Features HAMB ERA PROTOTYPES

Found the tread, maybe someone could help this guy out.

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/need-your-help.1141154/#post-12972922

 

Here's a 1957 Corvette by Giovanni Michellotti. It's a purported one-off aluminium body built on a ‘54 Corvette chassis by Carozzeria Ghia in Switzerland. The Ghia Corvette was powered by a Blue Flame 6 in-line engine with a 4-speed manual gearbox. The white one below sports the same plates however note the small tail fins and side trim (Scallop)







https://carsthatnevermadeitetc.tumblr.com/post/174893518279/willment-cobra-ghia-coupé-csx-3055-1965-an-ac
http://mycarquest.com/2016/03/mystery-corvette-two.html\

 

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Technically not a prototype but an authentic 427 Cobra (CSX3055) chassis with a Ghia Supersonic body (Fiat 8V) mounted on a new AC Cobra chassis designed by Giovanni Savonuzzi in 1965. John Willment found a Ghia Supersonic bodied Fiat 8V in a scrapyard (presumably in the days when classic cars were almost worthless) and having a spare 427 Cobra race chassis he decided to marry the two together. The engine was a Holman Moody prepared 427FE fitted with 2x4's. Willment lost interest in the project before it was completely finished, but based on the modern looking photos the car has recently been completed.

• https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/willment-cobra-427-ghia-coupe-1965.312999/
  
• https://books.google.com.au/books?i...UsQ6AEwDXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=CSX3055&f=false

 

1964 Grand Prix X-400 Show Car a 1964 X-400 was the 1963 X-400 with a different coat of paint and a different front and rear.

 

Prototype before Mustang name

Cougar

 

1962 Dodge & Plymouth Concept Turbine Cars Promotional Photo



Turbine engine

 

Ford Cougar Concept before Mustang became the name

 

Ghia did this body for Chrysler and then apparently got stuck a little in the creativity department when he did this design for VW a few years later.


Roo

 

1964 Explorer II Concept by Rohm & Haas

 

There was a 'dipstick' here whose father (looked just like the dipstick!) drove into Walmart in the first 'smart car' I'd seen.
Damned thing even LOOKED like him! He parked it in the #1 slot, got out, posed...Proud as punch.
It was extremely laughable. I had my freshly primered '55 F100...he was probably laughing, too...I may have been 'posing'...

 

There is some confusion about the Ghia show cars made for Chrysler. The cars were all designed by Chrysler stylists, they farmed out the construction to Ghia because they could make them faster and cheaper than anyone in Detroit. By that time all the custom coachbuilders in America had gone to join the Dodo birds and Italy was the best place to get a one off car made. They charged about 1/10 as much as union labor in Detroit, and could work from a few perspective sketches, full blueprints and detailed drawings not required.

It is true the Karmann Ghia was copied from Chrysler's show car design. When it came out, the Ghia asked Chrysler's head of styling if he thought it was too much like the Chrysler. The reply, 'I don't think it's too much like it, I think it is exactly like it'.

The truth is they were pure Chrysler designs and Ghia was a subcontractor. But, if the Italian connection made them seem exotic and glamorous to the public, they weren't going to spoil the illusion by telling the truth.

 

Exactly my point.
From "Beetle in a cocktail dress" by Aaron Severson;
"Years later, automotive writer Jan Norbye interviewed Ghia’s surviving designers, who insisted steadfastly that the design concepts for the Volkswagen coupe were Boano’s, not Exner’s. To defend that claim, some historians have gone so far as to attribute the D’Elegance design — and even Chrysler’s other Ghia-built specials — to Ghia’s designers in Turin rather than Exner’s team. However, Exner’s son, Virgil Exner, Jr., who was close with Segre, said that Ghia made no secret of the resemblance between the two designs. In fact, Exner, Jr., later told author Richard Langworth, that when Exner visited the Ghia studio in May 1955, the designers there actually asked him if the Karmann Ghia, then close to production, bore too strong a resemblance to the D’Elegance, which Exner replied that it did.

