In the history of the automobile there have been thousands of different designs, maybe tens of thousands. Select few of those have been truly influential. While having a discussion about my childhood with another gearhead we stumbled onto the topic of family cars. Well, the Lohnes clan rolled around for 10 years in a 1986 Ford Taurus wagon. Looking back to when that car was new, it got a lot of attention. It looked like nothing else on the road at the time and if you pay attention to automotive design after the Taurus was introduced, it was a game changer.
Looking back in history there have to be a bunch more examples of cars that changed the way the rest of the stuff on the road looked. Was it the VW Beetle? The immediate impact of that car was not felt by the Big 3, but the long term effects certainly were. I guess the Edsel and Chrysler Airflow are both non-starters for this discussion because they essentially failed because their looks were too far off of what people expected a car to look like although the Airflow was vindicated decades later when everyone started choosing shapes with an eye on aerodynamics. It could be trucks, too. The Ford F1 which has evolved into the F-series line of today is certainly a nameplate of note! There should be some interesting answers to this one.
What’s your opinion? Tell us what the most influential automotive design of all time is!
Jaguar XKE.
911. So influential that they haven’t changed it much over 50 years later.
Model T Ford. It pretty much redefined American culture, and also introduced mass production to the automotive industry. It put America on wheels….
The picture for this topic really caught my eye. I owned a 57 Studebaker Golden Hawk back in the late 50’s, arly 60’s. These supercharged small bore, long stroke engines when paired with a 3 speed standard shift with overdrive made for fun driving for the time period. And the styling was certainly different. They were offered with an automatic transmission but the performance suffered. I always thought they should have only come in Gold. I’d love to find one and resto mod it to make it more driveable by todays standards.
Jeep Wagoneer, so so many 4×4 utilities today. The Waggy was small and low, it would be considerably crossover today.
International putting an extra set of doors on their pickup. It took more than four decades but the four door pickup it king now.