Capsule Review: 2015 VW Saveiro CD Highline (Double Cab – Brazilian Market)

The car-based small pickup market was launched in Brazil by Fiat during the 1980s. Taking a 147 as its base, the Italians cut out the back seats, added a bed, beefed up the suspension and called it good. The market deemed it so, and soon, there was a whole new segment gracing Brazil's roads, with Fiat's Strada dominating the segment. Since that time, nearly every challenger has been vanquished by the Strada's unquestionable longevity – except for Volkswagen's Saveiro.

According to VW do Brasil, the Saveiro is now the market leader in single and extended cab configurations. It has sold roughly 40,000 units up until the middle of the year while Fiat sold roughly twice that. Volkswagen says half of Strada sales were of the double cab line. So finally VW reacted and launched its own double cab (the Strada's arrived in 2009).  Its take on this style of small pick up is different from Fiat's. As of 10 months ago, the Strada now comes with three doors, which of course (in theory) helps entry. The Volkswagen offers just two. Getting in the car and reclining the seat, I wiggle my 6 foot, 220 lb  frame into the back seat.

Nice surprise. While the Strada seats just four, the Saveiro does it for five. There are three headrests and three point seat belts only for those who sit off to the sides. The middle passenger, besides fighting for space, has to make do with a lap belt. Space is larger than in the Strada, though I wouldn't want to be there with two friends for more than short jaunts. The rear side windows open by popping out, while the back window is fixed. There are two cupholders and even an auxiliary jack and a compartment under the seats. Some thought was indeed put into it.

Getting into the front and sitting in the driver's seat, the whole ambience is very typically Volkswagen. That means a sober, almost boring layout, hard but well assembled plastics, monotone decorations and lots of unmarked plastic covers where commands for optional equipment would be. All in all it is an ambience I don't especially admire or find pleasure in being, while I can appreciate why others do. The seat is placed a little low, and the dashboard quite high leading to that sunken feeling that many nowadays equate with safety. What's safer than driving a tank, right? As such, it's good the Saveiro CD comes with parking sensors. That way you won't smash the bed into anything.

Speaking of the bed, it has been reduced to 1.1 m in length and capacity is now 580L. The spare has been placed under the bed. Just to compare, the Strada has a volume 100L greater and can carry 50 more kilos (650 to the Saveiro's 600). Though short, it is longer than the Strada's and offers 10 tie-down points, a number its rival can't touch.

The Saveiro Double Cab offers two engines. Both are 1.6L. One however has 8v while the other 16. The 16v is new and corrals 110 or 120 ponies (depending of fuel chosen, the first figure for Brazilian gasoline, the second for Brazilian ethanol) while the simpler mill makes do with 101 or 104 horsepower. While this output is relatively low, the multi-valve engine pulls well and vibrates less than the old one. Pulling power is steady and its capacity to rev higher makes it more comfortable to drive at high speeds on the highway. Top speed is 179 km/h, almost 10 more than the 8 valve unit. It has been on the market for a while now, and so far has not shown the same propensity of the old unit of going kaput at very low mileage. Keeping fingers crossed, one can hope Volkswagen do Brasil has finally figured out what kind of oil is needed to lubricate its 1.6 L motors.

Finally, and exclusively for its segment, the new engine also makes do without an auxiliary start up tank. In low temperatures, cars running on ethanol can have trouble firing. To avoid this, most cars here come with an extra tank you must fill with gasoline to aid firing. The new engine dispenses with this, aiding comfort and safety as there is no need for the extra tank, usually placed in the engine bay.

The Saveiro Highline comes with the 1.6 16v. I chose to drive it as I'm well acquainted with the 8v unit. It really helps the experience and makes the car that more enjoyable. Faster than ever, the little pickup has always been a handful to drive at high speeds with an empty bed. So much so that cars like these are known as caminito al cielo (road to heaven) in some South American markets. This time around VW has endowed the picape with stability control but only on the top-level Cross trim. Lower trim level buyers will have to be wary and drive with special care trying to make it around bends. While very sure-footed and planted in a straight line, the driver must not forget he is in a pickup and not a car. The bed will try to find the front of the car if the driver abuses it.

