Interesting site, like the fact that you can look by year. I was able to locate the Lancia Stratos HF Zero concept car. I remember the incredible response it got when it came out in 1970. It's so low to the ground they were able to drive it under the entrance gate to Lancia!
There's a YouTuber, Casey Putsch, who runs Genius Garage (offering on hands experience for students) and he's building an almost exact replica. In this video he tells how he's risking burnout and how it's kicking his butt to replicate the car.
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!
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.
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.
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!
It's weird to me that even as BMW styling goes off the rails in general, literally (practically) everyone has redone their interiors to imitate BMW. Next years' Honda Civic, for example.
Conversely, BMW replaced the 2 series with a FWD car that looks incredibly like a Kia Forte to me.
I'm sure they did focus groups and nobody actually knows which wheels drive their car. But I am unable to stop noticing the proportions of FWD vs. RWD in where the front wheel wells are located relative to the doors.
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.
> 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
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.
Great work! I was going to ask if there is any specific reason you stopped at 1976, but I see from your About page that you plan to go further. I reckon that Italian car design peaked in the mid-80s, so it would be cool to reach 1990 or so. Afterwards there were some interesting designs in mass-produced cars but the top range is fairly bland (with Lambos just being Lambos).
Yes exactly, Italian design studios peaked in the '60s. So there is still some really cool stuff in the '80s but starting from the '90s car companies start relying more on their in-house design teams and less on external design studios
In Seattle, there's a weekly get together of exotic cars at the Redmond Town Center. They have a list of makes and models of acceptable cars you can bring, that fit their definition. There's a gatekeeper at the entrance to keep the riff-raff out.
Under "Ferrari" it says "any model". Haha
I love how Ferrari has totally won the marketing game.
It's probably more fair to say that as far as "exotic" brands go, Ferrari has never deviated and produced a boring sedan or suv based no some other companies car.
Maseratti, Porsche, and Lamborghini are good examples of companies that make supercars that also make some pretty pedestrian models. To make it worse, those are usually built on an existing car platform from another manufacturer. Not to say those cars are bad, they just don't belong at an exotic car meet.
The Masseratti Ghibli, the Porsche Macan/Cayenne and whatever the Lambo SUV is called all fit this mold.
Indeed. I guess it's one of the problems of becoming a public company - numbers gotta go up and up... It's supposed to be on sale in 2022 but I expect Covid will delay it a bit, the entire factory was shut for months last year.
I know a couple of people with supercars of one sort or another, and they'll argue about how they accelerate faster than a Ferrari, corner better than a Ferrari, etc.
I'll just say "but it's not a Ferrari."
And they say, "sigh, I know."
Ferrari has amazing marketing.
I remember a tire ad in the 80's that went like:
Q: "Why do all Ferraris come with Pirelli tires?"
A: "Because Enzo Ferrari wants it that way."
Yeah, they kinda are the Apple of the supercar world, with a reality-distortion field to boot. The color alone is a triumph of branding for the ages. McLaren is currently trying to do it with orange, but it's just not the same...
Including Bertone's design study of the already existing Mustang (which was designed internally at Ford) is quite misleading without clarifying, and I wonder how much else also omits information.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHPqe4khs90&t=94s
There's a YouTuber, Casey Putsch, who runs Genius Garage (offering on hands experience for students) and he's building an almost exact replica. In this video he tells how he's risking burnout and how it's kicking his butt to replicate the car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbVgJ7zQhIA&t=4s