Chapter 6: The Stylists: It's the Curve That Counts
The importance of the stylist's role in automobile design is frequently obscured by critics whose principal tools are adjectives. The words are familiar: stylists build "insolent chariots," they deal with tremendous trifles to place on "Detroit Iron." Or, in the moralist's language, the work of the stylists is "decadent, wasteful, and superficial."
The stylists' work cannot be dismissed so glibly. For however transitory or trivial their visible creations may be on the scale of human values, their function has been designated by automobile company top management as the prerequisite for maintaining the annual high volume of automobile sales -- no small assignment in an industry that has a volume of at least twenty billion dollars every year.
It is the stylists ,who are responsible for most of the annual model change which promises the consumer "new" automobiles. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that this "newness" is almost entirely stylistic in content and that engineering innovation is restricted to a decidedly secondary role in product development.
In the matter of vehicle safety, this restriction bas two main effects. First, of the dollar amount that the manufacturer is investing in a vehicle, whatever is spent for styling cannot be spent for engineering. Thus, the costs of styling divert money that might be devoted to safety. Second, stylistic suggestions often conflict with engineering ideas, and since the industry holds the view that "seeing is selling; style gets the priority.
Styling's precedence over engineering safety is well illustrated by this statement in a General Motors engineering journal: "The choice of latching means and actuating means, or handles, is dictated by styling requirements. Changes in body style will continue to force redesign of door locks and handles." Another feature of style's priority over safety shows up in the paint and chrome finishes of the vehicle, which, while they provide a shiny new automobile for the dealer's floor, also create dangerous glare. Stylists can even be credited with overall concepts that result in a whole new variety of hazard. The hard-top convertible and the pillarless models, for example, were clearly the products of General Motors styling staff.
Engineering features that are crucial to the transportation function of the vehicle do exert some restraining influence on styling decisions. A car must have four tires, and though the stylists may succeed shortly in coloring them, it is unlikely that aromatic creampuffs will replace the rubber. But conflicts between style and traditional engineering features are not often resolved in the latter's favor. For example, rational design of the instrument panel does not call for yearly change or recurring variety. Yet the stylists have had their way and at the same time have met management's demands for the interchangeability of components between different car makes. In one instance the 1964 Oldsmobile used exactly the same heater control as the 1964 Buick. In one brand it was placed in a horizontal position; in the other it was used vertically, With this technique, four separate and "different" instrument panels were created for each division.
This differentiating more and more about less and less has reached staggering proportions, In 1957 the Fisher body division produced for the five General Motors car divisions more than 75 different body styles with 450 interior soft trim combinations and a huge number of exterior paint combinations. By 1963 this output proliferated to 140 body styles and 843 trim combinations. Different designs for what General Motors styling chief Harley Earl called "dynamic obsolescence" must be created for many elements of the car: front ends, rear ends, hoods, ornaments, rear decks and rear quarter panels, tail lamps, bumper shades, rocker panels, and the latest items being offered in an outburst of infinite variation -- wheel covers and lugs.
These styling features form the substance of sales promotion and advertising, The car makers' appeals are emotional; they seek to inspire excitement, aesthetic pleasure, and the association of the glistening model in its provocative setting with the prospect's most far-reaching personal visions and wish-fulfillment. This approach may seem flighty, but the industry has learned that the technique sells cars to people who have no other reason to buy them with such frequency.
In recent years, campaigns saturated with the "style sell" have moved on to bolder themes. A 1964 advertisement for the Chevrolet Chevelle said, "We didn't just make the Chevelle beautiful and hope for the best.... If you think all we had in mind was a good-looking car smaller than the Chevrolet and bigger than Chevy II, read on," Curved side windows, the ad continued, are not just for appearance, "they slant way in for easy entry and don't need bulky space-wasting doors to roll down into." In addition, Chevelle's "long wide hood looks nice, too," because of all that goes under it-"a wide choice of Six and V-8 engines,"
A Buick advertisement listed a number of regular vehicle features and commented, "You don't really need these, but how can you resist them?"
In Motor Trend magazine, a publication not addressed to "hot rodders" but to well-informed car hobbyists, the headline of a Plymouth advertisement read, "This is a status symbol." Its final paragraph read, "Plymouth Satellite's a decidedly undemocratic machine. Power-hungry people are the ones it really goes for."
