Automobile design or car design is the design of automobiles. A small variety of cars, the most popular kind of automobile. ...

The design of modern cars is typically handled by designers (aka stylists), engineers and modellers. A company's design director may still take responsibility for the whole car. Design of the suspension, the engine, the transmission, the styling, the crash protection, the electronics, the interior, and the production engineering of the car are tasks that are often separated.

In the USA automotive design reached a turning point in 1924, when the American national automobile market began reaching saturation. To maintain unit sales, General Motors head Alfred P. Sloan Jr. devised annual model-year design changes, to convince car owners that they needed to buy a new replacement each year. Critics called his strategy planned obsolescence. Sloan preferred the term "dynamic obsolescence". This strategy had far-reaching effects on the auto business, the field of product design, and eventually the American economy. The smaller players could not maintain the pace and expense of yearly re-styling. Henry Ford did not like the model-year change, and because he clung to an engineer's notions of simplicity, economics of scale, and design integrity, GM surpassed Ford's sales in 1931 and became the dominant player in the industry thereafter. The frequent design changes also made it necessary to use a body-on-frame rather than the lighter, but less flexible monocoque design used by most European car makers. General Motors Corporation NYSE: GM, also known as GM, is a United States-based automobile maker with worldwide operations and brands including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Vauxhall. ... This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ... Time Magazine, January 14, 1935 Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Henry Ford Motor Company which later became Cadillac and Ford Motor Company. ... Body-on-frame is an automobile construction technology. ... Monocoque (French for single shell) or unibody is a construction technique that uses the external skin of an object to support some or most of the load on the structure. ...

Another turning point came in 1935, when automotive engineers abruptly dropped aerodynamic research when they discovered that, among other problems, aerodynamics would tend to produce one single optimal exterior shape. This would be bad for unit sales, and for GM it would obviously work against their new strategy of market differentiation. Style and engineering went their separate ways, and all body shapes underwent plastic surgery every year, whether or not the underlying automobile had changed. Aerodynamics is a branch of fluid dynamics concerned with the study of gas flows, first analysed by George Cayley in the 1800s. ...

Since 1935 automotive form has been driven more by consumer expectations than by engineering improvement. Form still follows function, but the primary function of the car was to get itself sold. The notable exception in the American market was the postwar appearance of the imported Volkswagen Beetle. VW represented a surprising experiment in product-driven design integrity: one body shape that remained constant from year to year, parts interchangeable from year to year, and that stability made it possible to make incremental technical improvements with a cumulative effect. Volkswagen [literally: peoples car] (also known as VW) is an automobile manufacturer based in Wolfsburg, Germany. ... Suborders Adephaga Archostemata Myxophaga Polyphaga See subgroups of the order Coleoptera Beetles are one of the main groups of insects. ...

The most famous auto stylist is probably Harley Earl, who brought the tailfin and other aeronautical design references to auto design in the 1950s. Harley J. Earl (November 22, 1893–April 10, 1969) was an automotive stylist and engineer and industrial designer. ... The height of the tailfin era; the 1959 Cadillac. ...

See Category:automobile designers for a list of automobile designers and automotive design for Automotive design. Automotive design (auto self motive motivation) aka: styling, car design, vehicle design, transportation design) is a profession involved in the creation of vehicles. ...

External links

• cardesignnews.com The leading online resource for automotive design
• Freelance Automotive Design Independent automotive design and engineering