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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My takeaways from this are:
1: Darn you, you’re right, your version does look better.
2: I still think you’re full of designer snobbery bullcrap though :p But it’s very well thought-out and carefully considered bullcrap, I’ll give you that.
3: Honestly the changes are so subtle that the original is still deserving of being seen as a beautiful car. Yes it could do to have a 3 inch shorter hood, but it’s only 3 inches. Yes the rear axle could be 2 inches further back, but it’s only 2 inches. Even with those minor flaws it still manages to be a stunning design even if not perfect – less than perfect can still be good.
4: I honestly think there can be some push and pull to this proportion tweaking. At first I predicted you would think the rear overhang was too short, rather than too long. I was envisioning some sort of speed-tail design, I guess, sort of reminiscent of various streamliner cars. This may be partly due to me being heavily influenced by old American car design, where enormous rear overhang is the norm and IMO it works for those cars.
5: Some of my initial pushback to your criticism of the E-type may have been due to assuming you were condemning long hoods in general. Your final version still has a beautifully long hood, the 3 inch difference just makes it more proportional, as I guess it more closely matches the length of the equally long fastback roofline.
6: I guess I really shouldn’t get too mad about tweaking designs to make cars look better, as that is what traditional custom car building was all about. Factory cars from the 40s and 50s looked great from the factory, but lots of people believed they could look even better, and went to great lengths cutting, welding, and shaping metal filler panels to change the proportions of the car so the design could look as good as possible. Now I wanna see an E-type modified in the traditional custom style to look more proportional.
You call it snobbery. I call it having standards.
It can be both! But, fair enough. I suppose it’s only really snobbery if you look down on other people for liking it.
I contain multitudes.
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Came here to agree with this.
Glad I’m not the only one. Either this an “emperor has no clothes” situation or my eyesight is far worse than I realized. I say this as one who excelled at the “spot the differences” puzzles in the Sunday paper.
Not that it matters, but you lost me at Ferrari 250 GTE. I’m sorry — it just don’t look that great. (But I don’t know what I’m talking about.)
They’re stunning it the metal.
Ever since I was a kid I thought the windshield looked too upright. So moving its base even farther forward and putting more angle on the A pillar might have made shortening the front of the car (thereby decreasing engine room) unnecessary. Yes? No?
You are messing with an icon but have done it really well.
I can see what you doing makes it look smoother and better proportioned over all however it is not more engaging to look at.
Models with perfectly symmetrical faces and barbie like fat free bodies are still beautiful but they lack that engaging quality that keeps you staring at them at the same time wishing you lived next door to them.
Someone mentioned it elsewhere but yes, there is a ‘beauty in the imperfection’ conversation to be had. I would argue the stance of the E-Type is that imperfection here, and I haven’t changed that.
I do firmly believe that the best designs have something about them that doesn’t quite work – and that jolts the whole design into life.
This is where one of those slidey things that allow you to compare two images would be really helpful. I don’t know what they’re called but you can drag the bar back and forth.
I honestly might need an overlay on these or something to line up the points that have changed from the original… All I can see for sure is you’ve removed a wiper blade. Which in fairness, is definitely an improvement.
I was able to copy the pictures, open them in Photoshop, lay one atop the other and toggle them back and forth. The differences really are small.
Cool article I like the idea. The cleanup result looks better but these, to me, always looked mis-proportioned. Ever since I was a kid I thought the late 60s 2000 GT Toyota was similar but better looking. https://images.drive.com.au/caradvice/image/private/c_fill,f_auto,g_auto,h_1080,q_auto:eco,w_1920/v1/nxw3amhwacrilv724fnx
Agreed. My issue with the e-type was always the windshield, it just never looked right, too upright for the flow of the car almost like it was tacked on as an afterthought. I feel like this largely fixes that issue even though the uprightness didn’t actually change but it did visually with the a pillar angle.
It’s interesting to see the 2000GT has a lot of curve in the windshield and the same resulting awkward door opening.
True, but the widshield is raked back just enough that despite the awkward shut line the overall look of the car flows better to my eye.
I’d love to read your take on the early C3 Corvette, which I think is in the same league as the cat and horse- especially the convertible.
Nice! I should have read comments 1st now I see the 2000GT comments others posted. That said as you mention, the early C3 is something.. such a looker.
The C3 seems to get hated on, but I love its design. It really looks like nothing else, such a wild looking car. I guess it’s just unfortunate that it got produced for too long so by 1982 it was a smog-choked underperforming joke. The early C3s at least had performance to match their styling.
The early C3s are wonderful. Truly up there with some of GMs best sixties work. The problem is, like the second gen F bodies they had the misfortune to stagger into the malaise era and their design was buried under hideous add ons and tape packages.
I will give GM credit where credit is due though, the malaise C3’s bumper additions were probably among the least hideous of all 5 mph bumpers of the era. They did probably the best job they could to make them work with the rest of the styling.
I do like your reimagining Adrian. It’s less bulbous and disjointed. I always liked the jag, but something always seemed off about it. As you’ve said elsewhere the 240 and the 2000 gt are more refined (could be misparphrasing here as I’m too lazy to look it up.)