Such advertisements are anything but hidden and subliminal persuaders. To turn the promotion of a transportation machine into an appeal so far removed from the functional quality of that machine, and to do so with commercial success, is an impressive, if disturbing, achievement in applied social science. It is an achievement made possible in large part by the amazing rise of the stylist in the hierarchy of automobile company management.
The stylist did not carve out his own role: it was waiting for him In the late twenties, at the death of the Model T Ford. For years after introducing his Model T in 1909, Henry Ford did very well selling cars to Americans, giving them "any color so long as it was black." Going into the twenties, the Ford held a commanding lead over its numerous competitors. The twenties was the crucial decade for the kind of automobile the public was to be sold in future years and for the industry that was going to produce it. During the first half of that decade, the mechanical features of the automobile-the power plant, drive train, and running gear-achieved engineering maturity and became mo;" reliable. A stronger chassis frame and a passenger cabin were developed, and the suspension system improved the security and comfort of travel. Important assembly line production problems were overcome, and this permitted more uniform and efficient output. In other words, car companies were no longer forced to appeal to their customers with the kind of fundamental assurance that an early ad carried: "It gets you there and it brings you back." In 1925, 3,735,171 passenger cars were sold, compared with 1,905,560 in 1920.
In 1927, for the first time since it introduced the Model T, Ford lost its sales lead to General Motors, never again to regain it. In that year the 1927 La Salle became the first car to be "styled" -- by Harley Earl, who had joined General Motors a year earlier. In response, Henry Ford came out with his "re-styled" Model A. The era of styling began.
At first the stylist was little more than a decorator of the trim and color of the basic body, after its size, shape, and materials had been determined by the engineers and approved by management. The change in emphasis from mechanical to styling features was explained by a leading stylist, Charles Jordan: "For economic reasons, the mechanical assemblies couldn't be frequently changed, since no sales appeal lay in changing them when the result had no dramatic effect on performance. This evolutionary engineering of the car's functional parts tended to promote near-sameness in the products of all major competitors. This, in turn, opened the eyes and ears of company management to the arguments of the men who could provide real visible change under these conditions -- the stylists."
Another General Motors stylist, Vincent Kaptur, Jr., described the cars of the late twenties as having become more than cars. They expressed "status, power, fun, glamour, and freedom. The comforts, desires, and whims of the human being took precedence over the machine."
Actually, the problem the automobile industry was grappling with was one of maintaining a sales pace every year for a product that lasts for nearly a decade. Up to a point, a new invention like the automobile can show rising sales by simply meeting the demand for transportation. At that saturation point, however, the demand becomes less and less responsive to price reduction (the Model T had gone as low as $290) and functional improvement. A satiety threshold sets in that is similar to the limits which govern the consumer demand for food. But an emotional demand can be exploited for a much higher curve on the sales chart. There has never been established a human quota for "status, power, fun, glamour, and freedom." Thus the second stage in the evolution of a consumer product is reached: the time for catering to buyers' wants instead of simply to their needs.
General Motors has been the most aggressive advocate of styling. The first distinct styling section was organized in 1927 under Harley Earl. It was called "The Art and Colour Section." At first, the stylists' position was not secure when it came to disagreements with engineers. Earl's first contributions, slanted windshields and thin comer-pillars, had to be justified as "improving visibility," But by the late thirties Earl's group became the "General Motors styling section," and he was elevated to a vice presidency, indicating that the stylist's function was equal in importance to the work of the engineering, legal, company public relations, and manufacturing departments. The styling departments went through similar developments in other automobile companies. The engineer's authority over the design of the automobile was finished. As Charles Jordan of General Motors said, "Previously, functional improvement or cost reduction was a good reason for component redesign, but [in the thirties] the engineer had to learn to appreciate new reasons for redesigns." In a paper delivered before the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1962, Jordan demonstrated how the importance of the stylist has continued to grow when he urged that the word "styling" be replaced by the word "designer." Jordan said that the "designer" (that is, the stylist) is "the architect of the car, the coordinator of all the elements that make up the complete car, and the artist who gives it form. He stands at the beginning, his approach to and responsibility for the design of the vehicle is parallel to that of an architect of a building." An observer might wonder what was left for the engineer to do but play the part of a technical minion. Jordan ended his address by looking into the future. He foresaw changes in the automobile industry that he described as "drastic and far-reaching." He listed eleven questions in advanced research inquiry for which the styling research and the advanced vehicle design sections were working to find answers. Not one concerned collision protection.