All double cab Saveiros come with disc brakes all around. Stopping power is of course enhanced, and emergency braking is done without drama. It helps that the Saveiro offers EBD throughout the Double Cab line. It's very interesting how Brazilian cars are getting more equipped. Besides the mandatory airbags and ABS, the pickup comes with a hill holder function and special programming that allows VW to claim an off road traction launcher (depending on trim level). The Germans also claim their ABS and EBD have special programming offering better braking in muddy conditions. All of this was not present in the car I drove. For now, these are reserved for the pseudo-adventure Cross trim line.

The steering is precise as in most VW cars. In the city it's not the lightest out there, but on the highway it beefs up nicely. Being a hydraulic unit, it offers more feedback than electric setups. The car comes with a manual 5-speed gearbox that remains among the best in Brazil. Its short and precise throws are better than the competitions and it can shift fast and true. Better yet, this time around the thumping noises of its engagement have been largely avoided.

I enjoyed this little truck. Pressure is now on Fiat to improve its Strada. Volkwagen pricing is in line with Fiat's, but always offers just a bit more content. The drive is certainly modern and the use of an interdependent axle with longitudinal arms and springs in the back make it a less jumpy vehicle than the Strada. While the engine in the VW is smaller than the Strada's 1.8, 16v, 132hp unit, it makes the car almost as fast and more economic, plus smoother than Fiat's. Pulling power is aided by the hill holder function while the Strada has more torque. The Saveiro is now on par with the Strada and it will be interesting to be seen whether it will fulfill Volkswagen do Brasil's prediction of taking over first place from the Strada. Though that will be a tough, uphill battle, the Saveiro now has what it takes.

 

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Bill Mitchell’s Swan Song: The Phantom

Since it was the last design of consequence that General Motors design chief Bill Mitchell oversaw, Wayne Kady's 1980 Cadillac Seville is thought by some to be the ultimate expression of Mitchell's design philosophy. No doubt Mitchell was a fan of what he called the "London look", and the '80 Seville had that in spades: a classic vertical grille, a bustle shaped rear end, a raked C pillar and a long hood. When accused of borrowing the bustle-back from a contemporary Lincoln, Mitchell reportedly got indignant and said that he stole it from Rolls-Royce, not the cross-town competition in Dearborn. However, while Mitchell went to bat for the controversial Seville design over the objections of Cadillac management, the Seville was not the ultimate expression of his personal taste.

Full gallery here.

That ultimate expression can instead be seen in a car that never made it to production and in fact was treated a bit like a step-child by GM brass. While the Seville's razor sharp edges are justifiably associated with Mitchell, something that distinguished GM cars in the 1960s from what Michael Lamm calls Harley Earl's "Rubenesque" ethos of the mid to late 1950s, the fact is that Mitchell loved the sweeping and elegant look of cars from the late 1930s. The first two cars that he oversaw at GM were the 1938 Cadillac Sixty Special and the 1941 Cadillac. Neither of those cars has a single creased edge.

1980 Cadillac Seville

His favorite cars were the custom Silver Arrow Buick Rivieras that he had personalized for his own use, and while there are some of Mitchell's sharp edges on the Rivieras, particularly the first generation car, in profile the Rivs, most noticeably the boat-tailed versions, evoke the sweeping lines of cars from decades earlier.

Full gallery here.

Mitchell's ultimate statement as a car designer would be the 1977 Phantom, a large, fastback two-seat coupe built atop a Pontiac Grand Prix chassis. Though the Phantom has some sharp edges, its proportions, flowing lines and exposed wheel wells  go back to the era of those Cadillacs that Mitchell designed in the late 1930s. Though some have speculated that the Phantom ended up in Mitchell's possession as some sort of severance payment upon his retirement, while GM designers were indeed known to use one-off concept and show cars as their personal drivers, the Phantom never had a drivetrain. It still exists, but perhaps in line with its history the Phantom is almost hidden away in the corner of a museum.

This 1967 rendering by Wayne Kady of a hypothetical V16 powered Cadillac prefigures both the 1980 Seville and Bill Mitchell's Phantom of 1977.

