Among the automotive eras ripe for ridicule, a close second to the Seventies would have to be the Fifties. Postwar belt-loosening in the United States had, by the latter half of the 1950s, turned into an all-out bacchanal of chrome, fins, gizmos, multi-tone paint, and girth. And just as in any other time of excess, satirists leveled their pens at the trend with the aim, perhaps, of deflating it a little bit.
While most automotive designers of the mid-century period took themselves deadly serious, as we can see from our OldCarRenderings Tumblog – even when penning flights of futuristic fancy that had no hope of leaping from drawing board to real-life – Milwaukee-based industrial designer Brooks Stevens at least injected a little humor into his renderings. His most recognized satire rendering, above, titled “The Detroit Dilemma or ‘The Battle of the Bulge,’” managed to skewer just about every one of the Detroit Big Three by tacking together all the excess of the mid-Fifties into one design. There’s chrome gravel shields, chrome trim, chrome spears, chrome hood ornaments, chrome wheelcovers, big chrome bumpers, chrome fins, septuple-tone (or maybe octa-tone) paint, wraparound glass, and more. Funny enough, the rendering is dated January 1955 and so pre-dates the height of Fifties fin excess; just imagine what Stevens made of the cars of the latter two years of the 1950s.
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We’re sure there’s more such satirical takes on automotive design, whether concerning the mid-Fifties or other eras.

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