Other manufacturers have not stated such a dominant role for the stylist, though they agree that the automobile will continue to be the major industrial art form in our society. Gene Bordinat, vice president and director of styling for Ford Motor Company said, "Styling serves to make the public aware that here is a new product, with improvements in materials, components and mechanical design-features that might be hidden to anyone but a mechanic or an engineer. People want to know about these things. And if they buy the car, they don't want its best features to be concealed. They want identification where it is visible to one and all. It's the same sort of urge that causes some girls to wear tight sweaters."
That urge to make its assets visible was certainly the central motivation behind the development of the car that created the most dramatic success story in Mr. Bordinat's own company. The introduction, the promotion, and the success of Ford's Mustang was the climactic triumph in the advancement of the stylist to the level of pre-eminence in the industry. The stylist in this case was helped by another new tool: market research. For the mass psychological phenomenon of the Mustang began with a market analysis that discovered even such details as how many college students wanted bucket seats for "first dates" (42%). It moved on, after Ford's decision that the advance surveys had identified a "real market," to advance publicity. The Mustang was to be "a new breed of horse." Both Time and Newsweek, for the first time devoted simultaneous cover stories to a new automobile.
Even before the press coverage and massive advertising campaigns were under way, Ford began receiving thousands of orders from people who had never even seen the Mustang. On the day the car was introduced, almost four million people went to Ford dealers to look at it. Ford soon found that it could not keep up with the huge and increasing demand.
There is little doubt that never before had there been such an intense, immediate identification by so many people with a vehicle. Their immediate involvement with the "wild Mustang" paralleled in some ways the animism in certain primitive tribes, which see inanimate objects like trees as possessing animate qualities. Letters from early buyers of the Mustang revealed even other connections. One woman wrote to the company to confide that the "Mustang is as exciting as sex." A woman from St. Louis maintained, "Yes, it is true that blondes have more fun; but now I'm convinced that blondes have more fun in a new Mustang." A massive "after-market" sprang up quickly, anxious to be part of the Mustang boom. The American Racing Equipment Company advertised its aluminum sport wheels with the headline: "Mustangs are meant to be wild. Don't tame them with ordinary wheels!"
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Ford had an explanation of the overwhelmingly favorable verdict of the public. Lee Iacocca, the executive in charge of the Mustang project, cited his own pre-production analysis: "People would want this car because it offers them status at low cost ... because it satisfied in one package their need for basic transportation and their desire for comfort, style, handling, and a choice in performance capabilities," Ford's marketing manager, Frank Zimmerman, Jr., added some comments that Iacocca, as "father of the Mustang" could not make with modesty. Ford had been convinced, Mr. Zimmerman said, that the Mustang would have a stable market and would not be just a fad. He said that the car had an emotional appeal, that people reacted to it personally -- a kind of "Mustang spirit."
What Ford had produced, in fact, was the stylist's dream. The product planning committee, working closely with the stylists, had chosen the prototype and had approved the basic sheet metal and two body styles -- before it informed the development engineers at Ford. Sheet metal, glass, bumpers and moldings of the vehicle were new, while the chassis, engine, suspension and driveline components were copies of Ford's Falcon and the Fairlane models.
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The goal of distinctiveness had been achieved in what Bordinat called "the battles of the inch," He gave as an example: "The close-fitting rear bumper was essential to the lithe and lovely look. Here the battle of dimensions was waged over fractions of an inch. If the gap between bumper and sheet metal had become an inch greater, the resultant effect would have detracted from the appearance of the entire vehicle," Other little differences that collectively made "all the difference" to Bordinat and his staff included simple lines with little ornamentation, single headlights, taillights with a vertical pattern, pointed fenders, slimmer bumpers, a small, cropped grill and "roll-under" to expose the wheels and tires for a more "gutty" look. The overall profile was as recognizable as the 1946 Studebaker-long, low hood, close-coupled passenger cabin, and a short rear deck.
