When it became official this week that General Motors would be going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, like a lot of Americans we couldn't help but be a bit nostalgic. Along with Ford Motor, which has been less battered by the recession, the 100-year-old GM has long been a red, white, and blue institution. Its Chevrolet unit, in fact, had a hit jingle in the 1970s with the refrain "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet," that sought to identify the things Americans liked best.
So we took a tour of GM's photo archives and came up with this somewhat arbitrary showing of automotive designs from the company's heyday in the broad middle of the 20th century, before the first oil crisis and the surging presence of Japanese imports on U.S. roadways. We'll start here with a "market segmentation price ladder" of GM models from 1925: Cadillac sedan, Chevrolet touring, Pontiac coupe (first year), Buick touring, and Oldsmobile sedan.
The 1927 Cadillac LaSalle Roadster meets Charles Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis airplane. The '27 LaSalle, GM says, was the first production vehicle conjured up by a professional designer--in this case, the legendary Harley Earl, whom the company had just brought on board from Hollywood, where he'd been customizing cars for the stars.
British automotive journalist Giles Chapman had this to say about the significance of GM's design efforts, in an interview Monday on Public Radio International's The World program:
"I think you can safely say that General Motors invented car design, because in 1926 they opened up a department called the Art and Colour department, and that was really the first time that they had actually decided to expend some attention on how cars looked as opposed to the design of the car underneath its metal. So that is something they brought to the entire global car industry. And that's what their success was founded on, being absolutely brilliant at that. We think of something like the 1959 Cadillac with those gigantic fins, or the '63 Corvette Sting Ray with the split rear window. They were the result of years and years of trying to create spectacular automobiles."
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