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ON THE PEBBLE BEACH Concours field two years ago, I was startled by a General Motors dream car from the '60s I could not recall ever seeing or reading about [...]

TALKING ABOUT March's Geneva auto show, I noted Palexpo's halls were 'full of various electrics that either resembled Italian supercars or were Italian supercars--but with electric propulsion,' as I reported [...]

I HAVE NO absolute ideas about how electric cars should look. Apparently, no one working in car design today has any more certainty than I do. But I can tell [...]

LET ME QUOTE something I wrote back in 2014 about the car that would become the precursor to Toyota's new Supra--the FT-1 concept: 'In many ways, this car is a [...]

LAST YEAR I attended the Unity AutoTech Summit, the single most interesting automotive event I've experienced in the past decade or two. No, it wasn't an auto show; those manifestations [...]

Automobile's editors have chosen the BMW 8 Series coupe as our 2019 Design of the Year. There are multiple reasons for our selection, not least of which: In a year [...]

THE YEAR 2018 was not a great one for concept cars. We hoped for radical breakthroughs to show up at the long-running Paris auto show in the fall, but it [...]

THE MCLAREN SPEEDTAIL is an astonishing accomplishment, a truly luxurious road car that could presumably be driven from Chicago to Bonneville, run on the salt, qualify for the 200 MPH [...]

IN TERMS OF physical appearance, this flashy, highly attractive all-electric sports car is as pure a dream car as it's possible to make. Practicality is sacrificed to style everywhere, but [...]

A couple of decades back, somewhat awestruck, I held a simple--primitive, really--wooden car model as old as I was, nothing more than a block of wood that had been sliced [...]

WHEN I TAUGHT at the Art Center College of Design (Switzerland) nearly 30 years ago, there were some intriguing international students with very strong ideas about what they intended to [...]

VOLKSWAGEN STYLING HAS been inspired by American practice for as long as there has been a Volkswagenwerk. You may well think the original Porsche-designed KdF proudly presented to the world [...]

EACH YEAR WE get a selection of wondrous new vehicles that their proposers tell us are world-beating creations, the fastest, the most expensive, the most economical, the most beautiful, the [...]

THIS WAS A moderately good year for concept cars--from Detroit through Geneva, Frankfurt, and Tokyo--but when all was weighed and considered carefully, there remained only two show cars of real [...]

OUR SELECTION OF the Tesla Model 3 as Automobiles Design of the Year might come as a surprise, given some of the shots the company has absorbed when it comes [...]

'THE LONG WHEELBASE and short nose lend the car a sense of dynamism, even when viewed at a standstill.' So says the news release on the Bentley Motors website. If [...]

I ADMIT, my initial intellectual reaction to the Infiniti Prototype 9 race car concept was, 'That's a really stupid idea. Why would Infiniti, a Japanese brand that didn't exist in [...]

THERE HAVE BEEN three separate and quite distinct Bentley eras since Walter Owen Bentley founded the company. The first lasted only a dozen years but established the reputation that enabled [...]

Elegance--as I understand the term--has absolutely nothing to do with selection as Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance Best of Show, if recent winners are considered. Key to earning the coveted award [...]

BAYERISCHE MOTOREN WERKE AG has existed since 1916, initially as a builder of aircraft engines. It moved to earthbound vehicles when in 1923 it offered a motorcycle to keep its [...]

'ATHLETIC ELEGANCE' is the design language for Hyundai Group's Genesis GV80 concept car. Or so said the company's image wranglers in an overblown press release issued during April's New York [...]

WITH A HALF dozen model ranges available in Land Rover's Range Rover stable, you would think there would be little need for the Velar, a completely new model named after [...]

The kings are dead. Long live the princess. In matters of automotive aesthetic mastery, there have been only two major influences. From about 1910 to 1939, the world looked to [...]

The subtle simplicity and purity of Scandinavian design has been admired for decades, largely in terms of household items and furniture, useful objects made of wood, wool, leather, stone, and [...]

Gran Turismo. These mellifluous Italian words are magic. They sound good to all ears, translate well to other languages, and even provide an evocative acronymic abbreviation: Gee-Tee. Unfortunately they are [...]

The latest installment of Automobile's Design of the Year was almost too easy for us to pick. The Ford GT was the most exciting, most innovative, and most surprising meant-for-production [...]

The Dawn is the best-looking car by Rolls-Royce since the iconic British firm came under German ownership a dozen years ago. That's our opinion, yes, but if reactions of the [...]

Part I: BEGINNINGS IN FRANCE Car design before World War II was steeped in French culture. Designers all over the world, including Americans like Howard 'Dutch' Darrin, benefited from the [...]

