About three years ago, a concept car began to make the rounds of the major auto shows as a show vehicle from General Motors. It was slated to be the new Camaro, although it was dressed in different fenders, quarter panel extensions, and other devices that were being used to shield its true lines.
One would have found the lines hard to follow in the first place. The Chevrolet Division of GM still had not completely fleshed out the final lines of the Camaro and some test groups and other blind market studies were still underway.
Still, the marketing people at General Motors were working behind the scenes, looking at the audience response cards. Each study group is required to fill out cards which show the features they like and those they do not like, and were formulating the vehicle that was to become the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro.
Pony Car
One of the concerns, noted by some on the auto show circuit, was that the new Camaro looked too much like the 1969 Camaro, one of the cult classics of the Pony Car era. The term Pony Car was ushered in by the ever-growing Mustang in the late 1960s. The Mustang was a Pony and the term and the era became synonymous. That aside, one could still see definite remembrances of things past with the Camaro that was set to debut in 2010.
Single Headlight Arrays
First, one could see the single headlight arrays at the corners of the egg-crate, blacked out grille. Each light array, in turn was recessed under an overhang that was truly reminiscent of the 1969/70 Chevrolet Camaro. This was the last of the Camaros to hold this line until the debut of a similar line in 2010, as the L6 restyling took its place and made its own mark on General Motors’ history.
The L6 redesign was first debuted at the end of the 1967 car show year, as a concept car in its own right, and with minor changes took its place in the pantheon of GM classic vehicles that were to last more than 20 years in basic outline.
If one were to look closely at the car designs being shown as future cars, one would also likely see styling hints that would impact other lines. For example, the 2008 Malibu, with its dual egg-crate front-end styling could be seen as early as 2005 in the car show examples of the major restyling of the Impala that made its appearance in model year 2006/07. Indeed, some of the lineage is still visible, although very subtly in the 2010 Camaro.
Future Car Designs
Perhaps more than any other factor, the show vehicles you see as future car designs and concept cars are key marketing tools for an automaker. They provide direct evidence of an automaker’s design thinking. If one watches closely, they can see just how much input the public has. A design that appears in Geneva as one vehicle,may appear later in the year as something else at the New York auto show. It all depends on public reaction. The public, though, is the group that will be buying the car in the future.
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