CHRYSLER HORIZON
There are not many of these about nowadays but, for Peter Horbury, the Horizon will always be special because it’s the first car he worked on. The Horbury family moved a lot during his childhood – to Glasgow, Wolverhampton and Sheffield (“I got used to being Peter, the new boy”) – but the car obsession was a constant. It took him to Newcastle’s School of Art, then to the Royal College of Art in London for postgraduate studies in transport design – in the same year as Martin Smith, later Ford’s design director in Europe. Horbury’s first job was in Chrysler’s design studio at Whitley, near Coventry.
“The Horizon was my first car,” he says, “and the sense of pride never goes away. In those days, you didn’t do everything, but I was responsible for the Horizon’s face: the grille, headlights and front bumpers. From then on, whenever I saw a Horizon, I only saw those bits.
“We moved to Detroit to finish the job because this was a world car, called the Dodge Omni in the US. It started as a softer, more adventurous shape but the VW Golf (Rabbit in the US) was doing well so they wanted to emulate the VW’S sharper lines. It also had to have Rabbit wheel arches, which meant its little wheels – it used Simca 1100 running gear – were lost underneath. The interior was rather good, though.”