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Italian Car Design History

cardesignhistory.com

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Re: Italian Car Design History

#11

Post by perl4ever »

What I thought of when I saw this was not the bodywork of Italian cars, but the rest of the engineering that you don't see until you look underneath.

I was really struck by the chassis of, for instance, 90s Ferraris, when I first saw a picture. They look so primitive, like something from the 60s or earlier, compared to a vehicle made by one of the big Japanese or American companies.

My impression is that until recently, the really prestigious brands that made super expensive cars were paradoxically impoverished themselves, so had to make severe tradeoffs in engineering and development. The only way to compensate was by racing and making beautiful sheet metal. I watched a Doug DeMuro video on an 80s Lamborghini and up close, it was just weird, almost like a kit car.

Nowadays, Ferrari is an expanding public company, and probably suppliers can give small car makers parts that are more on the level of the big companies.

I assume that Lamborghini no longer has to use Nissan headlights due to lack of resources to develop their own.

Re: Italian Car Design History

#12

Post by King-Aaron »

perl4ever wrote: post #11

What I thought of when I saw this was not the bodywork of Italian cars, but the rest of the engineering that you don't see until you look underneath. I was really struck by the chassis of, for instance, 90s Ferraris, when I first saw a picture. They look so primitive, like something from the 60s or earlier, compared to a vehicle made by one of the big Japanese or American companies. My impression is that until recent…

> I assume that Lamborghini no longer has to use Nissan headlights due to lack of resources to develop their own.

Note on this, Lamborghini is now owned by the Volkswagen/Audi Group, so while they don't use nissan parts any more, basically every component bears a VW or Audi logo

Re: Italian Car Design History

#13

Post by perl4ever »

jibbit wrote: post #4

I’ve long wanted something like this. I’m fascinated where the common elements of contemporary car design come from. Why does every car have a hard lateral crease? When did it originate? It wasn’t on early cars or carriages. I look forward to studying this carefully

Creases seem to me to suggest the way cloth folds or ripples, or possibly muscles. Both of which were features of sculpture before cars.

There's also the sharpish edges of air intakes, or fake intakes, due to the association with race cars and fast motorcycles. Sometimes creases make intakes look more integrated in the body.

For a reason, well, people used to complain about contemporary (when that meant 90s) cars being blobby or ovoid. The survival of exotic car companies probably depended on being strikingly attractive and different from mainstream cars. I assume that when you say "hard lateral crease" you would agree that a late 90s Ford Taurus, or a Porsche 928 did not have one.

I think the air intakes are overdone these days and don't like fake ones any more than tailfins. There's something wrong when even the top of the line trim doesn't have all of the intakes functional.

Re: Italian Car Design History

#14

Post by bellyfullofbac »

perl4ever wrote: post #13
jibbit wrote: post #4

I’ve long wanted something like this. I’m fascinated where the common elements of contemporary car design come from. Why does every car have a hard lateral crease? When did it originate? It wasn’t on early cars or carriages. I look forward to studying this carefully

Creases seem to me to suggest the way cloth folds or ripples, or possibly muscles. Both of which were features of sculpture before cars. There's also the sharpish edges of air intakes, or fake intakes, due to the association with race cars and fast motorcycles. Sometimes creases make intakes look more integrated in the body. For a reason, well, people used to complain about contemporary (when that meant 90s) cars bei…

I think the BMW chief designer has had a stroke, he keeps insisting on putting massive front grilles to the front of his car, he must think they look attractive!

Re: Italian Car Design History

#15

Post by smackeyacky »

perl4ever wrote: post #11

What I thought of when I saw this was not the bodywork of Italian cars, but the rest of the engineering that you don't see until you look underneath. I was really struck by the chassis of, for instance, 90s Ferraris, when I first saw a picture. They look so primitive, like something from the 60s or earlier, compared to a vehicle made by one of the big Japanese or American companies. My impression is that until recent…

It was pretty common in the 1960s, 70s and 80s for the supercar makers to freely use parts from Alfa Romeo or Lancia or Fiat. Door handles, switches, rear view mirrors, vent outlets, headlights, interior lights, sometimes even tail lights and indicators although these were sometimes disguised. The door handles on a Dino were designed for the Alfa Spider.

Its only in the relative recent past that Ferrari or Lamborghini created their own minor bits and pieces.

One thing that highlights for me was just how stylish prosaic Italian cars could be. Nobody would ever want to reuse a door handle from a Ford Fairmont for anything, but Alfetta door handles ended up on exotica.

You are hard pressed to guess which country modern cars are designed in, but it used to be easy to tell.

Re: Italian Car Design History

#17

Post by syx »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #2

It's Italian car design history. But it's really just a bunch of confusing bubbles that makes me feel slightly dizzy. Not so dissimilar to some of the cars actually!

when you use the filter at the bottom is actually not that confusing as when you see all the makers together

Re: Italian Car Design History

#18

Post by kuu »

objektif wrote: post #9
porphyra wrote: post #7

It would be interesting to visualize trends by clustering car designs using t-SNE or similar methods on neural network embeddings.

What do you mean by neural network embeddings?

Not OP but I think I can explain it:

A NN embedding (simplified) would be:

Input -> some Layers -> Final layer of size N -> Output

The trick here is to teach the NN to output the same as the input; so if the NN has to learn to emit what is on the input, it has to learn to extract intermediate representations that allow it to reconstruct the input; in this way, on the "final layer of size N" you have a representation of the input (otherwise you cannot obtain the output equal as input).

With that N you can now represent them in a N-dimensional space.

Imagine we have an input of size 20 but choose N=2 for that layer, then we train the NN, and we pass it a new sample, with that we have obtained a 2D representation of a 20D data.

Of course this approach has limitations and it's not going to have 100% acc in many cases, as by reducing dimension you may lose information too.

I hope the example is clear

Re: Italian Car Design History

#19

Post by WalterBright »

perl4ever wrote: post #13
jibbit wrote: post #4

I’ve long wanted something like this. I’m fascinated where the common elements of contemporary car design come from. Why does every car have a hard lateral crease? When did it originate? It wasn’t on early cars or carriages. I look forward to studying this carefully

Creases seem to me to suggest the way cloth folds or ripples, or possibly muscles. Both of which were features of sculpture before cars. There's also the sharpish edges of air intakes, or fake intakes, due to the association with race cars and fast motorcycles. Sometimes creases make intakes look more integrated in the body. For a reason, well, people used to complain about contemporary (when that meant 90s) cars bei…

I hated tailfins when they were common, and love them now that they're gone. But I saw one at the supermarket last week, and the owner carefully and lovingly drove it away.

The Jetsons look in the early 60's is also way cool.

Re: Italian Car Design History

#20

Post by WalterBright »

perl4ever wrote: post #11

What I thought of when I saw this was not the bodywork of Italian cars, but the rest of the engineering that you don't see until you look underneath. I was really struck by the chassis of, for instance, 90s Ferraris, when I first saw a picture. They look so primitive, like something from the 60s or earlier, compared to a vehicle made by one of the big Japanese or American companies. My impression is that until recent…

Ferraris had cheap interiors, as all the money was spent on the engine. Not a bad tradeoff, who buys a Ferrari for the carpets?
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