Now on Display, Engines Dressed Up to Tell a Story
By PHIL PATTON
Published: November 3, 2003
“UNDER the hood is the last frontier of automobile
design,'' said David Laituri, who was a pioneer in
the engine-compartment territory when he was a designer at General Motors.
Mr. Laituri, now an
industrial designer at the Design Continuum, a Boston-area consulting firm,
began his career in the late 1980's as a member of the first G.M. design team devoted to engine compartments. He was responsible for the
cover atop the original Cadillac Northstar V-8
engine, one of the first of a new crop of engines that automakers stamped with
a distinct brand identity.
Today, named and covered engines are everywhere,
their mechanical bits concealed by plastic shields that dominate engine
compartments. The shrouds also provide a billboard on which automakers can
display logos and deliver subtle messages hinting at what lies beneath.
Photographs of suggestively shaped engine covers
have even begun to supplement shots of cars on curvy roads in the marketing
materials of automakers. Infiniti's promotional materials, for instance,
feature the styled cover of the 4.5-liter V-8 engine from its flagship Q45
sedan. In a photograph, the sculptured black engine cover is softly lighted to
make it look as if it is carved from basalt. Light plays over the stone's
surface, suggesting the gravitas of the Black Stone of Mecca or the monolith in
''2001: A Space Odyssey.''
''Under-hood appearance has been an issue for
Nissan for about 10 years, although we've really gotten serious within the last
four to five,'' said Sheldon Payne, a product design manager at Nissan Design
In the days when there was enough room around the
engine to see the ground below, the engineer alone ruled the space under the
hood. When Mr. Laituri was hired by G.M., he was
fresh out of industrial design school. ''It was just me, a couple of kids and
two old guys left over from the Frigidaire division,'' he recalled.
But the concept of applying a styling theme to
areas not always in the customer's view was beginning to catch on.
''Design had recently cleaned up trunks and glove
compartments.'' Mr. Laituri said. ''We rethought the
motor and came up with a theme: a diamond on a black velvet pillow. That meant
blacking out everything possible around the engine -- all the wires and pipes
-- and covering the engine with a faceted shape bearing the Cadillac crest and
shield. The idea was to emphasize high technology. It was not going to be just
an engine. It was a power plant.''
When the group began, Mr. Laituri
recalled, the dipstick for the oil and the dipstick for the transmission fluid
looked different and had different typefaces. ''At a meeting, I led the oil
dipstick engineer over to the transmission fluid dipstick engineer and
introduced them. A few years later, I looked under the hood of a G.M. show car
and saw the dipsticks with the same typeface. It was a great moment.''
Designers like Gary Braddock, a design manager in
Ford's product studio, regularly cite 1920's Duesenbergs
and especially Bugattis as having the most beautiful
engine compartments. And exotic sports cars, including some from Ferrari and Lamborghini,
proudly display their engines under a transparent hood, the better to show off
finely wrought pieces and neatly detailed wires and hoses.
Tom Matano has been
watching under-hood design since he was called on to improve engine compartment
appearances in one of his first jobs, at Holden, G.M.'s
Australian subsidiary. Mr. Matano, who was also a
designer at Mazda and BMW, is now director of industrial design at the Academy
of Art College in
Years later, Japanese automakers began to clean up
wiring harnesses and the plumbing needed to circulate coolant as a way to
suggest economical efficiency, while high-end German automakers were early
adopters of full covers on V-8's and V-12's to imply technological precision.
Engine covers have also been called on to help
establish brand identity. The covers began to display company logos and,
increasingly, new engine designations. What were once informal, garage-gossip
nicknames, like the Ford ''flathead'' or Chrysler ''slant six,'' became formal
appellations like the Cadillac Northstar, the Ford
Triton or the G.M. Quad 4. Some of the attention that went into chrome engine
logos on the car's body -- such as Ford's wonderful nesting of the number 8 in
the valley of the V in the 1930's -- was now directed to locations seen far
less regularly by motorists.
The Northstar example of
elevating the engine's brand identity seems to have inspired later efforts.
''It was like the 'Intel inside' campaign,'' Mr. Laituri
said.
According to Mr. Braddock of Ford, the intake
system of the first Taurus SHO engine of 1989 was reshaped by designers in a
high-tech, nylon-based thermoplastic for both better air flow and better
appearance. The SHO's ''bucket of guts'' look is
still admired by other designers.
Chrysler has recently revived the Hemi name for its
engines. The designation was originally applied to powerful engines that
dominated stock-car racing in the 1960's thanks to their hemispherical
combustion chambers, which were advanced at the time. But the evolution of
engine technology has relegated the layout of the original Hemi engine to
history's dustbin; it is left for the engine cover in the Chrysler 300C and
Dodge Magnum models to reflect the tradition in a decorative, curved-roof
shape.
These days, the dominant typologies of engine
covers seem to run in three main streams. The first is exemplified by the
bulging contours of bodybuilders -- the ''six-pack abs'' look, worthy of an
advertisement for an exercise machine.
At the other extreme is the ribbed box, as seen on
BMW's ''M Power'' engines, which resembles the sort of huge amplifiers that young
owners install to give a car audio system window-rattling bass. This is the
''engine as power supply'' and it even seems to wear the cooling fins of an
electronic component. In a world where digital is light-years cooler than
mechanical, why should an engine cover not suggest high-tech electronic
components?
A third type is the framing of a sculptured air
intake system of thermoplastic, molded into a ''nest of vipers'' shape. That
look, made famous by the Taurus SHO, is seen today in Audi's high-performance S
models.
Those who recall older engines, with each part
readily identifiable, find the covers have taken away something vital.
''Things are certainly neater,'' Mr. Matano said wistfully. ''But the engine no longer looks
like the beating mechanical heart of the car. It looks more and more like an
appliance.''