By 1977, Mitchell was a bit of an anachronism, a man with a Mad Men mentality in an era while Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinam were raising women's consciousness, someone who could order a half dozen hookers for lunch and send out an underling to the bank to get the Benjamins to pay them. GM's design and engineering teams had just created what would be their last masterpieces for decades, the downsized 1977 fullsize sedans, the first American cars designed from scratch to deal with more expensive gasoline, the result of the 1973 oil crisis. The new Chevy Impala, for example, was 700 lbs lighter, smaller in every exterior dimension, yet had more interior room and more cargo capacity than the land yachts it replaced. Those cars would be GM's high point for years, as they were almost immediately followed by the disastrous X-cars, the Chevy Citation and it's badge engineered siblings.

Full gallery here.

Bill Mitchell was not a man for downsizing. Not a small man himself, for his last personal design Mitchell opted for something that was not smaller, lighter nor more space efficient. It was his idea of a modern classic and his hope for the direction that GM design would take after his retirement. However, by 1977, Mitchell had been with the company for four decades and many of his contemporaries (and advocates) were long gone.

A styling show was planned for the GM board at the proving grounds and Mitchell had the Phantom shipped out to Milford on the sly, hoping to surprise the board of directors as well as some of the GM executives like Howard Kehrl, executive vice president in charge of the product planning and technical staffs. Kehrl wasn't as well known and certainly not as flamboyant as Mitchell, but the engineer had risen up through the ranks and by the late 1970s, with many of Mitchell's allies retired, Kehrl held more power in the corporation. Having been on the receiving end of Mitchell's legendary foul mouth, Kehrl was in no mood for one of Mitchell's power plays. He spotted the Phantom being prepared for display and ordered it off the grounds immediately. Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Mitchell reportedly fumed, but the lion was roaring in winter. Later that year Mitchell retired from GM and opened up his own design studio in suburban Detroit. He died in 1988.

By 1977, times had changed. In a 1979 interview he told Corvette historian Michael B. Antonick, "You know,  years ago when you went into an auto styling department, you found sweeps…racks of them. Now they design [cars] with a T-square and a triangle."

Even the designers who had risen through GM's design studios under Mitchell to positions of power themselves realized that times had passed the designer by. Jerry Hirschberg, who later would head Nissan design, is quoted by Michael Lamm as saying, ""As the years passed, Mitchell's rather narrow biases and hardening vision limited GM styling. He was fighting old battles and withdrawing increasingly from a world that was being redefined by consumerism, Naderism and an emerging consciousness of the environment."

George Moon, a senior interior designer at GM reflected on Mitchell at the end of his career: "Bill Mitchell ruled over GM Design Staff during its most creative, most exciting years in corporate history. No matter his mood, his manner, his style—he gave the place a verve and an excitement it never had before or since. He brought out the best creative energies from all of us, and he oversaw the design of the greatest diversity of cars ever produced.

"Bill couldn't have survived in today's arena: too many rules, too many handcuffs, committees and bosses. Nor could today's corporation tolerate Mitchell's flamboyance, impertinences, ego and lifestyle. He was his own man, flawed and gifted, crude and creative. You had to love him or hate him, but no one in America could ignore him."

Mitchell seemed to have understood that times had passed him by. Even his internal code name for the Phantom, "Madame X" evoked a bygone era. Concerning the Phantom he later said, "Realizing that with the energy crisis and other considerations, the glamour car would not be around for long. I wanted to leave a memory at General Motors of the kind of cars I love".

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Though his power had ebbed, Mitchell was still a legend at General Motors. Perhaps out of consideration for Mitchell's indelible role in GM history, unlike many concepts the Phantom wasn't destroyed, and while it's not in a place of honor in GM's Heritage Center, the company's private car museum, the automaker has either donated or loaned it to Flint's Sloan Museum where you can see it in their Buick Gallery.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

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Sunday Story: “100MPG Carburetor” by Jack Baruth

Strictly speaking, there was no reason for Ashley to attend old Frank Jacobsen's retirement party. She'd been part of the department for all of five months and she'd spent most of the time doing the other engineers' paperwork. It was true what they told her in school: To be a female engineer, particularly in Detroit, you need to be twice as good as the men. Over and over she found mistakes that were childishly stupid; over and over they patted her on the head, praised her in an email, and gave the next important assignment to some charmless nerd.

