HUMAN TOUCH

Before a car goes from design to production, model makers get their hands dirty

- SIMRAN RASTOGI

What I would give to have been a fly on the wall of any of the great coachbuilders’ workshops just around the time mass manufacturing was really taking off, after the second World War. Could those master craftsmen have foretold the rapid death of beating metal panels into artful bodywork, even though it takes a rare skillset to do so? Well, if history is any indication, the smart coachbuilders might have, at least the few that appropriated into design houses, like Bertone, Zagato and Pininfarina did. And though the companies that survived still make the odd one-offhand-built car, like the SP12EC Pininfarina built for Eric Clapton, or the beautiful Zagato-bodied modern Astons, the novelty of these cars lie in their rarity, not so much in their form. Because while some handbuilt cars look so fluid, and so organic that they can only have been built by hand, modern manufacturing techniques have caught up. With the added benefit of being much quicker, more consistent in quality and cheaper to make.

In a way, the art of the clay sculptor in automotive design seems deigned to the same fate. An art, and integral part of the automotive design process that began at roughly the same time in the 1930s as coachbuilding did, said to be pioneered by a GM designer, Harley Earl. Back then, the process would begin with the designer’s sketches, as wild and ambitious as he’d dare. These would be applied to orthographs, or technical drawings that detailed out the dimensions of the clay model to follow – whether at full size, or scaled down. Wooden framework placed on wheels would be created, and clay modellers would add clay to it, and shape it to form the car’s general shape.