Every time a properly ‘vintage’ car appears in these pages, a colleague remarks: “The problem with old cars is they all look exactly the same.” Even as Autocar’s biggest history nerd, I find this difficult to totally refute, genre of car aside. All had that same in-sweeping bonnet, terminating in a vertically oblong grille between two high-mounted, circular headlights, flanked always at the front and often at the rear by separate wings over the wheels. So when did this stop being the case?
You might propose the point when aerodynamics crossed over from the aeronautical industry and the resultant ‘streamliners’. But the main thing that makes those cars look (relatively) modern is their wheels being situated within their bodies – and those developments weren’t mutually exclusive.
The first streamliner to…
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Autocar (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 13, 2024