Frank had been the exception. More than once he'd called her over to his desk, eschewing the usual Sametime or chat bullshit that the young guys liked to do in place of actual work, and asked her for what he called her "professional opinion."

"Now, Miss McCormick, I was wondering if you would examine this set of drawings and render your professional opinion." And when she pointed out a way to re-radius something for materials savings or change the spacing for the comfort of a future mechanic, Frank would make the change and then credit her in the next meeting. He was an okay guy, Frank was. And given the way things were going in this business, when was the next chance she'd have to see someone actually retire?

With that in mind, it wasn't that tough of a decision to pay a sitter and head to the old Radisson where they were actually doing the thing. Problem was, the first sitter bailed on her and the second one needed to take a bus so by the time she got there they'd already handed Frank a certificate and everybody had already said what they came to say and the room was sad, alcohol-smelling and seedy in its recessionary disrepair. The strivers and shovers from the department were gone and everybody left was older than the small-block Chevy, leaning back in the threadbare stackable chairs, age spots on their faces and trembling hands clutching the red party cups.

"Well, if it isn't Miss McCormick, the beauty queen of this once-great department!" That was Frank, and he rose on unsteady legs and clutched her in an embrace that smelled distinctly of her long-dead father. "Without you, it was not a party. Now sit down with us and we will tell you a couple of stories about what it meant to be the best God-dammed car company on the globe! Everyone! Raise a glass!" A few cups were halfheartedly lifted. So this was how it was going to be. Ashley texted the sitter, poured one finger of Maker's Mark into a cup, and sat down with what she was hoping was non-obvious resignation.

Four hours later, it was just her, Frank, and the second-oldest guy in the department, Alvin Banks. She was still mostly sober but the men were slurring their speech and starting to demonstrate a decidedly non-retired interest in her V-neck top.

"She's gorgeous, Banks, you have to admit it," Frank laughed, leering without shame and tossing back yet another shot. "Women engineers. Why couldn't we have thought of that in 1972? We thought of everything else. Young lady," he growled, pointing a grubby finger at her decolletage by way of hugely creepy emphasis, "we invented so much shit they had to lock some of it up. Banks here knows what I'm talking about, right, Banks?"

"We ain't gonna talk about that one, Frank." Alvin seemed very sober all of a sudden.

"Yes we are, Banks. This is my last day as an employee of this corporation and I want someone to know what I did." Alvin put a hand on Frank's arm but the old man shook it off, angrily. "I'm telling her and you can't stop me. Probably," Frank said with emphasis, "you don't really want to."

"I got three more years to put in, Frank, you know that."

"Well then, shove off and let me talk to my date, you old bastard." Alvin gave Ashley the what can I do? shrug before standing up and striding towards the door.

"I got to piss anyway."

"Piss off, you mean. Now, young lady, listen here." He put his hand on Ashley's bare arm and she shuddered for just a moment but Frank didn't seem to notice or care. "Forty years ago I was the smartest man here and everybody knew it. What I wanted, I got. And what I wanted was an instrumented tank in which I could produce a near vacuum and I wanted enough fucking mainframe time to plot a thousand NORAD scenarios and I got all of it, do you understand? Because I had an idea."

"Frank, I know you're smart, you—"

"I'm not done, God damn it. I saw what the Japs were doing with their CVCC and I had some ideas beyond that. I came up with a system that used high negative pressure to produce extraordinarily lean combustion ratios. After a month, I had a box the size of a washing machine that did what I wanted. After four months, the box was the size of a shoebox. And on the bench, using a long-stroke V-6 I cobbled together, it returned a projected eighty-five miles per gallon in conditions modeled on what became the '77 mid-sizer. Do you understand me?" Ashley's mouth was hanging open and she finally remembered to shut it before opening it again to speak.

