Historical Factors in Transportation Styling

Abstract

Passenger cars have been mass-produced for more than 100 years and their style has gone through dramatic changes as well. The purpose of this paper is to construct a chronology for passenger car styles by studying the factors that contribute to the changes of them. By taking a thorough and dedicated analysis on the bestselling models of FORD in different eras, this paper establishes a chronology for the passenger car styles and further extracts nine basic types of styling icons based on the comparison result of style similarities. It is revealed that time features were the main factor that inspired designers to create those various basic styles, including technologies, users’ values, infrastructure and environment etc. This paper concludes that it was the time features that shaped passenger cars’ basic styling icons; therefore, contemporary styling of new automobiles should embrace new styling icons to embody contemporary time features.