30 times US design influenced European cars

Stateside style

In the history of motoring, car design has evolved from individuals attempting to put everything in the right order to a mostly global activity, with influences being generated and taken up across the world.

Somewhere in the middle, the trend was more one-directional, because features were often invented in the US and then picked up by manufacturers in Europe.

This was particularly true in cases where the European brand was American-owned, though as we’ll see it also happened when there was no such business connection.

The tendency was particularly noticeable from 1930 to 1970, so here are 30 examples from that period, arranged in chronological order.

1. 1932 Ford Model Y

The first Ford created specifically for Europe wasn’t just influenced by the Americans, it was actually designed by them.

In an unusual case of influence going in both directions at the same time, small British cars were sent to Ford HQ in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Model 19 (as it was originally known) was crafted as a potential rival, and shipped across the Atlantic in prototype form in 1931.

The American version of a type of car which must have seemed very foreign to its creators in the US was a huge success in the UK, saving Ford’s British outpost from imminent financial collapse.

The Model Y was built not only in Dagenham but by other Ford subsidiaries in France and Spain, and also in Germany, where it was known as the Köln.

2. 1935 Peugeot 402

The outstanding styling feature of the Peugeot 402 was the placement of its headlights behind the radiator grille.

Also used on the slightly later 202 and 302, but not copied by any other major manufacturer, this was so strange that it’s difficult to pay much attention to anything else.

However, if you can drag your eyes away from the unusual lighting arrangement, and ignore the prominent chin and lack of running boards, you’ll see that the 402’s body shape is very similar to that of the much larger 1934 Chrysler Airflow.

The Airflow is rightly hailed as one of the first mainstream cars whose body was designed on aerodynamic principles, but the 402 shows that Peugeot was either thinking along remarkably similar lines or paying very close attention to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

3. 1935 Volvo PV36 Carioca

Volvo insists that its streamlined Carioca model was not a copy of the Chrysler Airflow, but there’s strong evidence that it had American influence all the same.

The key figure here is the car’s designer, Ivan Örnberg, who joined Volvo in 1931 after working for Hupp in Detroit.

Hupp was almost certainly thinking about streamlining while Örnberg was still there, since it put an aerodynamic Hupmobile on sale in the 1934 model year.

Both the PV36 Carioca and, to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Volvo’s very odd-looking Venus Bilo concept of 1933 resemble the Raymond Loewy-designed Hupmobile.

The shape of the Venus Bilo is credited to Gustaf Ericsson rather than to Örnberg, who was nevertheless definitely on the premises when it was being created.

4. 1947 Renault 4CV

In the early 1940s, all the Big Three US manufacturers were producing cars with high-domed bonnets and very large, curved front wings which housed the headlights.

From 1942, the shape of the Chevrolet Fleetline’s wings extended beyond the items themselves and well into the front doors, a feature which, like the others mentioned, was taken up by several European car makers after the Second World War.

Renault, not usually influenced by American styling, took all this on board with its first post-war model, the 4CV, sold in the UK initially as the 760 and later as the 750.

The original 4CV prototype, built in 1942, had absolutely none of the above, but it had all been added by the time production started five years later, along with non-functional horizontal metal strips which hinted (anachronistically, since the engine was mounted at the rear) at US-style chrome radiator grilles.

5. 1947 Volvo PV444

Volvo says now that ‘American styling influenced the appearance’ of the PV444, and it’s clear that the company’s designers were aware of the early 1940s US models.

The bonnet line and the bulbous front wings are familiar, though Volvo did not (as Vauxhall would also refrain from doing) extend the shape of the wings as far back as the doors.

The suggestion can be made – and in fact we’ll be making it shortly – that a lot of European cars launched at around this time looked very similar, but despite the acknowledged American inspiration, the Volvo was still very distinctive, particularly at the front.

The 444 was replaced by the PV544 in 1958, but as far as its styling was concerned, this was really just the same car with larger front and rear windows.

6. 1948 Morris Oxford

Morris used Oxford as a model name more or less continuously from 1913 to 1971.

The generation produced from 1948 to 1954 was the first with unibody construction, and following contemporary fashion its design had a lot in common with that of the Chevrolet Fleetline, and indeed the Renault 4CV.

Unlike the Renault, the Oxford was front-engined, so it had a real radiator grille which, thanks to liberal use of chrome, added to the American-style look.

By the mid 1950s, that look had become old-fashioned, and the next Oxford, with a now-trendy straight-sided ponton body, had very little visual connection with the car it replaced.

7. 1948 Peugeot 203

In what must now be sounding like a familiar story, the 203 was Peugeot’s first model introduced after the Second World War, and the first with unibody construction.

