Frustrated Customizer: GM Designer Carl Renner

If you don’t recognize Carl’s name right away, that’s because Harley Earl often gets full credit for the entire GM Design Team’s work. If you think the first generation Corvette, ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air and Nomad or the ’56 Impala Motorama concept are good looking cars, you can thank Carl Renner for his often uncredited input. He actually started as an animator at the Walt Disney Studio for a short while, and then moved to car design at General Motors in 1945. At GM, Renner was an extremely successful designer, and his immense design talent was recognized when he was relocated to a secret studio that only he and Head of Design Earl had access to in 1952. From this elite drawing lab came the early ‘Waldorf’ Corvette, among many other dream and production models. I’ve attached a few surviving Carl Renner concept sketches below and you’ll see that even with the rough ones, he had a great eye for what makes a Custom so sexy: Futuristic looks, low stance, minimum chrome trim, and implied motion in the design.