The 1927 Cadillac LaSalle Roadster meets Charles Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis airplane. The '27 LaSalle, GM says, was the first production vehicle conjured up by a professional designer--in this case, the legendary Harley Earl, whom the company had just brought on board from Hollywood, where he'd been customizing cars for the stars.
British automotive journalist Giles Chapman had this to say about the significance of GM's design efforts, in an interview Monday on Public Radio International's The World program:
"I think you can safely say that General Motors invented car design, because in 1926 they opened up a department called the Art and Colour department, and that was really the first time that they had actually decided to expend some attention on how cars looked as opposed to the design of the car underneath its metal. So that is something they brought to the entire global car industry. And that's what their success was founded on, being absolutely brilliant at that. We think of something like the 1959 Cadillac with those gigantic fins, or the '63 Corvette Sting Ray with the split rear window. They were the result of years and years of trying to create spectacular automobiles."
Photo by © GM Corp.
Caption by Jonathan Skillings