Once again, the American cars introduced before the US entered the conflict exerted an influence – the domed bonnet was there, as were the front wings whose shape continued into the doors.

The 203 was available in several body styles, but the saloon is notable for its fastback-like tail, which was similar to a design used for some versions of the influential Chevy Fleetline.

Unusually, Peugeot continued producing the 203 without major styling changes all the way until 1960, by which time the other European manufacturers had long since moved on to more modern designs.

8. 1948 Vauxhall Wyvern

Of all the European manufacturers, it’s perhaps least surprising that Vauxhall adopted the early 1940s American look for the cars it introduced later in the decade.

David Jones, head of styling from 1937 to 1971, joined the company in 1934, and spent some of his early career in Detroit, where he worked with the almost legendary Harley Earl.

Both the Wyvern and its larger-engined equivalent, the Velox, followed the US-influenced trend, though Jones and his team diverted from normal practice by ensuring that the front wing line did not, this time, extend as far back as the doors.

In complete contrast to Peugeot, Vauxhall abandoned the fashionable design very quickly – the new and entirely different-looking Wyvern and Velox were on the market as early as 1951.

9. 1950 Ford Zephyr/Consul

According to motoring author Eric Dymock, Ford’s UK operation was transformed ‘almost overnight’ in 1950 into ‘a design-conscious, avant-garde fashion house’.

The Consul and Zephyr (the latter with a longer nose to accommodate its straight-six engine) looked completely different from recent British Fords, all of which had an air of the late 1930s about them.

These ponton-style cars looked remarkably similar to the 1949 Ford full-size model range in the US, though their bonnet lines were much flatter, they had far less chrome and even the Zephyr was considerably shorter.

Both models, and the upmarket Zodiac (pictured) which came along later, were replaced in 1956 by similarly American-looking versions featuring the hooded headlights which Ford had already adopted for some of its US models.

10. 1951 Morris Minor

Like the Peugeot 402, the Minor as launched in 1948 looks strange to us now because of the placement of its headlights.

These were mounted unusually low down, on either side of the radiator grille.

In 1951, the year before Morris was merged with Austin to form the British Motor Corporation and the Minor was substantially re-engineered, they were raised more or less to the top of the front wings, where they remained until production ended 20 years later.

The body, essentially a scaled-down version of the one used for the 1948 Morris Oxford, remained the same, but the repositioned lights made it much more obvious that it had been inspired by the American cars of the early 1940s.

11. 1956 Volvo Amazon

Jan Wilsgaard, who designed many Volvos, has been quoted as saying that the Amazon was inspired by a Kaiser he saw just after it had been shipped from the US to Sweden.

He didn’t specify the exact model, though there is persuasive speculation that it might have been a Henry J, which was produced from 1950 to 1954.

Whatever the inspirational car might have been, one of Wilsgaard’s first Volvo projects, the Philip concept (built in 1952, when Wilsgaard was 22 years old) does show some general Kaiser influence.

However, the front end of the Amazon bears a much closer resemblance to that of the 1955 Chrysler C-300 (the first of the 300 letter series, known retrospectively as the 300A), and, to a slightly less extent, that of the Chrysler New Yorker from the same year.

12. 1957 Ford Taunus P2

The P2 was known in Germany as the Barocktaunus, or ‘baroque Taunus’, due to its extravagant styling.

This included a flamboyant dividing line along each side, copied almost exactly from Ford’s 1955 range in the US and with, in more expensive versions, different paint colours above and below.

There was also a ‘hooded headlight’ effect, though this was achieved, not by cowls or anything of that sort, but by the fact that the P2’s front panel was angled slightly forward.

Finally, both the saloon and the estate had tailfins, which had recently come into (and would soon go out of) fashion in North America, and were not used for any other generation of Taunus.

13. 1957 Vauxhall Cresta

The PA-generation Cresta (and the Velox, which was basically the same car with less standard equipment) had a distinctively American look, previewed by the Cadillac Park Avenue concept displayed at the 1954 GM Motorama event in New York.

In terms of its design, the Park Avenue was the common ancestor of the Cresta/Velox and the second-generation Chevrolet Bel Air, which made its debut in the 1955 model year.

All three had tailfins, a wraparound windscreen and whitewall tyres, though Vauxhall did not, as Chevrolet did, retain the concept’s partial enclosure of the rear wheels.

The brands went their own way with the design of the tailfins (Vauxhall’s being by far the sharpest), and the Cresta/Velox also had significantly more prominent headlights than either of the American vehicles.

14. 1958 Auto Union Sp 1000

The 1000 was a close relative of the DKW Sonderklasse, but with a larger version of that car’s three-cylinder two-stroke engine.