Well-to-do Americans have always loved big, fast, comfortable coupes, even more than big convertibles. Think of Packard Twelves, Lincoln Zephyrs, Cadillac Coupe de Villes and Eldorados, Buick Rivieras, and Oldsmobile [...]

Last summer, Jaguar sponsored an ambitious project with two Californian design schools: the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The [...]

For years it has been reasonably clear Hyundai intended to make Kia its sporting arm. And though myriad concept and show cars indicated that direction, Kia for the most part [...]

Some six decades ago Chrysler unleashed a batch of dramatically different 1957 models that made its General Motors and Ford rivals seem shockingly old and tired. An advertising tagline for [...]

A concept car? No way. Renault's Trezor is a pure show car, something meant to startle and stimulate, but never destined to become a product. It's what we used to [...]

Not one of the people running Cadillac as a separate General Motors entity out of a trendy Manhattan coffee bar appears to know what Cadillac was--irrelevant, they say, we want [...]

MORE THAN ONE Automobile staff member voted for the Lexus LC500 as our Design of the Year--it is the most stylish production Lexus since Erwin Lui's seminal wet-plaster-in-a-rubber-balloon LS 400 [...]

A truly great man in automotive history, Vincenzo Lancia accomplished a fair deal more than many others who are far better known yet contributed far less to the accumulation of [...]

Last month I characterized the first Panamera sedan as 'ugly.' Any production Porsche is exceptionally well-made, even those poorly engineered, and even something as artless as the 911 can become [...]

No one knows Tesla's fate, but we all realize an electric-only car company is an extremely risky endeavor and that those involved, whether makers or users, are admirably brave. The [...]

Alfa Romeo's sedans have rarely been as beautiful as its myriad coupes and roadsters presented over the past hundred-plus years. There were a few honorable exceptions when the four-doors ? [...]

Bentley invited us to an intimate gathering in London's Hospital Club, where new chief designer Stefan Sielaff showed the barest glimpses of things his team has been working on, stressing [...]

The Bugatti Chiron is not a car; instead, it's a nearly useless dazzling object--the rolling equivalent of the bejeweled Easter eggs made for two czars of Russia by Peter Carl [...]

Honorable exception of the plaster-filled-balloon-shaped SC 400 coupe aside, I've found every Lexus apart from the LFA supercar essentially unattractive. There were many awkward, overwrought, and easily forgettable sedans and [...]

Editor Floyd's commitment to 'hang our hat on telling compelling stories around design' in his January column brought a number of thoughtful letters from readers, several of them making distinctions [...]

I've always liked Volvos despite their clunky appearance, and I have owned several including, half a century ago, what was the fastest Volvo in the world. True, it required a [...]

This is a perfect example of what concept cars ought to be: something you'd really like to have once it's converted into a real car. Mazda's RX-Vision concept, a sort [...]

Brazil, it is said, is 'the country of the future.' But given its messed-up economy and corrupt politics, cynics say 'it always will be.' As someone who got disastrously involved [...]

It was a nice occasion, totally unexpected: a chance to see a new concept car before any public presentation. The invitation was especially attractive since the car was coming from [...]

At least the DBX is closer to a tall fastback sedan than it is to a truck. But I hope I'm not alone in thinking that a nicely proportioned four-door sedan taller than the claustrophobic, hard-to-enter Rapide and lower than this DBX would be a better car than either of them: more habitable than the former, better proportioned than the latter. Fortunately, the Aston Martin grille shape, carefully evolved over more than 70 years by a succession of excellent designers, is as distinctive as the Rolls' Parthenon or Mercedes' three-pointed star despite it having been cribbed along the way for some cheap Fords, so there's no question of this car's identity. He also turned out some truly impressive grand touring coupes and sedans with storied but usually troubled Aston Martin. [Extracted from the article]

SOME DESIGN JOBS are simply impossible, and directly replacing the 67-year-old Land Rover Defender with a modern vehicle is one such example. Saying the original Land Rover - essentially a surplus Willys jeep chassis with a Rover sedan engine and a no-compound-curve sheet aluminum body - was on the rustic side is extreme understatement. Notice the names on their business cards: Andy, Gerry, and Nick, not Andrew, Gerard, and Nicholas. Rogers was amusing in his self-description as "incredibly young-looking" for someone who's been with Land Rover for 35 years. [Extracted from the article]

As I walked onto the Pebble Beach Concours field that Sunday morning in August with old friend Rex Parker, one of the first cars we came to was the eventual [...]