LaSalle 1933 to 1934 Redesign

The focus of this post is the redesigned 1934 LaSalle (Wikipedia entry for the brand is here).  But instead of dealing with its design features, I try to put it in the context of 1933-34 carryover details for it and its parent brand Cadillac.  In addition, the 1934 LaSalle is compared to two other General Motors makes, Oldsmobile and Buick for reasons made evident below.

GM Art & Colour boss Harley Earl oversaw the new LaSalle design, but the stylist mostly responsible for its looks was Jules Agramonte.

Now some further background on LaSalle's 1934 redesign from an article by stylist/historian Jeff Godshall in the May/June 1971 issue of Special-Interest Autos (page 43):

By 1933, "La Salle had failed to get established despite its early success.  What looked right in 1927 turned out to be very wrong by 1933, so that year GM brass handed down the decision to discontinue the La Salle....

"Hearing this, Harley Earl went before the management committee and told them that he still had something  to show them.  While his exact words are not recorded, Earl said that as long as they had killed the La Salle, perhaps they would like to see what they had thrown away.  He then led them to the Art and Colour Section viewing room and pulled the drapes, and there stood the stunning new La Salle design for 1934 -- the slim-nosed, radically different (for the time) body that was to give La Salle a new 7-year lease on life.  Warren Fitzgerald of GM Styling asserts, 'It can honestly be said that Harley Earl saved the La Salle with his dramatic new design.'

"The Series 350 ushered in both a new car and a new direction for La Salle.  Management decided that La Salle had gotten too close to Cadillac in size and price.  Remedy: put La Salle into a different [that is, mid-price] market entirely."

Out went its V-8 motor, replaced by a Straight 8 from Oldsmobile.  In came other changes to achieve the the new market niche.  The Wikipedia entry linked above mentions that "Beginning with the 1934 model year, a significant portion of the LaSalle was more closely related to the Oldsmobile, than to Senior Cadillacs."

Comparing 1934 price ranges, the LaSalle, now with a 119-in (3,023 mm) wheelbase sold for $1,595-$1,695.  The Oldsmobile series with the same wheelbase had a $895-$995 price range, and Buicks with that wheelbase were priced $1,110-$1,230.  However, the price range for the entire Buick line was $795-$2,175.  The lowest-price Cadillac line that year with 8-cylinder motors and 128-inch (3,251 mm) wheelbases were set at $2,545-$2,695.  LaSalle was GM's most expensive car for its wheelbase, but one could buy a 128-in wheelbase Buick for about the same price, $1,465-$1,675.  So LaSalle was in a tricky marketing situation armed mostly by its new styling.

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1933 Cadillac V-12 4-door sedan, Hyman Ltd. photo.

1934 Cadillac Coupe, Hyman Ltd. photo.  Although the body was new, Earl saw to it that the 1933 grille theme was carried over to the 1934 models.

1933 LaSalle Convertible Coupe, Auctions America photo.  LaSalle's grille theme is close to that of Cadillac.

1934 LaSalle sedan for sale.  The Cadillac-related grille theme -- fine vertical background bars, a stronger central vertical bar and five stronger horizontal bars -- remains.  But the drastic narrowing of the hood and grille opening largely obscures this continuity.  Note the shared front fender design: lesser GM brands got more traditional fenders for 1934.

1934 Oldsmobile 2-door, RM Sotheby's photo.  Although LaSalle got an Oldsmobile motor and some other engineering details, the brands were stylistically distinct.

1934 Buick Series 60 3-Window Coupe, Mecum photo.  This is the same body type as shown below for the 1934 LaSalle, though on a Series 60 128-inch wheelbase.  This car sold for about the same price as that LaSalle, but even though it was longer, its styling was less advanced and far less exciting.

1934 LaSalle coupe, photo source unknown.  Both the LaSalle and Buick coupes have the same basic body as the '34 Cadillac shown earlier.

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General Motors' C Body Cars: 1941 Facelifts

In my post dealing with General Motors' new C body designs for the 1940 model year, I stressed that styling was inadequately modernized.

To summarize: Most American closed-car designs in the period approximately 1934-1940 were awkward.  In part, this was because body and production engineering could not evolve rapidly enough to deliver sleek streamline-influenced designs stylists were capable of dreaming up.  For the 1940 model year, General Motors finally produced attractive closed cars in the form of its redesigned C platform.  But while these cars were attractive abaft of the front axle line, their front end styling seemed a little more dated.