After such a stylistic triumph there was little left for the engineer to do to the Mustang. The independent automobile evaluation magazine, Road Test, described the car as "a hoked-up Falcon with inadequate brakes, poor handling, and marvelous promotion." Their report, based on careful road testing, also said, "Like most American cars, the Mustang abounds with new and startling engineering features carried over from 1910." The magazine cited the "very bad" glare from windshield wiper arms and blades, and warned that its soft shock control could be dangerous on high speed diagonal railroad crossings, where the vehicle moves onto the road abruptly as the springs reach the limit of their travel. The magazine further described the Mustang as having "rear-axle hop and instability." Road Test advised Mustang owners, "With heavy duty suspensions the car is safer, but a severe ride penalty is paid, which would be unnecessary if some advertising dollars were spent for advanced, independent rear suspension."
Steve Wilder, an automobile expert, wrote an article for Car Life entitled, "Taming the Wild Mustang." In it he described the Mustang chassis as "the quintessence of what's generally wrong with American cars. It's a heavy-nosed blunderbuss with a teenage rear suspension." Among his dozens of indictments was this observation: "If you hit a bump heeled over, the suspension immediately bottoms out, the tire loses its already tenuous grip, and the Mustang jumps to the side like a frisky colt."
Neither the public appraisal, nor Ford's own explanation of its success, nor even the writings of automobile experts addressing the buffs take into account one piece of Mustang history. In January 1963, over a year before the Mustang made its public appearance, Mr. R. C. Lunn, a Ford engineer, delivered a technical paper to the Society of Automotive Engineers on the subject of an experimental model of the Mustang which was being displayed in various parts of the country. Mr. Lunn's comments were remarkably candid. They showed a glimpse of what the industry could do in the elementary stages of safety design. Lunn included references to the following features incorporated in the operational model: a "fail-safe" dual braking system, integrated headrests to prevent or minimize neck and spinal injuries, a roll-bar to strengthen the roof structure in the event of roll-overs, a steering column preventing rearward displacement into the driver during a front-end collision, a collapsible steering shaft, provision for shoulder harness and lap belts, strongly anchored seats, and bucket seats with lateral holding power. In the production-model Mustang which was introduced in April, 1964 (and of which nearly half a million were sold in twelve months) every one of these features had been eliminated.
A vast corporate effort, keyed to stylistic features, had built a new vehicle. The result was impressive brand-name recognition and soaring sales. The compromise in this achievement was that new or improved automotive engineering for safety once again took a back seat.
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The Mustang is a classic case of styling imperatives superseding engineering development in the total concept of car design. But long before the Mustang's pyrotechnical introduction to the public, the stylists' control over the design of front- and rear-end appearance and exterior sheet metal created serious pedestrian hazards that never were permitted to fall within the concern of the engineers.
Senator Ribicoff raised the issue directly with Arjay Miller, president of Ford, during the 1965 Senate hearings on automobile safety. "Mr. Miller," he said, "one of the problems we have is the pedestrian. Very little has been said of the pedestrian. There are about 500,000 pedestrians injured; 8,000 pedestrians are killed every year. [1] Much of the injury and death is caused by sharp edges on automobiles-hood ornaments, fins-all these sharp features you have on cars. Do you ever take the pedestrian into account when you design automobiles?"
Mr. Miller replied, "Very definitely, Senator. I am on the styling committee and this question never fails to be raised before any styling is approved, and furthermore, it is in the knowledge of the stylists and the engineers at the time the vehicle is designed and styled."
The most charitable estimate that can be made of this statement is that it is utterly lacking in candor. If Senator Ribicoff had pointed out that his own Mustang -- even more than other Ford models -- had a hood edge that was sharp enough to act as a chopper, Mr. Miller might have had to face specific charges. He would not have been able to refer for defense of the Ford design to Gene Bordinat, Ford's chief stylist. In the October 1964 issue of Automotive Industries, Mr. Bordinat had approvingly described the Lincoln Continental's flush-mounted parking lights in the "leading edges of the blade-like front fenders."