"The 100MPG carburetor. It's —"

"Real, Ashley. It's real. But what every whack job and book-depository conspiracy moron didn't realize was this. Yes, the company killed it and reassigned me. But not because of any grand scheme to fuck the public. It was a matter of practicality. My device required that the size of the vac chamber be precisely controlled at all times, within a hundredth of a cubic centimeter. I handled this by running all the calculations over the course of forty-five days on the mainframe and then using a series of mechanically adjusted stops that I built, like a ticker tape. And the precision needed for the adjustable chamber was only achievable at the time through careful and individual construction. It was only useful for driving conditions that would be known to the split second months ahead of time. They took my research and warned me not to talk about it again because your average man on the street, or average politician in Washington, would be too stupid to realize that you can't predict throttle applications one second into the future, much less months ahead. But now…" Ashley couldn't help but interrupt him.

"Now, it can be done in realtime, and we can use CAD to make every chamber just like the others." Frank smiled and suddenly he didn't seem very drunk either.

"Good girl. Tomorrow, when you go to work, I want you to take this key —" and just like that, it was in her hand, hot from being hidden in his — "and open the lower right-hand drawer. You'll find two manila folders with everything you need to know. Ashley, everybody who knew about this is dead or gone. I don't require credit, I don't require money, and I don't even want a night with that fabulous body of yours, I'm an engineer by trade and I know when the materials are insufficient to the application. I want you to show those young punks what real engineering looks like, alright?" Then he stood, turned from her, and walked away without another word.

For ten minutes, maybe longer, Ashley sat alone in the conference room, holding the key, the hot rush of thoughts in her head too much to hold back. She had no doubt that Frank was serious, that he was right. The problem was figuring out how to reproduce the work and own the solution entirely on her own. She didn't rate anything beyond a PC and an Ethernet jack at work. But she still had room on her credit card. She could buy a multi-core desktop, install SolidWorks, do as much as she could, claim that she had a "feeling" about it, and then have someone else do the flow calc. Or she could… Christ, she could patent it herself. She didn't need to show it to anyone at work. She could go directly to an OEM or supplier. She could make millions. Tens of millions. Her whole life would change tomorrow.

No, it would change tonight. She couldn't wait until tomorrow and her badge would get her in the building tonight and she wanted those documents in her hand. She'd call in sick tomorrow and spend the day scanning everything and getting it into the cloud, just in case.

One more text to the sitter as she ran to the parking lot. Twenty frantic minutes on the road, tapping out a nameless rhythm on the wheel of the old compact car she'd bought while she was still in school, then running to the door, badging in, running upstairs, key in hand unlocks not that drawer but the one below it and —

Two manila folders, hoary and fragile with age, loaded with drawings, bills of materials, hundreds of pages in Frank's block writing and blue-mimeogaphed papers from a Selectric II. She took it all, ran back to the car, placed it in the passenger seat, started up, and headed for home.

Coming off the freeway, she hit a big pothole that didn't show in the old headlights and there was sudden silence as the ignition switch twisted in its broken housing and shut off. The road went dark ahead and she stepped on the brake pedal with both feet and screamed but when her windshield hit the back of the Wal-Mart truck she was still doing a solid forty-five and although the fire didn't start for another two seconds or so her head was already sitting in the back seat by then. The tank caught and burned steady, cooking the back of the trailer, sending a hundred thousand charred bits of paper into the night sky in a perfect vortex, ephermeral fireflies in a twisting column of smoke, burning embers consuming and disappearing, until nothing was left.

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Corvette Museum Will Fill Sinkhole

After much discussion regarding the merits of repairing the sinkhole that struck the Corvette Museum in February, and keeping in mind the seventy-percent boost in foot traffic afterwards, the facility has announced that it will be repairing the sinkhole, and restoring three of the eight cars damaged in the event, this November.

The NCM announced on its blog that the sinkhole will be filled-in after a November "Vets and Vettes" event.

Keeping even a portion of the sinkhole would require 35 foot retaining walls to be built inside of the sinkhole, additional micro piling, visible steel beams running through the hole, and soil nailing. All of these additional structural features are to ensure the safety of the sinkhole and prevent cracking and breaking of the sides in the future, which could result in stability issues, but take away from the natural look of the original sinkhole. The board also considered future maintenance issues that could arise if the hole was kept and the possibility that the hole wouldn't look like a naturally occurring sinkhole any longer.

