Every big auto museum is filled with shiny beauties, historic achievements and, inevitably, some that make you wonder “What made them think THAT was a good idea?”
The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is one of the biggest, and even without paying the extra to see the 300 or so cars in their Vault collection, there’s plenty to let anyone collect their own Picks and Pans. Here are some of mine… starting with the sheer elegance and pure functionality of this 1886 Benz. Only one original was built, but 25 working replicas have been built for museums.
Forty years on, much the same idea—simple, attractive if bare design—surfaced in the Red-Bug Electric Roadster, advertised and sold through high-end toy stores as well as to estate owners. In a way, an ancestor of both the go-kart and the golf cart.
But when it comes to memorable cars, few are so simple, and a popular theme is long, low, sleek and shiny. Here are some of those at Petersen. In order, a 1937 Talbot-Lago with a customized tear-drop body, a production-line Nash-Healey from 1954 with body by Italian designer Pinin-Farina—probably the best-known postwar designer—and a never-built GM design idea for a lower-price Cadillac line to be called LaSalle II.
A sedan version was also built by the designers; the museum shows it in the condition it was found in a salvage yard in the 1980s. While it was meant to be a lower-cost model, the concept featured advance equipment including independent suspension, fuel injection and advanced wheel design.
There are other less-practical concept cars at the museum, including this (ahem…) weird 1969 Fascination prototype with a body resembling a small plane, horizontal tailfins and 180° steering. The five prototypes were built by the Highway Aircraft Corporation; you won’t be surprised that the owner had previously designed an Airomobile.
A more practical, and more likeable, concept car is the 1999 Ford 021C. Its design came from industrial designer Marc Newson, whose goal was a “simple, likable and fun” car that was meant to feel spacious despite its size. Among its innovations are a trunk that opens like a drawer, swiveling seats and the first-ever use of LEDs for headlights and tail lights.
We return for a moment to the long, low and sleek category for a pre-war outlier: This Hudson Terraplane Cab Express shares the sleek lines of its sedan brothers, but with a pickup truck bed where the rear seats and trunk would go; designed for suburbanites rather than businesses, it could be the inspiration for later models like the Ford Ranchero. Or, sadly, the Tesla Cybertruck.
And a different kind of sleek, the classic 1957 T-Bird, a design that still looks fresh almost 70 years later.
But now it’s time for some less elegant shapes again, especially tiny ones. We can start with the tiniest production automobile ever made, the Peel, built by a British boat builder that branched out from fiberglass hulls to fiberglass bodies for kit cars, and then to this three-wheel, one-cylinder 37 mph model. Fifty were eventually built, which may have exhausted the market for full-size adults willing to bend double.
More practical, and more popular, were these two Japanese minis. The Honda Vamos, from the 1970s, was aimed at the same market as the VW Thing and other mini-jeeps that had a vogue at the time, although too slow for highway use. Several thousand were sold, a much better outcome than the three-wheel Fuji Cabin, a three-wheeler with a kick-start engine. Fewer than 100 were built; the competition from cheaper scooters left it with little market.
Of course, small (if not too small) doesn’t always mean niche market; the Fiat 500. Between 1957 and 1975, nearly 4 million were sold, and it even made a splash as a movie star in The Italian Job. It also won design awards. About the same size as the Fiat is this prototype from Waymo for an autonomous taxi; it saves space by turning the driver seat into a passenger seat!
Okay, we’ve seen some beauties, a couple of weirdos and some interesting idea cars. But all of that can’t hide how hideous it’s possible to make a car look, even if it started out with reasonable or even good design. And yes, I know, my opinion, but… I mean… The green monster below, a 1951 Mercury Sport Coupe, started out as the fairly handsome car below it.
And then there’s the gold-and-chrome monster that started as a 1953 Lincoln Capri.
And now a word from our batteries… or a reminder that this is the second age of the electric car, and that Tesla didn’t invent the idea. Let’s start with this one, an electric runabout from 1896 built, yes, in Brooklyn by Andrew Riker, who later designed gas engines for Locomobile. Before the Model T, about a quarter of cars made in the U.S. were electric.
A trio of 1970s ‘city cars’ powered by batteries at a time when interest was high because of fuel crises. The green British Microdot lost financing before production, but the red Sebring-Vanguard sold over 4,000 before the company failed in the 1980s. The Italian Zagato Zele, sold in the U.S. as Elcar, had a run of around 500; it had a range of only 50 miles.
The museum has one of the few survivors of the first ‘real’ electric car of the modern era, the 1996 General Motors EV-1. Over a thousand were built, and leased to everyday users to gather data and to popularize the concept. With 100 mile range, it was suited for serious commuting and was popular with its users. But when GM decided the experiment was over, it recalled the cars and crushed all but a few.
A last moment here… Not a car at all, but an extensive multi-panel display of the history of tire types and production, carefully explaining the advances, and the problems each new type of tire was designed to solve. As the exhibit points out, tires are “the only components of an automobile that come into contact with the road.