This changed when GMs C body lines were facelifted for 1941.  An important factor was integration of headlights into front fenders, something GM was slow to do apparently because Engineering had objections.  The other improvement component was grille design.  Grilles for 1941 (with one possible exception) were much better matched to the rest of the styling.

Below are comparative images of 1940 and 1941 frontal designs.  Missing is a comparison for 1940 LaSalles because that brand was dropped at the end of the 1940 model year.

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Pontiac front end styling was greatly improved over the too-delicate 1940 design seen in the Mecum photo.  All fenders took on a squared-off "suitcase" motif with side ribbing.  Headlights are essentially blended into the fenders, though are still placed inboard of the fender sides.  The front of the hood has been flattened slightly to blend with the rest of the flattened face of the car.

Oldsmobile grilles retain all the 1940 element themes for '41 but are made bolder, as can be seen in this likely "for sale" photo.  Aside from the reworked headlights, Olds frontal styling is the least-changed of the lot.  A fussy design.  Unlike Pontiacs, sheet metal is almost unchanged.

Buick headlights were completely integrated, unlike those on Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles.  Better yet, they were placed near the sides of the reshaped fenders as seen in the for sale image.  The grille is now horizontal, not the equivocating '40 outline.  Grille bars are larger, adding strength to the design.

Cadillac faces for 1940 were strongly old-school, whereas the '41s received a classic design that set the theme for many decades of future Cadillacs.    The upper photo is from RM Sotheby's, the lower is a for sale photo.  Front fenders and the hood were less curved, headlights were integrated and placed outboard.  Note the fender crease that notionally passes through the headlight center and whose line becomes the upper edge of the grille.  I rank the 1941 Cadillac design as the best ever for that marque.

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General Motors' C Body Cars for 1940

General Motors is usually considered the American styling leader through the 1930s and for many years beyond (due in part to its market dominance).  But that doesn't mean that GM designs were attractive.  My view is that most American car designs for closed cars from around 1934 to about 1940 were awkward.  That was because of the shift from boxy-yet-functional pre-1934 styling to streamlining-cum-component-integrating designs during that period.  This change required changes in body engineering and production technology that took time to be mastered.  Hence, awkwardness.

But GM's new C body introduced for the 1940 model year shed most of the kind of awkwardness just mentioned, though it wasn't until 1941 everything fell into place.  That is, the basic body design was attractive, but brand-identification details carried over from previous years along with passé headlight assembly forms held back the styling promise of the new body until those elements were better integrated.

Below are examples of 1940 C body cars from Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, LaSalle and Cadillac (no Chevrolets got the new C bodies that year).

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Here is a 1940 Pontiac Torpedo Coupe (Pontiac marketers labeled C body Pontiacs "Torpedo").  Ignore everything from the front axle line forward and you'll see the attractive, not-awkward styling.  The only archaic detail in this zone is the exposed running board that got covered in 1941.  The partly integrated head lights and Buick-like grille detract from the overall appearance.

GM marketers made heavy use of retouch artists in part because newsprint reproduction quality was comparatively poor in those days.  This worked-over photo shows the aft end of a 4-door C body Pontiac.

Side view of a 1940 Oldsmobile 90 sedan via Barrett-Jackson.  Styling is basically rounded, but not nearly as heavy-looking as before.  This is due to the thinner top and well-integrated trunk.  Front fenders are more blended into the rest of the body than on the other brands with C bodies.

And here is a side view of the Buick Roadmaster.  Note the longer trunk.

Buick Super, the next level down from the Roadmaster also got C bodies.  Note how the windshield divider line carries into a slight crease on the roof panel.  Again, the front end styling strikes me as being slightly at odds with the rest of the car.  Grille orientation is neither horizontal nor vertical, and the headlights are not quite integrated or separate.  Call all this "hesitant" or "ambiguous" or to put it most kindly, "transitional."

I find the LaSalle in this "for sale" photo the most attractive 1940 C body car even though it shares the same headlight problem as the others.

Side view of a 1940 Cadillac 62 Coupe from RM Sotheby's.  Cadillac's headlight housings remained discrete entities perched on the catwalk between the front fenders and the hood/grille assembly.  This was drastically improved the next year.

