Car Design on Automobilist.org

Paris Motor Show, October 12–18, 2026, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What catches my attention about the opening of the 91st Paris Motor Show is how much of the future arrives carrying something from the past. The show opened for the press on October 12 at Porte de Versailles, with the public following on October 13, and the announcements have that familiar motor-show mixture of engineering, theatre and optimism. Everyone has a new chapter to announce. Everyone is ready for tomorrow. Yet some of the most interesting cars reach backwards for their names, their proportions and the little visual details that make us recognize them before we have read a word about their batteries. I rather like that. A car should give you something to respond to before it asks you to understand its operating system.

InCabin Europe 2026, September 22–24, La Farga de L'Hospitalet, Barcelona

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

InCabin is the car-interior show. It runs on a combined pass with AutoSens Europe, its sister event for ADAS and autonomous driving, at La Farga in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, just outside central Barcelona. Organisers expect more than 1,000 attendees, 100+ speakers and 120+ exhibitors.

The program covers driver and occupant monitoring, sensing and perception, HMI and UX, voice interfaces, sensor fusion, and the chips that run all of it. OmniVision, Tobii, STMicroelectronics, Sony, Analog Devices, Magna and BMW are on the list. The headline demo this year belongs to AEye and LITEON. AEye’s Apollo lidar is fitted to a LITEON demonstration vehicle, and the two companies are fusing LITEON’s camera feed with Apollo’s 3D point cloud into one picture of the road.

Genesis GV90 Flagship SUV Debuts With Hidden B-Pillar Coach Doors and 657 HP

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The pillarless hardtop died around 1976. Rollover and roof-crush rules were coming, the engineering answer was a thick B-pillar, and one of the prettiest shapes in postwar car design went with it. Nobody has really brought it back since. Rolls-Royce and the old Lincoln kept the rear-hinged doors, but they kept a pillar too, or they built the pillar into the door and hoped you wouldn’t look.

Genesis just unveiled a full-size electric SUV that does the whole trick. The GV90 arrived at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on August 19, and the headline feature is a pair of coach doors with no B-pillar between them.

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing: The Interior That Defined an Era

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Few automotive interiors carry as much design weight as the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing. Step past the raised door — hinged at the roofline rather than the sill, a solution born from the car’s tubular spaceframe chassis rather than styling whimsy — and the cabin makes its case immediately: saddle-red leather stretched across every surface, a slim wood-rimmed wheel, and a shift linkage so exposed it looks like an afterthought bolted to the transmission tunnel.

The 1967 Lamborghini Miura Invented the Mid-Engine Supercar and Did It Perfectly the First Time

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three engineers at Lamborghini — Gian Paolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani, and Bob Wallace — built the Miura’s chassis on their own time, without official company authorization, because they believed that a mid-engine sports car was the right direction and that the best way to convince Ferruccio Lamborghini was to show him one rather than explain it to him. They were correct. Lamborghini approved the project. Bertone’s Marcello Gandini, 26 years old, styled the body. The result was unveiled at the 1966 Geneva Show as a rolling chassis and sold as a complete car the following year.

The Jaguar E-Type Series 1 Remains the Most Beautiful Car Enzo Ferrari Ever Called Beautiful

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The attribution is disputed, as most famous automotive quotations are, but the sentiment is not: when the Jaguar E-Type was unveiled at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show, it produced a reaction that went beyond the standard admiration afforded to attractive new automobiles. Enzo Ferrari reportedly called it the most beautiful car ever made. The automotive press ran out of superlatives by the second paragraph. Malcolm Sayer, the Jaguar aerodynamicist who shaped the body, was working from engineering principles — the curves were functional, derived from Jaguar’s racing experience with the D-Type — and produced something that looked like it had been shaped by aesthetic ambition rather than calculation.