What about those funny shaped cars? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7H396OOGZw

by fortran77 • 6 years ago

73 31 6 years ago

Loughla2• 6 years ago

2 things about this.

1. Those designs may have just been ahead of their time, and now that retro-future is back in fashion, I could see those swept designs being wildly popular. I would love to own a vehicle that looks like a 1940's-1950's view of the future.

2. I am glad that people like Matthew Bird exist in the world.

_niv62• 6 years ago

Re: #1, I would love a modern car that looks like a 1937 Packard 120C: https://i.imgur.com/i6HxWbm.jpg

This is just wishful thinking, but electric cars might be the way forward in making that happen. Customizable top shell, standardized bottom skate. Design and order your own.

sho_hn• 6 years ago

Body-work is heavy regulated. E.g. location and size of bumpers, certain lights not allowed on movable body-work, etc. A lot of the "top shell" also has structural elements under other regulations.

Lots of older-gen designs would not be certifyably street legal if released today.

dfxm12• 6 years ago

I do miss cars designed by coach builders. Bertone and Pininfarina have some beautiful designs. But, I think it comes down to a few questions: How much are you willing to pay? Will these custom coaches pass your local regulations?

Ididntdothis2• 6 years ago

The Chevrolet Prowler went a little in that direction. But I guess there is no real demand for such a thing.

sib• 6 years ago

Is that picture from the Lemay Museum in Washington?

aidenn0• 6 years ago

The PT Cruiser was definitely a nod to that style of car:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_PT_Cruiser

fortran77• 6 years ago

Matthew Bird's RISD lectures on line are wonderful! I've watched them all.

csours2• 6 years ago

There really is an amazing cross-over between cars and airplanes in the 1930s, to the extent that General Motors bought an airline! (Disclaimer, I work for GM, but I did not work for GM in the 1930s)

Both airplanes and cars were very new, and they shared many design features and goals.

Where did it all go wrong? For one small example, consider the weight penalty/bounty. These number are illustrative, not exact or proportional.

Imagine that saving 1 gram of weight on an airplane would be worth 1 dollar over the lifetime of the airplane. In that case you would have a bounty of 1 dollar per gram; your engineers could spend that dollar to "add lightness" to the airplane. The purchase price would go up, but the lifetime cost of ownership would go down.

For an automobile, the bounty might be 0.05 dollar per gram. Automobiles are getting lighter nowadays, but very slowly.

So, if you try to make a car with the same structural components as an airplane, you may be paying a penalty of up to 0.95 dollars per gram relatively speaking!

In other words, you're paying just as much for your flying car as you would have for an airplane, and now you have a vehicle that is bad at both being a car and being an airplane.

This entirely leaves aside safety equipment and many other questions.

---

One other thing to note is that many of the "streamlined" cars shown are actually aerodynamic disasters due to small trim pieces/headlights/etc; but they never actually got fast enough for it to really matter.

JoeAltmaier2• 6 years ago

I think the idea that there were shared design goals, was their fatal mistake. You illustrate several of these, thank you.

The speed difference is another - streamlining mattered not at all for a car at the speeds they were generally going at that time.

Further, a plane is always headed into the wind; cars are pinned to the road by friction and most often have cross-winds. There were tragic car rollover problems throughout the 30's because of this misconception/failure to recognize utterly different design goals.

Generally the only thing in common was, a factory making chassis and shells. Other than the manufacturing technology, there was almost complete mismatch of design goals.

csours2• 6 years ago

"I think the idea that there were shared design goals, was their fatal mistake."

Yes. If goals were vectors, cars and airplanes have many that align on the direction, but have VERY different magnitudes.

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

Prime movers and fuels also.

Both the automobile and airplane ... took off ... atvirtually the same moment, once petroleum-based fuels and reciprocating, Otto-cycle engines existed. Power-to-weight matters more for aircraft, but it's a critical problem for both, along with range (fuel capacity) and reliability.

Body design and aerodynamics aren't the only issue. Though also a bigger problem for aircraft.

Materials (duraluminium), controls, aerodynamic theory, infrastructure (airports, navigation, traffic control, safety standards, incident investigations, etc.), are other key elements.

Then came gas turbines. Auto engineers tried to apply them but they weren't a good fit.

pugworthy• 6 years ago

I did not work for GM in the 1930s

Thank you for this clarification

Animats• 6 years ago

many of the "streamlined" cars shown are actually aerodynamic disasters due to small trim pieces/headlights/etc; but they never actually got fast enough for it to really matter.

When they did get fast enough for aerodynamics to matter, the designs looked very strange.[1] Dodge managed to sneak a car with a giant wing in back into NASCAR, and it beat everybody. So for a few years, all the players had wings. This caused a sales problem. NASCAR cars are supposed to be something like "stock" cars, and manufacturers have to sell some number of the things. The Dodge designer said “I showed the car to the head of sales at Dodge. He saw the wing and said, ‘I can’t sell that shit.’” So, after a few years, the "aero" cars were banned from NASCAR.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a30349118/eye-of-th...

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

Sounds like UCI’s ban of recumbents in 1934, a sordid tale of political intrigue, commercial interests, wounded pride, and arguably bribery and corruption, which basically crippled the recumbent bicycle/tricycle industry, and all because they were better. I’m bitter about that because in most regards recumbent tricycles are just so much better than upright bicycles.

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

This style of design, prioritising aerodynamics highly, hasn’t been popular in cars for a long time, but it is popular in one niche type of vehicle: velomobiles, which are recumbent tricycles with a full fairing (shell). When you’re doing all the pedalling, there’s a little more incentive to optimise its aerodynamics than when you’re merely paying for the fuel.

I’ve had an unfaired recumbent tricycle (a Greenspeed GT3) for over five years and they’re great, especially for long-distance travel and touring (I’ve gone on solo multi-week trips a few times, e.g. St Louis to Philadelphia in America and through parts of Victoria and South Australia in Australia). I’m currently planning and intend soon to start designing a velomobile and trailer that I’d like to build from scratch next year. (These plans are subject to complete change, of course.) It’s an interesting domain where a casual person with no particularly relevant training can actually get going and produce quite decent results at comparatively low cost. (I mean less than a few thousand dollars.) There’s lots of interesting and useful information on the internet, though most of it is from 2005–2012, which is a common era for interesting things happening on the internet, and you’ll find lots of broken links, and it’ll probably help a bit if you’re Dutch.

tingletech• 6 years ago

I wonder if there will be a resurgence of the "large scooter" mini cars from the end of the talk -- but using the new battery and motor tech that the lime-type scooters use.

dsfyu404ed• 6 years ago

As long as states keep regulating "smaller than a car but doesn't fit into any existing category vehicles" the same way they regulate motorcycles (all the insurance licensing and registration stuff you have to put up with for a car possibly plus some) there will be little to no space for them in the market because the people who can afford them will mostly just buy similar price used cars instead because those will deliver better utility, comfort and safety at the same price point. If you want people to try something new at scale you gotta make it worth their while and barring some yet unforeseen technological breakthrough that applies to sub-car sized vehicles but not cars I don't see any way of doing that besides easing regulation on smaller than car vehicles.

jansan• 6 years ago

Nobody has mentioned Matthew Bird's voice, yet. Isn't it just fantastic? This is exactly the tone of voice that I could listen to all day.

What about those funny shaped cars? [video]

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