therefore the radical decision to rely upon krill as the Rekord’s fuel source.
The great drawback to this strategy, of course, is that to refuel, one had to drive to the sea, enter the surf and force thousands of gallons of seawater through the grille in order to sift out enough of the tiny shrimp to power the car. Germans found this somewhat inconvenient. Also, krill engines were not all that efficient, so range anxiety was thing. Opel was not alone in opting for this approach. DKW was another large adopter of krill technology, as indicated by their full name, Das Krill Wagens. Now you know
COTD fodder here
I can see that, but I’m picking up on a Puking Toad vibe, which may just be the car’s exhaust mode, after the krill binge.
At least DKW managed to extract the same amount of power out of 3lbs of krill as other automakers did from 6gal of gasoline.
Actually (yeah, I’m being that guy) the earlier grills were modeled on the sperm whale. It was only latter that they realized squid were less available than krill, so then they modified appropriately.
It looks better than the grilles on 90% of modern cars. The Lexus “predator” grilles are especially ugly.
I liike the 1st gen Tesla Model 3’s grille-less design. It’s functional, looks clean, and makes sense.
Oh my god, speaking of luxury SUV grilles, have you seen the Bentley SUV grille? I happened to see on in person yesterday. It was was parked in a dealer lot and even from the road it was hideous.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fspends-200k-on-bentley-bentayga-receives-off-center-grill-v0-5n8lmz0r4gub1.jpg%3Fs%3Dfb229f5d3d834a3bf054cdbf7c6e17bc111f970f
It looks like a chainlink fence and it’s so open you can see the radiator clearly through it, which makes it look unfinished. It’s so bad.
Yeah, its almost quaint to look back on the styling controversies of earlier eras, when a ’58 Edsel or one of Virgil Exner’s late stage lucid dreams were about the ugliest things anyone had yet seen
Opel Pigeon Hoover.
“We had a deal!”
You shouldn’t have done this – it’s going to give modern car makers ideas.
One interacting with this vehicle while a journalist is nearby, it’s best to stay off the rekord.
That’s why Benicio del Toro sold his in 1989.
The two forward facing barbs are there to catch backpack straps, preventing it from completely ingesting kindergarteners.
I swam with a school of Rekords in the sea of Cortez. Noble, majestic creatures.
Perfect opportunity to buy one of these and swap in a hydraulic-powered shredder mechanism into the grille.
It’s not pretty, but it’s better than the oversized maws on so many German cars of today!
I love how everyone goes straight to the Germans when talking about big grilles like Toyota and Lexus don’t exist. Have you ever seen an Alphard/Vellfire or an Avalon?
it reminds me of those conveyor-belt toasters you get in fancy hotels, which is probably a bit more wholesome.