General Motors will be contributing approximately $250,000 to the repair of the sinkhole and the restoration of three Corvettes. The Blue Devil ZR1 prototype and the 1992 "millionth" Corvette will be restored by GM Heritage, while the NCM will restore the '62 Corvette using GM funding. The other five will be left as-is in a special display.

Now's the time to get to the NCM and see these cars — I know I'm going to.

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2015 Ferrari California T First Drive: Turbocharged with a Capital T

Five years ago, if you'd asked Ferrari engineers why they didn't use turbochargers, you probably would've gotten colorful responses involving a lot of suggestive hand gestures. With very few exceptions (F40), forced induction used to be blasphemous in Maranello—not enough aural emotion. READ MORE ››

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VW’s Karmann Ghia Was a 5/8ths Scale Chrysler

1968 VW Karmann Ghia. Full gallery here.

With a German-Italian name like Karmann Ghia it may surprise you that the little coupe/roadster built on the Volkwagen Type I (aka Beetle) chassis had its origins not on the continent but rather a few thousand miles west of Europe, in Detroit, of all places. By the early 1950s, the postwar Volkswagen company was getting on its feet and had expanded their lineup to include the Ben Pons inspired Type II aka Transporter aka Bus and a cabriolet version of the Beetle, built by the German coachbuilder Karmann. That company's director, Dr. Wilhelm Karmann, had tried to increase his business with VW but management in Wolfsburg was less than receptive to his suggestions for variants of the Beetle. Karmann turned to Ghia to see if a collaboration would be more successful. Corrozzeria Ghia's Mario Boano and Luigi Segre had already done some consulting for VW, though the company was about as accepting of their ideas as it was with Karmann's.

1970 VW Karman Ghia cabriolet. Full gallery here.

Not much earlier, Boano's son, Gian Paolo, had bought a VW Type I in Paris and drove it back to Italy. In Turin, Ghia's workers removed the Beetle's sedan body and over the next five months they handcrafted a handsome coupe that looked much more sporting than the Beetle (in reality, the Karmann Ghia was slower than the Beetle, all that fine coachbuilding meant that the coupe weighed about 200 lbs more than the Type I sedan). In November of 1953, the prototype of what would become the Karmann Ghia was examined at the Karmann works in Osnabruck by top VW managers including managing director Heinz Nordhoff, the man generally credited with building the modern VW company out of the ruins of war. Nordhoff and his team liked what they saw.

Full gallery here.

By 1953, Ghia had a well established relationship with Chrysler and their head of advanced styling, Virgil Exner Sr. That relationship was started when C.B. Thomas, the head of Chrysler's export unit, set up a competition in 1950 between Pinin Farina's styling house and Ghia to build their respective takes on a future Plymouth sedan. Pinin Farina pretty much built the car as designed, but Ghia added their own sense of style.  Chrysler executives were impressed with the quality of the workmanship and Ghia's added styling touches. Even more impressive was the fact that Ghia's price of $10,000/car was a fraction of what it would have cost to have the car fabricated in Detroit, either by UAW labor in-house or by independent fabricators. Italy was still rebuilding after World War II and labor was cheap there. Ghia would go on to build a series of well known and well received show and concept cars for Chrysler in the 1950s and into the 1960s.

1970 Karmann Ghia coupe. Full gallery here.

The Chrysler-Ghia concepts can be roughly divided into two groups, the first five cars that were mainly designed in Highland Park at Chrysler headquarters and the later cars that had more Ghia influence. The early "Exner Ghia" cars were the K-310, the C-200 convertible, and the fastback SS (for Styling Special), which Thomas liked so much that he ordered another one for himself in notchback form that is known as the Thomas Special. Chrysler's French distributor may have liked it even more than Thomas and commissioned Ghia to build up to 400 similar cars called the the GS-1 (some sources say fewer than a dozen were actually built). Ghia also liked Exner's Special because they licensed the design and built 36 Chrysler Specials, one of which is in the collection of the Walter P. Chrysler Museum.

Chrysler Special. Full gallery here.