Although the VW coupe was already in progress when Ghia’s designers saw the D’Elegance, we suspect that the Chrysler design provided several elements that Boano subsequently utilized for the Volkswagen project. It should be said that the latter was not an outright copy of the D’Elegance; the VW coupe and the Chrysler were certainly not identical, least of all in size, and simply adapting such a design to a much smaller platform was itself no small feat. Nonetheless, we don’t believe the similarities were coincidental. It is certainly evident that the collaboration between Exner and Ghia produced a common design language — if they hadn’t, it’s unlikely that the D’Elegance would have provided any usable themes for Boano to borrow — but if we had to assign principal authorship for the design that became the Karmann Ghia, it would be to Exner, not Boano. (We’re inclined to dismiss as national chauvinism the idea that Ghia, not Exner and Voss, designed the D’Elegance; there is far too much evidence to the contrary.)"

Roo

 

I think that design language went both ways. Its not likely coincidence that the 64 barracuda looks like a smaller, slightly stodgier 62 Dual Ghia.

 

chrysler had them build them for chrysler!!-same as above!!

 

If I remember correctly there were several Ghia bodied Chrysler concept cars lost when the Andria Doria sunk. Don't know where I saw that, maybe on our visit to the WPC Museum before it closed.

 

That is a perfect example of the way designers drew differently then. Then, a designer would think of a 3D form and then set about doing 2D drawings of it. At some stage that changed: after that, a designer would begin with a sketch or doodle – these days an electronic pure-shape virtual sculpture – and then work it into a thing, or trust the production engineers to do a good bit of that. It's a fundamentally different way of working. One is craft and the other is psychology – often pop psychology.

The ability to design directly in the concrete, rather than from some random psychologistic abstraction, has become something of a lost art.

 

The Chrysler Norseman was on its way from Italy on the Andrea Dorea.

 

Rita Hayworths 53 Cadillac Ghia

 

Buick XP300

• http://www.deansgarage.com/2011/harley-earls-1951-lesabre/
• https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2007/12/16/sia-flashback-le-sabre-xp-300/
• https://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z998/buick-lesabre-concept.aspx

DOHC V8, supercharged 335hp

 

1953 Cadillac Ghia

 

1953 Lincoln XL 500

 

1954 Olds Cutlas

 

Any photos with the hood closed, I would like to see them.

 

https://classicmotorsports.com/articles/sunken-treasure-chrysler-norseman/

Chicago native Joe Bortz has purchased, rescued and restored many of Detroit’s most famous concept cars, including some that have been cut into many pieces and long thought destroyed. One of the world’s experts in the area of factory design studies and concept cars, Bortz knew of the Norseman and its unfortunate fate. He wondered, given today’s advanced industrial diving techniques, if the car could be located within the ship, extracted, brought to the surface, and restored.

After some research, Bortz met an industrial diver who claimed he could do the job. He pursued more information and spoke with scientists qualified to assess what the car’s condition might be after more than 50 years underwater. Unfortunately, Bortz and company concluded that the ravages of time, pressure, and the corrosive nature of salt water would have reduced the hapless Norseman to little more than rusty sludge.

According to a Hemmings Motor News article, in the mid-1990s a leading underwater researcher and explorer named David Bright wrote on his website about finding the remains of the car.

“While looking for a lost diver, I had an opportunity to see the Norseman for myself in the cargo hold,” he wrote. “Normally, all passenger cars were placed in the garage section of the Andrea Doria that is slightly aft of the collision point where the Stockholm impaled the Doria, underneath the bow wing bridge. These cars would have been placed onto the Doria by use of a crane and meticulously parked in the garage and arranged strategically for stability. However, the Norseman was no passenger vehicle, and was specially packed and treated with extra care. The Norseman was put into a wooden crate and placed in the No. 2 cargo area.

“The crate had disintegrated and the car was in very, very poor condition. The ocean’s salt water invaded the Norseman’s metal and most of the car is rust, corrosion and a heap of indistinguishable junk.”

Thus, the Chrysler Norseman rests aboard the Andrea Doria, which lies on her starboard side off the cost of Nantucket, some 250 feet below the ocean’s surface. We don’t expect to ever see this one on the grounds at Amelia Island.
​

It would've been amazing if he'd managed to take photos. The wreck was actually dived the day after it sunk, however technology in those days was not as advanced as now. A shame it was lost forever.

 

1955 Lincoln Indianapolis