Harley Earl ("Misterearl") and Designing the American Dream Car

What was left to be done, in the words of Kettering, was to “keep the customer dissatisfied,” and that largely would be the work of GM stylist Harley Earl, hired by Alfred Sloan in 1927 as head of the Art and Colour group. As a result of Earl’s efforts, cars would become longer, lower, and light reflective due ever-increasing amounts of chrome trim. Design historian Stephen Bayley said this of Earl’s legacy: 

In 1926 a typical General Motors car was 75 inches tall and 65 inches wide. Harley Earl’s achievement was not only to change the shape of the car into a unified sculpted form but also to lengthen it and lower it – always in appearance often in fact. By 1963 the same typical General Motors product had shrunk to a mere 51 inches in height but had swelled to a massive 80 inches in width.[i]

With the exception of the instruction of 88-inch width strip steel that made entire bodies of metal now possible, technological changes related to suspension, the engine, and drive train were incremental during the 1930s.  But the looks of the vehicle became increasingly critical to the annual model change, in advertising copy, and consequently in attracting consumers. Engineering automobiles took a back seat to their design.

            Few television viewers could have understood the significance of the General Motors commercial made a decade ago that portrayed a flashy man in a broad hat who stated that he was Harley Earl. The commercial assumed too much, and gave more credit to the American consuming public for historical knowledge concerning their automobiles than they possessed. That said, perhaps no other single individual did so much to turn America into a consumer-driven society, one characterized by status, style, color, and planned obsolescence, as Harley Earl. From 1927 to 1958, Earl dominated design in Detroit, and by 1958 his legacy in the auto industry was one in which the stylist, and not the engineer, was supreme.²⁹Earl sold Americans on a dream, not on a mode of transport. Excesses of flash over substance became the keynote of an American industry by the late 1950s that marked the beginnings of American auto industry decline that became only evident during the post oil-shock 1970s.

            Earl was a big and burly Californian, who cut his teeth in the auto coach trade while working for a family firm during the 1920s.³⁰He caught the eye of Alfred Sloan, and in 1927 made his first contribution to style at GM with a redesign of the LaSalle. Sloan wanted a car that could be as beautiful as a custom car of the era, and the LaSalle, with its rounded corners, unified design elements and lowered silhouette did that. It was a vehicle for the prosperous middle classes that resembled Hispano-Suiza, but at an affordable price.

Harley Earl at the wheel of a 1927 LaSalle

1927 Hispano-Suiza

 Earl’s initial success was followed by the failure of a bulbous 1929 Buick, but he learned that change must come gradually to guarantee public acceptance, and that production engineering must be on the same page as his stylists. The 1929 Buick had its panels pulled out five inches at the bottom, but an increase of five inches in height all but defeated what Earl was trying to accomplish in automotive design.

1929 Buick

            In general, however, Earl’s cars were colorful, attractive to the ladies (who often made the family decision concerning which car to buy), longer, and lower. GM cars of the 1930s continued along this line of evolution, with chrome trim increasingly employed in strategic positions and with beveling so that “reflective value” had its greatest impact. The culmination of Earl’s efforts during the pre-WWII period was his 1938 Buick Y Job, a stunning styling tour de force that introduced auto design developments that went into production after the war. The Y Job, actually drawn by George Snyder, was a 2 passenger sports convertible that featured electric windows, a power top, flowing body panels, and a waterfall grill. To lower it, the car featured an elongated standard Buick chassis on 13-inch wheels. It was a dream car, one that Earl personally drive to the various clubs in the Detroit area, as glitzy as his suits and shoes. Looking back on the pre-WWII era, Harley Earl was to jibe that “I have watched them spend upwards of $50 million since I have been here to drop cars three inches.”³¹

Harley Earl and the 1938 Buick "Y" Job

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[i]Stephen Bayley, Harley Earl(New York, 1990), p. 44.