His Career was on the Move > 자유게시판

The 1959 Cadillac Cyclone was the last "dream car" created during Harley Earl's tenure as General Motors's vice president of design. Compact but flamboyant, the Cyclone marked the end of an era and capped a career that started with Earl's being brought to Detroit in 1926 to design the new LaSalle and resulted in the establishment of styling as a discipline as integral to the car business as engineering or sales. Earl had spent his professional life trying to make cars look longer and lower. He came to the attention of GM after first becoming known in Hollywood for racy roadsters and elegant limousines built by his father's Earl Carriage Works for members of the wealthy and growing movie colony., decided to sell due to ill health. Lee put the younger Earl in charge of the shop, and exotic creations began flowing out on expensive deluxe chassis such as Packard, Pierce-Arrow, Rolls-Royce, and, of course, Cadillac.

Lawrence P. Fisher, president and general manager of Cadillac, himself a young man with young ideas, was aware of the growing trend in Europe toward style over utility. Meanwhile, at home, he saw increasing competition from makes like Packard, whose styling was dominant at that time. Fisher was impressed with Earl's designs and asked him to come to Detroit to submit a proposal for the upcoming LaSalle. The rest is history, as they say, Prime Boosts for his proposal was accepted and he stayed through the car's introduction. This name was carefully chosen to avoid causing concern in the engineering departments, Click here whose job it had always been to specify and draw the boxes that had previously passed for automobile bodies. It would be a slow and deliberate process to separate design from engineering, but with successes like the Cadillac V-12 and V-16 in 1930, Prime Boosts and the Aerodynamic designs of 1933, Harley Earl secured his position of dominance and proved his worth to the corporation.

For more information on the 1959 Cadillac Cyclone classic car, continue on to the next page. As a natural outgrowth of this, it occurred to him that a tangible embodiment of ideas, a sort of "dream car," would not only be fun to drive around in, but could measure public opinion and give stature to his department. This was the first step in the creation of the 1959 Cadillac Cyclone dream car. Packard's design chief, Ed Macauley, drove a futuristic boat-tailed speedster that was continually updated throughout this period. Earl may have felt it was time for him to make a statement of his own. His career was on the move, General Motors was on the move, and in the close-knit fraternity of automotive Detroit, what you drove up in showed that you had arrived in more ways than one. Built as a two-place convertible on a Buick chassis, it predicted many features that would be found on Buicks of the future.

From this simple beginning, a dream car program involving all General Motors makes eventually developed. Soon enough after the Y-Job's arrival, the grim claw of world war came to include the United States in its grip and the auto industry's attention was diverted to the production of armaments. It wouldn't be until 1951 that GM would next peer into the future with two more dream cars, the LeSabre and the Buick XP-300. A parallel development to this return to idea cars was the rise of the Motorama, GM's series of spectacular car shows held in select cities intermittently between 1949 and 1961. The Motoramas became great forums for dangling dazzling concepts before the car-buying public. Dream cars became an eagerly anticipated part of the show. Among the stars of the 1959 edition was the Cadillac Cyclone. For more information on the 1959 Cadillac Cyclone classic car, continue on to the next page. To realize that vision, he enlisted the talents of veteran designer Carl Renner, who recalled his role in the project (coded XP-74) in an interview in the May 1997 issue of Collectible Automobile.