Barrett-Jackson photo showing rear 3/4 of a 62 four-door sedan.  The rear elements are nicely composed, whereas the front fenders are of the more squared-off "suitcase" variety.  The separate headlight assembly can be glimpsed here.

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General Motors' Companion Cars (2): Oldsmobile and Viking

This is the second in a series of posts dealing with General Motors' companion brands launched during the late 1920s.  The first post can be found here.

As I stated in the introductory post, a major factor in the rise of General Motors during the 1920s was Alfred P. Sloan's establishment of a price-prestige hierarchy for GM's various brands.  Over the 50 years from 1941 to 1991, when the Saturn brand appeared, the hierarchy from low to high was Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac.  But during the late 1920s so-called "companion" brands were introduced to fill what seemed to be price gaps in GM's line.  In 1930 the hierarchy was approximately (there was price overlapping in a number of cases): Chevrolet, Pontiac, Marquette, Oldsmobile, Oakland, Viking, Buick, LaSalle, and Cadillac.

The least-successful companion brand in terms of sales was Oldsmobile's Viking.  As noted in the Viking link, it was the only companion make priced higher than its established companion line.  Vikings were built for model years 1929 and 1930, but a few leftover 1930 cars were marketed as 1931 models.  The Wikipedia link has total Viking production as 7224 units.

Below are comparisons of 1929 and 1930 Oldsmobiles and Vikings.

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The top photo is a "for sale" image of a '29 Olds, the lower is of a Viking for that year.  Oldsmobiles all had six cylinder motors, whereas Vikings had V-8 engines and longer hoods that would have been necessary were the motors straight-eights instead.  Perhaps the greater length was to indicate Viking's higher price (and, GM hoped, prestige) than mere Oldsmobiles.  Other differences were in the headlight mountings (for some models), crank cap (below the grille), and tops of the grille frames -- Viking's badge is set off more distinctly than Oldsmobile's.

The situation was essentially the same for 1930.

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1941: Harley Earl's Very Good Year

I am not alone when I claim that the 1941 model year was the best for General Motors' styling chief Harley Earl, though I think 1949 comes close.  Several designs were outstanding and the others were very good -- all this in the context of their times.

The 1930s were a time when designs evolved from largely angular bodies and assemblages of many discrete parts (fenders, headlights, running boards, spare tires, etc.) to smoothed styles where most of the formerly discrete parts were largely blended into aerodynamically-influenced ("streamlined") compositions.  Between those points, a good many awkward designs were marketed by GM and the rest of the industry.  For General Motors, 1941 models were safely beyond that, as stylists and body engineers were now comfortable with with the new concepts.

GM had three basic bodies for 1941, but they were fairly similar.  Most attention was paid to using ornamentation as brand identification.  Each brand had its own theme (with one exception), and those themes were distinctive.  The exception was entry-level Chevrolet, which was given a grille similar to that of the upper-middle brand Buick.

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Buick Sedanette - Hyman Auctions photo

Cadillac - for sale photo
My favorite year for Cadillac, and a design that established brand identification indicators for decades to come.

Chevrolet Special DeLuxe Club Coupe - RM Sotheby's photo

Oldsmobile 98 Club Coupe - Auctions America Photo

Pontiac - for sale photo
I am partial to '41 Pontiacs because my father owned one (a model not nearly as sleek as the one pictured here).

Here is the 1941 LaSalle that never entered production. The image is part of page 46 from Automobile Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2001.  This would have made for a very fine production design.  Sadly, a Cadillac model was substituted.  (LaSalle was a "companion car" to Cadillac -- companion brands being a late 1920s GM experiment.)

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Richard Howard Stout's Fascinating Article on 1950 GM B and C Bodies

A magazine I truly loved, especially when Michael Lamm edited it, was Special-Interest Autos, published by the Hemmings organization.   Here on the Hemmings web site is a complete index of SIA articles, some of which have links, and other do not.

Those that are linked are where the Hemmings Daily posts SIA Flashbacks.  This is a fine feature since SIA is long gone, yet its content is often pure gold for automobile history buffs.  One article yet to appear on the Internet is from SIA #39 titled "Body Politics" by Richard Howard Stout.  The title seems a bit misleading because it goes into great detail regarding how General Motors B and C body elements in the early 1950s could be arranged and rearranged to yield designs with different impacts.  I found this fascinating, and I think it should be of great interest to readers of this blog.  Especially helpful are the fine illustrations by Harry Bradley.