Exner's vision was getting clarified. The DeSoto Adventurer continued Exner's themes though Ghia is said to have reshaped the fender lines. He borrowed the long hood, short rear deck, close-coupled coupe layout from the classic European grand tourers, and, contrary to the trends in Detroit in the '50s, he used chrome trim sparingly. The European influence on Exner would become recursive through the next car Ghia built for him.

Chrysler D'Elegance. Photos courtesy of RM Auctions.

The Chrysler D'Elegance of 1953 summed up the design philosophy of Exner in those days. A sleek car, it has a beautifully shaped greenhouse with delicate A pillars and graceful C pillars. A character line sweeps back across the D'Elegance's lower flank from just behind the front wheel arch, eventually rising into the fender bulge over the rear tire. It may have been influenced by European touring cars but the D'Elegance was still unmistakably American, with bright red metallic paint, gun-sight taillights and trick show car features. The rear deck had one of Exner's signature styling touches, the profile of the spare tire embossed in the metal, Ex's distinctive and graceful interpretation of the "continental kit".

1957 Mercury

If your familiarity with the continental kit is mainly due to the 1956 Ford Thunderbird, that was a particularly nice application of the concept. Many of the other cars with that modification, whether factory or aftermarket, ended up extending the rear bumper out to make room for the spare and its case. The results were awkward and inelegant, albeit popular. Exner's idea to move the spare tire cover up onto the trunk lid allowed him to keep both the look of a spare tire carrier and the lines of the car. In the case of the D'Elegance it was a functional spare cover, which lifted up to allow the spare tire to be lowered to the ground with a hydraulic mechanism.

The D'Elegance had a Hemi in it, the original 331 cubic inch FirePower Hemi V8 with 180 hp. It also featured power windows and power steering, two luxury features in those days. The D'Elegance also featured power brakes, the Ausco-Lambert self-energizing disc brake system that had been offered on the top of the line Town & Country Chrysler and the Crown Imperial.

By the time the D'Elegance was fabricated, Exner and the Ghia stylists had an established working relationship that eventually had ideas going back and forth across the Atlantic. Clay models in 3/8ths scale would be shipped to Turin, where Ghia stylists like Giovanni Savonuzzi would scale up the rendering, often adding their own touches. The response to the D'Elegance when it hit the auto show circuit, debuting at the 1952 Paris auto salon, was so positive that Chrysler executives told Ghia to tool up for a short production run of 40 cars. However, the Korean War was going on and before it was completed the order was cut to 25 D'Elegances. That left Ghia with some unused capacity and its stylists with time on their hands. That's when Boano and Segre made the little VW coupe to Savonuzzi's designs.

1972 VW Karmann Ghia coupe. Full gallery here.

Not only did cutting short the D'Elegance project give Ghia the opportunity to develop what became the Karmann Ghia, the D'Elegance donated its styling to the little VW sports car.

Virgil Exner Jr., an accomplished car designer in his own right, visited Ghia's shop in Turin at his father's behest in 1955, the year the Karmann Ghia went on sale. Though some automotive historians on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean think that Ghia's stylists were just applying the same theme to different cars, not directly copying Exner's work, both Exners, per et fil, thought otherwise. Exner Jr. is quoted in Chrysler Concept Cars 1940-1970 (Fetherston & Thacker, Car Tech Books) as saying that the Karmann Ghia "was a direct, intentional swipe off the Chrysler D'Elegance. Givanni Savonuzzi was the engineer and designer who downsized the D'Elegance and made the Karmann Ghia out of it. Nobody minded it. It was wonderful."  Exner Jr. would later work as a design consultant for Ghia, where he had a role in Karmann Ghia history.

1972 VW Karmann Ghia cabriolet. Full gallery here.

In 1961, Volkswagen introduced the Type 34 Karmann Ghia, based on the Type 3 with the "pancake" engine. With a design headed by Ghia engineer Sergio Sartorelli, the shape of the Type 34 has nothing to do with the Chrysler D'Elegance or Virgil Exner (well, maybe a little bit as you'll see later). If you ask me, it may have been influenced by the Chevrolet Corvair and an obscure AMC concept drawing by designer George Lawson called the CUDA. The Type 34 was known as "Der Große Karmann" [the Big Karmann] in Germany, the "Razor Edge Ghia" in the United Kingdom, and the "European Ghia" in the United States. It was expensive, twice the cost of the Beetle, it sold less than 10% of the numbers of the original Karmann Ghia, and it went out of production in 1969, outlasted by the original as well. Type 34s are very rare in the U.S. Interestingly, one of the cars that Virgil Exner Jr. worked on while at Ghia was the Type 34.

