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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 [...]

It has been almost six decades since the world market was offered a fully realized 'car of the future,' available to anyone holding the modest sum requested. It came with [...]

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 [...]

The complex is served by eight on-site stores as well as fourteen restaurants that produce 30,000 meals a day. and a fleet of more than 6000 bicycles is on hand [...]

A 1934 VOISIN C27, A 1910 WHITE STEAMER, AND A 1963 CHRYSLER TURBINE ARE SHINING EXAMPLES OF THREE AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE LOST TO HISTORY. OR ARE THEY? 'It seems [...]

955 La Salle II roadster: 'For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.'' --John Greenleaf Whittier, 'Maud Muller' OCTOBER 1954 Standing [...]

IT'S AN OLD IDEA AND, ON THE FACE OF IT, A GOOD ONE: put a reliable, powerful American engine with its slightly retrograde specification (but astonishingly low price) in a [...]

UNREASONING PASSION IS INEXPLICABLE to anyone who's not caught up in its throes, so it's essentially impossible to explain why a couple who live in the history-rich Three Musketeers region [...]

This concept is a particularly nice three-dimensional sketch, not a finished design. It confirms that the architecture we'll see in three years is going to be like the original NSX, [...]

ESSENTIALLY UNKNOWN TO THE PUBLIC--even to the most dedicated automobile enthusiasts--Blaine Jenkins has an exceptional history of accomplishment in car design despite never having shaped a fender, a taillight, or [...]

'THIS IS A FAIRLY AGRICULTURAL piece of kit, isn't it?' remarked photographer Colin Curwood as we examined details-- such as the front compartment foot-level vents--of the Continental R Mulliner coupe [...]

THE DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH story and its multiple analogues have fascinated humanity for millennia, so it's no surprise that the schema was transposed to the automotive world almost as soon [...]

HONDA, ONE Of THE WORLD'S largest-volume producers of internal-combustion engines, is a famously multifaceted organization. Even as it launches the vitally important new Civic (page 70), the company is celebrating [...]

RETROMOBILE, A FABULOUS PARISIAN event for fanciers of old cars, is held annually at the Pare des Expositions, where the biennial Paris auto show takes place. Now in its thirty-sixth [...]

THE ITALIAN COACHBUILDING industry has been diminishing in importance and influence for a long time now, with disastrous consequences for the few well-known firms that have not simply disappeared (see [...]

ROARING ACROSS CALIFORNIA'S SAN Fernando Valley at about 100 mph on a 100-degree day, bereft of any kind of windshield or deflector, was intensely exciting. The hot wind in my [...]