I knew before posting to search for comments stating the Datsun 240Z was the correctly restyled version of the XK-E.
And so it is.
I had a 72 240. Great little car. Repaired the rust, but it eventually came back. Went for a ride in an etype 2÷2. Of course it caught fire on the highway. The 2+2 was hideous imo. I’ve never see a 2000gt except in pics and videos. Was at a car show where a lamborghini 350gt was on display. I covet those cars. Absolute art imo.
That is a damn fine looking car. I’m impressed.
I am a massive fan of the E-Type – not least because we are almost exactly the same age. One of the reasons for my fandom is that there is so much wrong with it, especially in contemporary terms, but there is so much right that it works. That combination is part of what makes it unique.
Having said all that, Adrian’s version deals with most of what’s wrong with it without weakening what’s right. Lovely.
The windshield of the E was always an oddity related to when and how it was developed. That chunky firewall/door hinge area was overdue for rework in almost all 1950s cars, but Jaguar was not a company with the resources to devote to fixing it early.
Adrian’s version of the A pillar and windshield looks a little better. Converging the pillar lines isn’t the only way that could have been fixed, so I’m not fully onboard with the blanket statement that they must converge.
I’m 50/50, maybe 60/40 on the rest of the changes. Cutting out the 3 inches and moving the rear axle makes it different, but less outrageous, less bold.
Overall, I’d say The Adrian E-type is a bit more modern. Design, over time, is often a case of applied refinement.
I see Adrian’s version as less Countach, more Diablo. A candidate for the E-Type Series 4, maybe. Side by side, I’d buy the Adrian, but I’d probably later wish I’d gone with the less practical free spirit, bigger statement version.
The E-Type has never been my thing, but I have especially never liked how upright the windshield is behind that runway length hood. I don’t have any drawing or editing skills, but I always imagined it would look better with the base of the windshield extended forward a few inches, giving it a little more rake and shortening that dash-to-axle ratio a tad.
I hadn’t read this before posting above. Same sentiment.
that’s what would fix it for me too.
Can’t believe Adrian forgot to put a Union Jack on the roof.
Oh, behave!
Sorry.
If I win the lotto we’ll build the Adrian version.
Adrian, I was one of the guys that was pretty hard on you about the original E-type write up. But I will admit, you have done one of the few “improvement” efforts on the original E-type styling that doesn’t ruin it.
My own feeling is that the shortening of the nose and moving the rear axle are very debatable as to which is better, but I do like what you did with pillars. I also understand the concerns or exceptions you took with the styling a little better.
That said, your work on this is more as an editor than an artist. That is not a reflection on you or your talents, but just the particular work here you didn’t create the concept, the marvelous concept in my opinion, you ironed out some details.
Point being, both cars look great, and unless side by side, and maybe even if side by side, most wouldn’t notice the difference, they would mostly note the overall shape. Some would love it some wouldn’t. But most would feel pretty much the same about your improved version as they would the Bill Lyons original.
Chief designers are only ever editors of other peoples work.
I believe Satoru Nozaki fixed the design of the E-Type in 1967, when he designed the Toyota 2000GT.
In my opinion, that is the true holder of the title for Most Beautiful Car Ever Made.
When he built the E-Type properly you mean.
I feel like if it was built properly I would fit in it.
No no you’ve got it the wrong way around, if you don’t fit in it then it’s you who’s not built properly.
Definitely a strong contender, if only I could fit my hawaiian ass in one it’s just too small. Another option for me would be the datsun z g nose, and a third would have to be the ferrari 365 gtb4 especially in blue.
Nah Adrian… you’ve got it all wrong. According to the modern consumer, the way you fix it would be to raise the body, elongate the cabin forward and add extra doors to make it a 4 door (and to allow the space for that, change the engine to a transverse inline-3), add oversized wheels with tires with an inadequate amount of sidewall, make it automatic-only (preferably a CVT), add a mediocre AWD system, add a 3rd row of useless seats where the trunk space is, add some poorly designed ultrabright LED headlights that cause lots of glare and change the name to something stupid like “Jaguar EXJ iX”.
Oh and replace the spare tire and tool kit with a useless bottle of fix-a-flat.
That’s what The People want.
You forgot the over aggressive styling!
Ok… we’ll add an ‘Angry/constipated Wrangler’ grill
Don’t forget the faux skid plates made of plastic!
You forgot plastic body cladding. How else will its customers survive driving in inclement weather?
Oh yeah… we need to add that… along with spoilers!!!
You can’t just add spoilers without fake vents!
Or fake NACA Ducts!!! Or Vortex generators (installed sideway making things worse).
https://www.carthrottle.com/news/vortex-generators-how-do-they-work
Still looks like a big clown shoe with wheels stuck on it.
Yeah?? And!? Clown roller skates is peak car design, bite me.
You’d love a BMW Z3 Coupe for sure. The super peak of clown shoe car design.
The only worthwhile change to my eye was the windshield and pillars.