In most of its forms it could be described as charmingly dumpy, but the Sp two-seater, available as either a roadster or a coupé, was inspired by the first-generation Ford Thunderbird launched in the 1955 model year.

The influence was slightly hidden at the front because, unlike the T-bird, the Auto Union did not have hooded headlights.

At the rear, the resemblance was far closer, the main difference being that the little German car’s tailfins were angled outwards rather than standing nearly vertical.

15. 1958 GAZ Chaika

Despite occasional differences of opinion between Russia and the US, luxury cars built in the former have often resembled those built in the latter.

A case in point is the Chaika (Russian for ‘seagull’) produced by GAZ in the city known then as Gorky but today as Nizhny Novgorod.

The Chaika looked remarkably similar to Packards of the late 1950s – most notably the Patrician, though some commentators have pointed out a resemblance to the smaller Clipper.

Packard wasn’t in a position to complain about this even if it wanted to, since the once-great marque was being wound down when the Chaika entered production in 1958.

16. 1958 Opel Kapitän

There was clear American influence in the design of the ‘58 Kapitän, which replaced a previous model with the now old-fashioned ponton styling.

Features borrowed from the other side of the Atlantic included tailfins (fairly modest in this case) and a wraparound windscreen.

Unfortunately, the car was not at all successful in its single year of production, and Opel was obliged to come up with something different for 1959.

Visually, the next Kapitän (pictured) was broadly similar to its immediate predecessor, though its grille and front bumper were now far straighter than before.

17. 1958 ZIL 111

Like the GAZ Chaika, the Moscow-built ZIL 111 suggested that its designers had looked west for inspiration, though it’s harder in this case to pinpoint a specific influence.

The hooded headlights bore some resemblance to those produced by Packard and others, while the line along each side seems like a combination of the ones used in the 1955 US Fords and Taunus P2 and the ‘sweepspear’ which Buick employed from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The 111 remained in production until 1967, but its appearance changed completely after a major restyle five years before that.

18. 1959 BMC Farina models

BMC Farina is an umbrella term for a series of mid-sized saloons and estates marketed by the related Austin, MG, Morris, Riley and Wolseley marques (Morris Oxford Traveller pictured).

Although there were detail styling differences, the bodies were all the same, and were designed by Pininfarina.

Pininfarina, of course, is Italian rather than American, but the US trend for tailfins had become well established in Europe by now, and these cars all had them.

That trend soon faded, and after a redesign in 1961 the fins on the BMC cars were considerably smaller.

19. 1959 Ford Anglia

The unusual design of the last-generation Anglia was the work of Elwood Engel, who would soon leave Ford and spend the rest of his career at Chrysler.

Engel was American, and the Anglia bore several marks of his home country, including large tailfins and headlights cowled in a similar, though less extreme, manner to those of the original Ford Thunderbird.

The Anglia’s most arresting styling feature, however, was a reverse-angled rear window, which also appeared on a very different Ford-built car, the 1958 Lincoln Continental.

As we’ll see, Ford would use a window of this type again, and it was also adopted by Citroën for its 1961 Ami.

20. 1959 Mercedes-Benz W111

Mercedes-Benz has generally avoided being influenced by American designs, but it did include tailfins (of an admittedly subtle nature) on several of its saloon cars, starting with the W111 series in 1959.

They would later appear on the W110 and the significantly larger W112, before Mercedes dropped the idea in the late 1960s.

Mysteriously, these cars are sometimes collectively referred to in English as ‘fintail’, even though Heckflosse, as they’re called in German, definitely translates to ‘tailfin’.

21. 1960 Ford Taunus P3

After all the excitement about the design of the P2 Barocktaunus, Ford of Germany completely changed direction with its successor, the P3, which was nicknamed the Badewanne, or ‘bath tub’.

One of the many changes was a front end which resembled the bullet shape of the contemporary Thunderbird, though in the case of the Taunus it was considerably less pronounced.

The similarity was emphasised by the Taunus’s radical lozenge-shaped headlights, which were much wider than they were tall, and produced a similar effect to the twin lights on each side of the Thunderbird.

This would not have been possible on the Thunderbird, since by US regulations at the time a car could have either one or two headlights on each side, but they all had to be round.

22. 1960 Peugeot 404

Although there were coupé, cabriolet, estate and pick-up versions of the 404, the saloon in particular looked so much like the BMC Farina models introduced in 1959 that anyone not familiar with cars of that era would have difficulty telling them apart.

This was not coincidental, since all of them were designed by Pininfarina, which had done well to attract so much business with one basic shape.