The callousness of the stylists about the effects of their creations on pedestrians is seen clearly in the case of William Mitchell, chief stylist at General Motors and the principal creator of the Cadillac tail fin. This sharp, rising fin was first introduced in the late forties, soaring in height and prominence each year until it reached a grotesque peak in 1959 and gradually declining thereafter until it was finally eliminated in the 1966 models. To understand how a man could devise and promote such a potentially lethal protuberance, it is necessary to understand the enthusiasm of Mr. Mitchell, who frequently confides to interviewers that he has "gasoline in his blood." His vibrancy in conversation revolves around the concepts of "movement," "excitement,"' and "flair."' Samples of his recent statements are illustrative: "When you sat behind the wheel, you looked down that long hood, and then there Were two headlight shapes, and then two fender curves -- why, you felt excited just sitting there. A car should be exciting." Or, "Cars will be more clearly masculine or feminine," and "For now we deal with aesthetics ... that indefinable, intangible quality that makes all the difference." Mr. Mitchell's reported view of safety is that it is the driver's responsibility to avoid accidents, and that if cars were made crashworthy, the "nuts behind the wheel" would take even greater chances.
The world of Mr. Mitchell centers around the General Motors technical center, where in surroundings of lavish extravagance he presides over a staff of more than 1,400 styling specialists. It is a world of motion, color, contour, trim, fabric. To illustrate the degree of specialization involved, one color selector holds 2,888 metal samples of colors; glass- enclosed studios, surrounding verdant roof gardens, are specially designed so that colors may be matched under varying lighting conditions. In such an environment, it is easy for Mr. Mitchell to believe that "Eighty-five per cent of all the information we receive is visual." His two favorite sayings are, "Seeing is selling; and "The shape of things shape man."
The matter of Cadillac tail fins, however, transcends the visual world of Mr. Mitchell. Fins have been felt as well as seen, and felt fatally when not seen. In ways that should have been anticipated by Mr. Mitchell, these fins have "shaped" man.
In the year of its greatest height, the Cadillac fin bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side of the tail. In 1964 a California motorcycle driver learned the dangers of the Cadillac tail fin. The cyclist was following a heavy line of traffic on the freeway going toward Newport Harbor in Santa Ana. As the four-lane road narrowed to two lanes, the confusion of highway construction and the swerving of vehicles in the merging traffic led to the Cadillac's sudden stop. The motorcyclist was boxed in and was unable to turn aside. He hit the rear bumper of the car at a speed of about twenty miles per hour, and was hurled into the tail fin, which pierced his body below the heart and cut him all the way down to the thigh bone in a large circular gash. Both fin and man survived this encounter.
The same was not true in the case of nine-year-old Peggy Swan. On September 29, 1963, she was riding her bicycle near her home in Kensington, Maryland. Coming down Kensington Boulevard she bumped into a parked car in a typical childhood accident. But the car was a 1962 Cadillac, and she hit the tail fin, which ripped into her body below the throat. She died at Holy Cross Hospital a few hours later of thoracic hemorrhage.
Almost a year and a half earlier, Henry Wakeland, the independent automotive engineer, had sent by registered mail a formal advisory to General Motors and its chief safety engineer, Howard Gandelot The letter was sent in the spirit of the Canons of Ethics for Engineers, and began with these words: "This letter is to insure that you as an engineer and the General Motors Corporation are advised of the hazard to pedestrians which exists in the sharp-pointed tail fins of recent production 1962 Cadillac automobiles and other recent models of Cadillacs. The ability of the sharp and pointed tail fins to cause injury when they contact a pedestrian is visually apparent" Wakeland gave details of two recent fatal cases that had come to his attention. In one instance, an old woman in New York City had been struck by a Cadillac which was rolling slowly backward after its power brakes failed. The blow of the tail Bu had killed her. In the other case, a thirteen- year-old Chicago boy, trying to catch a fly ball on a summer day in 1961, had run into a 1961 Cadillac fin, which pierced his heart.
Wakeland said, "An obviously apparent hazard should not be allowed to be included in an automobile because there are only a few circumstances under which the hazard would cause accident or injury. When any large number of automobiles which carry the hazard are in use, the circumstances which translate the hazard into accident or injury will eventually arise. Since it is technically possible to add [fins to automobiles] it is also technically possible to remove them, either before or after manufacture."
