How I’d Fix The Design Of The Most Beautiful Car Ever Made

One of the little known pieces of car design history is that in the early 1930s Harley Earl descended from the Hollywood hills bathed in light. In his arms he cradled two pieces of brightly colored Canson paper. Inscribed upon them in wax pencil were the hallowed Rules: a set of commandments that must be followed by at all times by all car designers from this point henceforth, lest the wrath of the great man be incurred and his ghost appeared in the studio to shove your ballpoint pen up your ass sideways.

Of course, this never fucking happened. Really what there are, are guidelines around how things are laid out, and the spatial relationships between one part and it’s neighbors. They’re a basic framework to help you get the underlying fundamentals correct. For example: understanding the different positions of the A pillar and where it points in relation to the center line of the front axle for different layouts of car, is critical for getting the passenger compartment volumes right. Considering  them is only one part of ensuring your car looks good, because there are still lots of other things to consider: the failure of the Bangle era BMWs wasn’t their underlying proportions ignoring these fundamentals – it was their complicated twisted panels, unsettled ill-fitting details and generally cold demeanor, and the fact they flushed years of carefully evolved BMW design straight down the shitter. Take away all that surface distraction, and underneath the volumes and proportions were correct.

A few weeks back when I wrote about my problems with the Jaguar E-Type, there were comments. The main thrust of that piece was that my trained designer eye wouldn’t quite let me see past the issues I had with its proportions, and the awkward angles of the A and B pillars. Shit was flung my way from a variety of directions, namely that if the E-Type breaks The Rules then The Rules must be a fifteen pound bag of bullshit. And if I’m applying them to a sixty year old car I’m being unfair. Visual theory about form and balance is universal and not tied to any time period, but really my bigger personal problems with the E-Type are what it stood for subjectively. I understand that a lot of people like it, and consider it a beautiful car. And I see that. I do. It just doesn’t fill the gaping maw in the center of my existence with any kind of pleasurable human emotions the way say, a Ferrari 250 GTE does.

Let Me Show You How I Worked This Out

Being a car designer is about having qualified opinions that you can back up with critical thinking and sketch work to demonstrate your ideas. So with that in mind and to show you all I’m not above eating my own words for the amusement of the great and noble Autopian commentariat. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. Not in front of a bar person or exotic dancer but by altering the E-Type according to what I said about it last month. That way you can all see if what I said works or whether I’m full of designer crap. You can all judge me they way I silently judge all of you.

The important thing to understand is not everything a designer initially creates is a masterpiece. Design is a process. That process involves getting your ideas down on paper and seeing what has merit and what doesn’t. You can have the most amazing ideas rattling around in your brain for months, only to start sketching them out to find they just don’t work when you try to give form to them. Likewise a designer is not always the best judge of their own ideas. Massimo was always saying he didn’t always want to see beautiful Photoshop renders but pages of scrappy ballpoint thumbnails on the board. He wanted to see the working out, not the end result. I always encourage my students to do the same: to put their work up on the board even if they’re not entirely happy with it. This isn’t because left to their own devices student car designers will torture themselves inside out trying to find something they’re happy with (they will, literally sketching for months until they run out of time to do the rest of the design work); it’s because you never know exactly what will knock the chief designer’s multi colored socks off. Something you don’t like might be exactly what they are looking for.

Running With Scissors

When J Mays was my tutor at the Royal College of Art, one of the simple little tricks he taught me was how to alter your ballpoint side view sketches. Simply cut the sketch in half down the middle. Then you can move the two halves closer together or further apart to alter the length of your design. Then you can use that as an underlay to sketch over if you think it works better. Using the same images from Jaguar media as the previous article, I’ve done something similar in Photoshop. I think the E-Type has too much dash-to-axle ratio (the distance from the base of the windscreen to the rearmost edge of the front tire, when looking at the side view). Here is the standard car, and my altered version with a slightly reduced dash-to-axle ratio:

I had the boys back at the Autopian lab run the pixels on this and I’ve taken about 3” of sheet metal out of the area between the front wheel arch and the edge of the hood. Can you see the new problem my alteration has created? There are no free lunches – every time you change something in car design it has an effect somewhere else. In this case, shortening the dash-to-axle has had the corresponding effect of making the rear overhang look longer as a proportion of the total wheelbase. Now the rear of the car is starting to look a little bit dumpy and heavy. Let’s remedy that by moving the rear axle backwards about 2” to reduce the rear overhang. A couple of inches here and there doesn’t sound like a big deal, but car design is all about nuance. Small changes can have a big effect.

A More Famous Car Designer Agrees With Me

One of the other things that came up in the debate under the original E-Type piece was that design is subjective, and therefore there’s no way any two cars designers agree on anything or have a consensus. Well guess what fuckos, I have the receipts. Friend of the Autopian and a car designer with a slightly more glittering resume than mine, Frank Stephenson made a YouTube video about the E-Type. I didn’t know about this until someone posted it in the comments, so I had to watch it hidden under a prototype Autopian dog blanket in case Peter caught me and thought I was slacking off and not being productive. Frank raised exactly the same issue I had with the A and B pillar of the E-Type, and I haven’t met him at any of weekly car designer cocktail parties.

When you look at a side view, ideally all the pillars should point to an imaginary convergence point somewhere over the roof of the car. If it’s a longer car like a wagon or an SUV, there might be one convergence point for the front pair of pillars, A and B, and one for the rear pair C and D. Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but should be taken into consideration to make sure your pillars have a relationship with each other and don’t point all over the place drunkenly like an Autopian staff meeting. On the image below you can see I’ve changed the A pillar (the one that frames the windshield) by moving the base forwards, helping get rid of the knee cap removal corner in the door opening and making it more sympathetic to the B pillar, which I’ve stood up slightly.

Moving the rear axle back to reduce the rear overhang has created a bit of room to move the entire B pillar backwards making the door opening bigger still, which makes the division between the front and rear side glass better balanced.

On the top view, altering the A pillar has softened the curve of the windshield, meaning now we can have two full size wipers as opposed to three smaller ones, reducing part count and complexity, while maintaining roughly the same swept area.

Here’s a front three quarter view.

Frank rendered up his ideas freehand in pen and marker. I’ve not done that for time reasons and because when you do something like that with an existing car, you run the risk of introducing an unavoidable element of artistic interpretation. That’s fine for YouTube content wow-factor but less useful for making a considered design decision. Remember in my Defender piece I said that during the design process for that car I would always alter existing images for any trim changes, to evaluate wheel options, or suggest proposals for different versions. You need to have a known baseline for comparison. You’re brain is probably going to automatically reject my alterations, because the E-Type is so familiar, but part of being a designer is rejecting that initial visceral reaction and taking time to get used to what’s changed.

Unless otherwise stated all images courtesy of Jaguar Media.

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