By the mid-1950s Stout was working at Ford Motor Company and created presentation material largely like that in the article.  It opened management eyes to ways of making better use of body resources.  A byproduct of this revelation (that's what it was) was aiding people who were pushing a concept that resulted in the Edsel brand.

A big problem for me is that, even though the article appeared more than 40 years ago, it is surely still under copyright.  Yet due to its importance (as I see it) I'll risk presenting scans of it below in the hope that Hemmings will see fit to post their own, better scans on their site in the near future.

Be aware that if Hemmings asks me to delete this post, I will do so.

The images below can be enlarged, but the scan quality is such that the text can be hard to read in places.

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Concept to Production: Oldsmobile to Dodge ?!?

The 1992 Oldsmobile Anthem was a concept car that is little known today and was not very noteworthy in its time.  Supporting this contention, there are few Internet links dealing with it.

I came across an image of it while researching another Oldsmobile concept car and was struck by how closely its design theme reminded me of early 1990s Chrysler Corporation LH automobiles, especially the Dodge Intrepid that first appeared as a 1993 model.

Many concept cars are thinly disguised versions of soon-to-appear production models.  But the Anthem seems like a case where one company's concept car previewed another company's production job.

I don't think that's what happened intentionally.  But still ...

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1992 Oldsmobile Anthem side view.

1993 Dodge Intrepid side view.  The cars seem most similar when seen from the side.  The greenhouse fenestration is strikingly similar, minor details aside.  Even the front and rear designs are fairly close, though the Intrepid has more overhang.  Note the relationships of the backlights (rear windows) to the rear wheel openings.  Especially note how the rooftop interacts with the C-pillar on both cars.

Anthem front.

Intrepid front.  Concept car grilles often differ from production versions, so we see that here.  But the headlight housings are similar in spirit.

Rear view of the Anthem.

Rear 3/4 view of an Intrepid.  Again, differences can be expected here.  The quality of the Anthem image is poor in the area of the backlight, but the trunk/backlight design is not far from the Intrepid's.

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Concept to Production: Alpha Alero to Oldsmobile Alero

Some concept cars are pure fantasies intended to keep styling staff juices flowing.  Back in the 1950s, they were appropriately called "dream cars."  In recent decades, many concept cars displayed on the auto show circuit are thinly disguised versions of cars due to be marketed in another year or two.  One reason for their existence is to condition the buying public to new design features.  Another might be to get the buying public's negative reactions to details that might be easily modified in the months before introduction of the production car.

Currently, both concept cars and production cars usually are, in my opinion, overly-decorated in terms of both body sculpting and angular, sometimes spikey shapes for grilles, headlight and tail light assemblies, and even window profiles.  With all that happening, sometimes it can be difficult to evaluate differences between the styling of a concept car and the production car it is intended to "predict."

Back in the late 1990s, General Motors' styling emphasized shape rather than ornamentation.  Because of this comparative (to present times) simplicity, I though it might be interesting to examine the Oldsmobile Alero, introduced for 1998 and how it differed from the 1997 Alero Alpha concept car that previewed it.

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A 1998 Oldsmobile Alero coupe.

Side view of the Alpha.  Although it differs from the Alero in every detail -- especially note the front overhang -- the two designs are clearly related in spirit.  Examples include the side window shapes, the trunk area's relationship to the curve of the top, the side parts of the tail lights, and the sense of the fender line (despite the Alpha's stubbier nose).

Alero front end treatment.

Here the Alpha is much closer to the production Alero.  Details of the hood cut, the headlight assembly outline, the shapes of the three openings below the bumper strike panel, the strike panel itself -- all differ, but not greatly.

This frontal theme was already in place for Oldsmobile in the form of its Aurora sedan introduced in the spring of 1994.

In turn, the Aurora's front design evolved from a 1989 concept  called the Tube Car.

Rear 3/4 view of a 2000 Alero.

The Alpha's rear design is close to that of the production car above the bumper -- note the shapes of the tail lights and license plate zone.  Sub-bumper styling differs considerably.  For what it's worth the Alpha's gas cap is on the left side, whereas the Alero's is one the right.

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