Howard Gandelot replied to Wakeland, saying that only a small number of pedestrian injuries due to fins or other ornamentation had come to the attention of General Motors, adding that there "always is a likelihood of the few unusual types of accidents."
The lack of complaints is a standard defense of the automobile companies when they are asked to explain hazardous design features. Certainly no company has urged the public to make com plaints about such injuries as described by Wakeland. Nor has any company tried to find out about these injuries either consistently or through a pilot study. Moreover, the truth of the statement that "very few complaints" are received by the automobile companies is a self- serving one that is not verifiable by any objective source or agency outside the companies. Also, it must be remembered that since there is no statistical reporting system on this kind of accident -- whether the system is sponsored by the government or the insurance industry -- there is no publicly available objective source of data concerning such accidents.
As an insider, Gandelot knew that the trend of Cadillac tail fin design was to lower the height of the fin. He included in his reply to Wakeland this "confidential information" about the forthcoming 1963 Cadillac: "The fins were lowered to bring them closer to the bumper and positioned a little farther forward so that the bumper face now affords more protection."
Gandelot's comment touches on an important practice. The introduction, promotion, and finally the "phasing out" of external hazards is purely a result of stylistic fashions. For example, a few years ago sharp and pointed horizontal hood ornaments were the fad. Recent models avoid these particular ornament designs, not for pedestrian safety but to conform to the new "clean look" that is the trademark of current styling. The deadly Cadillac tail fin has disappeared for the same reason. New styles bring new hazards or the return of old ones.
Systematic engineering design of the vehicle could minimize or prevent many pedestrian injuries. The majority of pedestrian-vehicle collisions produce injuries, not fatalities. Most of these collisions occur at impact speed of under twenty-five miles per hour, and New York City data show that in fatality cases about twenty-five per cent of the collisions occurred when the vehicles involved were moving at speeds below fourteen miles per hour. It seems quite obvious that the external design and not just the speed of the automobile contributes greatly to the severity of the injuries inflicted on the pedestrian. Yet the external design is so totally under the unfettered control of the stylist that no engineer employed by the automobile industry has ever delivered a technical paper concerning pedestrian collision. Nor have the automobile companies made any public mention of any crash testing or engineering safety research on the problem.
But two papers do exist in the technical literature, one by Henry Wakeland and the other by a group of engineers at the University of California in Los Angeles. Wakeland destroyed the lingering myth that when a pedestrian is struck by an automobile it does not make any difference which particular design feature hits him. He showed that heavy vehicles often strike people without causing fatality, and that even in fatal cases, the difference between life and death is often the difference between safe and unsafe design features. Wakeland's study was based on accident and autopsy reports of about 230 consecutive pedestrian fatalities occurring in Manhattan during 1958 and early 1959. In this sample, case after case showed the victim's body penetrated by ornaments, sharp bumper and fender edges, headlight hoods, medallions, and fins. He found that certain bumper configurations tended to force the adult pedestrian's body down, which of course greatly increased the risk of the cars running over him. Recent models, with bumpers shaped like sled runners and sloping grill work above the bumpers, which give the appearance of "leaning into the wind; increase even further the car's potential for exerting down-and-under pressures on the pedestrian.
The UCLA study, headed by Derwyn Severy, consisted of experimenting with dummies to produce force and deflection data on vehicle-pedestrian impacts. The conclusion was that "the front end geometry and resistance to deformation of a vehicle striking a pedestrian will have a major influence on the forced movement of the pedestrian following the impact" These design characteristics are considered crucial to the level of injury received, since subsequent contact with the pavement may be even more harmful than the initial impact. As additional designs for protections the Severy group recommends the use of sheet metal that collapses, greater bumper widths, and override guards to sweep away struck pedestrians from the front wheels.
If the automobile companies are seeking more complaints about the effects of styling in producing pedestrian hazards, they might well refer to a widely used textbook on preventive medicine written by Doctors Hilleboe and Larimore. Taking note of the many tragic examples of unnecessarily dangerous design, the results of which "are seen daily in surgical wards and autopsy tables," the authors concluded that "if one were to attempt to produce a pedestrian-injuring mechanism, one of the most theoretically efficient designs which might be developed would closely approach that of the front end of some present-day automobiles.