When you look at the car in the context of it coming out of the 1950’s I think that can be excused, I think it’s just lucky that it didn’t sport vestigial fins.
William Lyons was far too much his own man to be influenced by America.
You want a Datsun 240? Because this is how you get a Datsun 240.
I said in the 240Z piece you can draw a line between the two cars.
Technically you can draw a line between any two things
Yeah – it’s pretty well established that the 240Z was inspired by the E-Type. Your subtle redesign just makes the cribbing by Nissan more blatant.
What now comes to my mind: are the wheel arches good from a design pov, or could they also be reworked as well?
Even at the front, they cover the tops of the wheels a little, to say nothing about the effect at the back.
I’ve always just accepted that as “E-type” but Adrian’s perspective makes me wonder now.
They changed that on the SIII. The restrictive wheel arches not only forced a goofy narrow track, it also made for a big turning circle.
Thanks for illustrating your thoughts, and for listening to me about Frank Stephenson’s evaluation and tweaks to the design.
It’s personally fascinating to me what similarities and differences you two had (especially as I’m a wannabe auto designer myself, but decades past when I’d have likely gotten my shot to get into the industry).
For me the biggest issue I have with its design is how small the door opening seems to be, and how upright the windshield appears. In my sketches I add a bit more rake to the windshield and have its base start closer to the rear hood line (not sure how that translates to cowl or not, technically speaking). Same roof height, but shallower angle to the windshield. This also seems to yield the ability to move the firewall a bit more forward (maybe) allowing for a slightly larger door opening. I admittedly get paranoid about smacking one’s head on side pillars, especially without a cushioning airbag or racing helmet.
My other big issue with it is the panel between the door and the hood on the side. This is something I adored on the (for instance) original Dodge Viper (and I think carried on to subsequent generation, or all of them?), where the end of the hood ended where the door began. Fewer panels, cleaner look.
That panel is almost certainly structural. If you extended the hood it would become too heavy to lift and you’d have to add the rigidity back in somewhere else.
That’s what I figured. As you said, playing with the design for design’s sake, not engineering.
The hood would stay the same size (or smaller), the forward edge of the door moves forward to meet the trailing edge of the hood. Supposedly structural piece is hidden underneath, at least on the side.
Okay I get what you’re saying now. If you moved the leading shutline forwards, you’re giving yourself problems with regard to where to hang the hinges to get the doors open properly, and then those hinges have to be bigger to hold the weight of the longer door.
Right, though if a hinge needs to be, say, 20% bigger to hold a 20% bigger door assembly, it doesn’t seem like THAT large of an increase that it couldn’t work. Given the shape of the E-type’s door hinges (truncated wedge/Isosceles trapezoid – or close to it – on one side with 4 fastener holes, and a semi-conventional mostly-rectangular piece on the other side with 2 fastener holes) adding more strength doesn’t seem very difficult or space-intensive. Compared to, say, Koenigsegg’s dihedral synchro-helix hinges, or McLaren’s “butterfly” style hinges, for instance. But then it’s more of the design effort than an engineering one in my mind.
That said, if I were the one doing a light update (something like what Eagle has done), I’d take it a step further and make use of Aston Martin’s lovely “swan” style door hinges, which take up surprisingly little space and add a significant touch of cleverness and elegance to an otherwise very conventional function.
Speaking of Eagle (and I went to their website for research, and am glad to see they are evolving a bit), I generally like what they do, especially with the “Low Drag” car. While it looks even harder to get into than a regular E-Type, the angle of the windshield is visually pleasant.
By taking out 3″ of wheelbase from the front – You’ve eliminated a cylinder from the inline 6.
Because that engine is packed in there against the firewall as it is.
Honey I’m used to fighting over fractions of a millimetre.
Just sayin’ – There’s a very good reason the front is so long, and it is the engine.
I mentioned it in the original piece. This is a purely visual exercise, but if you really wanted it I wouldn’t mind betting there’s a bit of room to be found under there.
Just make the radiator smaller and add another two rows to make up for it!
The E Type already had issues w/ overheating – a thinner radiator would do it no favors.
That’s why I said to add rows, but the comment was ultimately a joke.
Well they could just switch to an Audi Inline 5 then!
Or a GM Atlas Inline 5!!!!
Or convert it to a transverse Inline three and then we can chop at least a foot out of the wheelbase!!!
It’s a slippery slope – you’re headed for LS swap as the next option….
That’s a GREAT IDEA!!!
A nice FWD LS4 swap…
Not going to lie, Frank Stephenson’s version kind of looks like a half way between the last generation XK and E-Type.
With your changes, I feel that would be more in the realm of sports car vs grand tourer, and at that point you’re losing the parcel shelf/back seat so it becomes less of a weekend getaway car with your significant other and/or side piece.
I haven’t altered the cabin, just the doors and A pillar.
Knowing what the inside of the engine bay looks like, my brain was automatically moving back the seats and dash to fit the engine. I suppose you could get creative with the firewall though.
Edit: and the transmission tunnel.