As with the BMC cars, the most obvious American feature of the 404 was its pair of tailfins, which were mounted significantly higher than the bootlid and ended at the top of a set of vertical rear lights.

Unlike BMC, Peugeot persevered with the same shape for the lifetime of the car, and did not reduce the size of the fins.

23. 1961 Ford Consul Classic

The strangest-looking British Ford of the 1960s was easily distinguishable from the slightly earlier Anglia, except for the fact that both cars had tailfins and reverse-angle rear windows.

They also had luggage compartments which, in the American fashion, were very long, a fact accentuated by the orientation of their rear windows.

The effect was greater on the Classic, which had a similar overhang to the Anglia at the front, but a much longer one at the back.

The coupé version, the first Ford to be named Capri, was similarly odd, but more conventional in the single sense that its rear window sloped in the usual direction.

24. 1961 NSU Prinz

As well as being the only Chevrolet ever produced with a rear-mounted air-cooled engine, the Corvair, particularly in first-generation form as introduced in 1960, had a remarkable influence on the styling of rear-engined European cars in the same decade.

The earliest example was the Prinz of 1961, which looked quite different from earlier NSUs of the same name and very much like a dramatically shortened Corvair.

The effect was accentuated in later models which had either single-lozenge or twin-round headlights on each side, giving a similar effect to the quad-light appearance of the Corvair.

25. 1963 Ford Corsair

If Ford of Germany had seemed to be referencing the third-generation Thunderbird with its Taunus P3, Ford of Britain went a step further with the Corsair, which replaced the short-lived Consul Classic in 1963.

The bullet shape of the Corsair’s nose was far more obvious than that of the Taunus, and resembled that of the Thunderbird much more closely.

The fact that the Ford Corsair only ever had one round headlight per side and the Thunderbird only ever had two made the connection slightly less obvious, but in profile the similarity is striking.

26. 1963 Hillman Imp

Launched two years after the NSU Prinz, the Imp was another rear-engined European car with a noticeable resemblance to the Chevrolet Corvair.

Whether or not this was deliberate, there were unmistakable details in common.

Notably, both cars had bonnets which were lower in the middle than at the sides, with narrow upward creases down the centre, and whose leading edges dipped between the front lights, though more obviously on the Imp than on the Chevy.

Imp variants which, like the Corvair, had quad headlights – such as the Sunbeam Stiletto and later versions of the Singer Chamois – looked even more like the much larger American car than those with just one headlight per side.

27. 1966 Zaporozhets

The small rear-engined cars produced by ZAZ, based in what was then part of Russia but is now Ukraine, had individual model names but are known collectively as Zaporozhets.

The first of them bore a very strong resemblance to the Fiat 600, while the second had a similar visual connection with the NSU Prinz.

As previously discussed, the Prinz looked like it had been influenced by the Chevrolet Corvair.

ZAZ probably based the new car’s styling on the small German model rather than the large American one, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the Zaporozhets of this era would not have looked the way it did if there hadn’t been a Prinz, which would not have looked the way it did if there hadn’t been a Corvair.

28. 1967 Vauxhall Victor

The Vauxhall Victor range, which included the sporty VX4/90 and the larger-engined Ventora (pictured), was one of the first in the UK with ‘coke-bottle’ styling, in which the body line rises above the rear wheels and then falls back down to continue at its previous level.

GM’s American brands had already employed it earlier in the decade, notably on the first Buick Riviera and the second Chevrolet Corvette, both introduced in the 1963 model year.

The Victor and associated models also had very distinctive front ends, with four round headlights, each of them enclosed in a square housing.

This arrangement did not appear on early styling models, and seems to have been created in Detroit before being adopted by Vauxhall.

29. 1968 Opel GT

There are many reasons why it’s difficult to confuse the Opel GT and the third-generation Chevrolet Corvette, not least the fact that the larger of the two engines available in the Opel measured 1.9 litres while the Chevy’s range of V8s started at 5 litres.

The GT was also physically far smaller than the Corvette, but the cars shared several important styling cues.

These included front and rear wings which rose over their respective axles (a sort of ‘double coke-bottle’ effect), a cab-backward shape, a very short rear overhang and pop-up headlights.

A similar look was used for two European General Motors concepts of 1966, the Vauxhall XVR and the Pontiac Banshee.

30. 1970 Ford Cortina

Ford waited a little longer than GM to add the American coke-bottle styling to its European cars.

It appeared first in 1970 on the third-generation British Cortina and its German counterpart, the Taunus TC.

In this and other respects, the European Fords slightly resembled the fourth-generation Mercury Comet, sold only in the 1968 and 1969 model years, though some imagination is required here since the Comet was about three feet longer.