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The ultimate evidence that the work of the stylist is anything but trivial is to be found in the effect styling bas had on the economic aspects of the automobile industry.
General Motors, which controls over fifty per cent of the automobile market, whenever it introduces and promotes a particular styling feature can compel the other companies to follow suit. The history of the wrap-around windshield, the tail fin, and the hard-top convertible confirms this point. For although the wraparound windshield created visual distortion that shocked the optometry profession, and the tail fin and hard-top designs engendered the dangers discussed earlier, every one of the other automobile companies followed the lead of General Motors in order not to be out of date.
Economists call this phenomenon "protective imitation," but under any name, following suit involved tremendous tooling costs, the curtailment of engineering diversity and innovation, and, most important, the wholesale adoption of features that were intended to please the eye of the driver rather than to protect his life.
George Romney, then the president of American Motors, described the situation aptly when he told the Kefauver Senate antitrust subcommittee in 1958, "It is just like a woman's hat. The automobile business has some of the elements of the millinery industry in it, in that you can make style become the hallmark of modernity ... A wrap-around windshield, through greater sums of money and greater domination of the market, can be identified as being more important than something that improves the whole automobile.... In an industry where style is a primary sales tool, public acceptance of a styling approach can be achieved by the sheer Impact of product volume."
Still the industry has persisted in declaring that it merely "gives the customer what he wants." This hardly squares with Mr. Romney's statement or with the facts. The history of every successful style feature is that it was conceived in one of the automobile company style sections -- often without reference to company engineers, let alone considerations of safety -- and then turned over to marketing specialists for repetitive, emotional exploitation until it was an entrenched, accepted "fashion."
Entrenched, that is, until the need to make the customer dissatisfied with that fashion sent the styling staffs back to their drawing boards. The principle that governs then is in direct contradiction to the give-them-what-they-want defense. In the words of Gene Bordinat of Ford, the stylist at work must "take the lead in establishing standards of taste." That, in fact, is what they have done.
The follow-the-leader spiral of styling Innovations has had other profound effects. One of the most important results is that by concentrating model "changes" in the area of styling, the manufacturers have focused consumer attention on those features of the automobile that are the most likely subject of "persuasive" rather than "informational" appeals. As in the fashion industry, dealing with emotions rather than dealing with the intellect has had the result that the car makers have rarely been threatened with consumer sovereignty over the automobile. On the contrary, car Manufacturers have exerted self-determined control over the products they offer. This control is reflected in another statement from Mr. Mitchell, who said, "One thing today is that we have more cars than we have names. Maybe the public doesn't want all these kinds, but competition makes it necessary."
The narrowing of the difference between automobiles to minor styling distinctions is not the only unhealthy result of the stylists' dominance. Even more discouraging has been the concomitant drying-up of engineering ingenuity. As the stylists have steadily risen to pre-eminence, the technological imagination of automotive engineers has slowed to a point where automobile company executives themselves have deplored the lack of innovation. Ford vice president Donald Frey recognized the problem clearly when he said in an address delivered in January 1964, "I believe that the amount of product innovation successfully introduced into the automobile is smaller today than in previous times and is still falling. The automatic transmission [adopted in 1939 on a mass-production basis] was the last major innovation of the industry."
The head of Mr. Frey's company, Henry Ford II, seemed troubled by the same question in his address to the same group. He said, "When you think of the enormous progress of science over the last two generations, it's astonishing to realize that there is very little about the basic principles of today's automobile that would seem strange and unfamiliar to the pioneers of our industry.... What we need even more than the refinement of old ideas is the ability to develop new ideas and put them to work."
Neither of these automobile executives, of course, makes the obvious connection that if an industry devotes its best efforts and its largest investment to styling concepts, it must follow that new ideas in engineering -- and safety -- will be tragically slow in coming.
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NOTES:
1. Drs. James Goddard and William Haddon have estimated that at least four per cent of all vehicles, at some time during their use, strike and injure pedestrians.