1972 VW Karmann Ghia cabriolet. Full gallery here.

The Type 34 may have had nothing to do with the D'Elegance, but similarities between the Chrysler show car and the original Karmann Ghia, particularly in profile, are hard to ignore. The shape of the greenhouse and C pillars and the character line along the lower body sweeping up into the rear fender bulge are just about identical, though the front end treatments are different. The air-cooled, rear-engine Karmann Ghia didn't need the D'Elegance's large radiator grille. Also, Savonuzzi got rid of Exner's inset headlights (whose own influence can be seen on the modern Chrysler 300 cars – the "Bentley" grille on current Chryslers can also be traced back to the early Exner-Ghia cars), moving them to the front of the fenders.  I personally prefer Savonuzzi's front end to Exner's. It's a cleaner look, even if it reminds me a little of some Studebakers.

Type 34 Karmann Ghia. Full gallery here.

Producing Ghia's coupe meant just adding a new "top hat" to the Beetle's platform chassis (platform as in a flat surface, not platform in the modern sense of a car's hard points), giving the company a new, sporty model with few engineering resources needed to develop it. Nordhoff embraced the idea and as Dr. Karmann had hoped VW gave his company the production contract. The Karmann Ghia would be in production from 1955 to 1974. Perhaps one reason why it stayed in production so long was because of one of those family squabbles that periodically flare up between Volkswagen and Porsche.

Type 34 Karmann Ghia. Full gallery here.

In the 1960s, though they were separate companies, per Wikipedia, VW and Porsche had an agreement where the sports car maker was responsible for much of the technical development of Volkswagen cars. Under the direction of Ferdinand Piech, Porsche started developing a mid-engine car with a Targa roof. The original plan was to sell 4 cylinder models as VWs and 6 cylinder models as Porsches, replacing the Karmann Ghia at VW and the entry level 4 cylinder 911 marketed as the 912. Porsche decided that it would hurt its brand in America if a car with the same body was sold as a VW so the car was called the Porsche 914 here and the Volkwagen-Porsche 914 in Europe. Soon after the prototype was presented Heinz Nordhoff died and his successor, Kurt Lotz didn't have the ties to the Porsche family that Nordhoff had. Upset that Porsche wouldn't share in tooling costs Lotz ended the development agreement with Porsche. VW was still obligated to build the 914, but by then costs made it an impractical replacement for the Karmann Ghia. The Type 34 had never sold more than 5,000 units in a year so when that was discontinued the original Karmann Ghia stayed in production, produced the same way it had been since 1955.

Porsche 914. Full gallery here.

Assembled and mechanically complete Type I chassis were shipped from the main VW factory at Wolfsburn to Osnabruck. Workers at the Karmann works made and painted the bodies, mounted them to the chassis, and completed assembly, installing the interior and trimming out the cars. Finished Karmann Ghias were then shipped back to Wolfsburg for distribution and export.

VW do Brasil's Type 1600 TC, by Giugiaro

Quite a few of those exports made it to the United States. Virgil Exner Sr. is reported to have been "delighted" every time he saw a Karmann Ghia on the road. That's understandable if you think about the fact that car designers rather like it when a design of theirs makes it to production. While there were short production runs of some of the Exner-Ghia cars, their numbers were nothing like the 445,238 Karmann Ghias that were built by Karmann, plus about 42,000 Type 34 cars. Another 23,402 Karmann Ghias were assembled by VW do Brasil, along with the Type 1600 TC (or Touring Coupe), attributed to Giorgetto Giugiaro.

The Karmann Ghias (and Porsche 914) pictured here were photographed at the 2014 Vintage Volkswagen Show in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS

The post VW's Karmann Ghia Was a 5/8ths Scale Chrysler appeared first on The Truth About Cars.

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