Ghia changes
As the saying goes, it is “the singer, not the song” and, as Stephen Paul Hardy finds out, the same maxim often applies when it is the designer not the manufacturer.
Stephen Paul Hardy remembers an old design house.
Ask the person in the street what, in automotive terms, the Ghia badge means to them and you are highly likely to get the reply “the top end Ford models”.The point is that most of us tend to think of cars in terms of their manufacturer. I often feel that Ford’s use of the Ghia badging was a very sad and poignant epitaph to a once very great and influential design studio.The flair demonstrated by Carrozzeria Ghia was extensive and renowned with bodylines penned by a host of famous designers that worked for the studio in its heyday.Whilst some of the designs lived on as series production models, others were immortalised in one-off design studies that had short but exciting lives as centre stage attractions in international auto salons of the past.
Relationships between manufacturers and design studios of course flowed two ways - manufacturer instigated commissions and the totally different, fascinating, world of designer-led studies aimed at wooing manufacturers with their ensuing lucrative royalty payouts. Such work included original and alternative designs.The former involving the complete construction of both the visible part of the design - the bodywork - and mechanical substructures mated to contemporary power plants and transmissions.The latter, slightly easier, route involved acquiring a new vehicle or rolling chassis and reskinning it with a new body designed by the studio, crafted by a coachwork specialist.
The lengths that design studios went to in this way, and the outcomes of such work, are already well represented in the AutoCult and Avenue 43 catalogues of 1/43 scale resincast models. One of the very latest Avenue 43 releases arrived on my desk just in time to be showcased this month that, taken together with a previously released model, proved to be a perfect illustration of the whole scenario.An opportunity therefore too good not to be missed. One of them having a very well known history, the other virtually shrouded in mystery.Yet both with a common initial design heritage that started in Carozzeria Ghia’s offices.
That well-known model was premiered at the 1953 Paris Auto Show after being conceived and developed in secret by Luigi Segre, head of
Construction at Carozzeria Ghia around the chassis, drivetrain and mechanicals of an acquiredVW Beetle became, of course, theVW type 14 Karmann Ghia coupé.
Whilst that coupé development was happening at Carozzeria Ghia, during 1953, amongst the other projects being worked on was a two-seater open sports design based on the contemporary Porsche 356. Seemingly also premiered at the 1953 Paris Auto Show though, unlike the eventual Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia, it never progressed beyond the design study prototype stage. Sitting it alongside the perfectly replicated model of the prototype Karmann-Ghia made by AutoCult for Ravensberger Handelskontor’s “Masterpiece” range in 2019, this Porsche 356 Ghia (#60057) throws up some interesting insights into the distinctive traits of individual designers or design studios.
Whilst the oval statement on the Porsche
356 Ghia has obvious connections to several contemporary radiator grilles, the similarity in the way that the front wing line and headlights flank a fairly distinctive front bonnet is noticeable.The waistline kick-up towards the rear wings also carries a certain resonance between the two bodies.That waistline and the paired front lights that can be seen on the Porsche also have echoes of things to come with the laterVW type 34 Karmann-Ghia.
Invariably design studio led prototypes, if accepted and adopted by manufacturers, undergo quite a few adjustments before the series production models start being delivered. Exceptional then was the case of the type 14 Karmann-Ghia, with early production models being remarkably similar to the 1953 prototype.With the 356 based prototype, we can only conjecture how Porsche may have influenced further work on the design if it had embraced it into production with consequent Ghia changes.
I felt that another previous AutoCult model from August 2018 needed inclusion in this feature on account of its tacit connections to the two models showcased so far - a 1960 Zunder Coupé (#05023) from Argentina. Unashamedly inspired by the type 14 Karmann-Ghia, it nevertheless differs in many respects under closer inspection. Designed around licence-built Porsche 356 engines, this is an example of yet another design that got no further than the prototype stage.
To close, we have to break away from the Ghia thread, but are staying with the theme of designerled prototypes and what I think is a very exciting, bold move by AutoCult that should just about be available by the time you are reading this. I say bold because I am sure that at first sight to many collectors it throws us back into the realms of simplistic vintage ‘solid window’ toys.The reality is that this 1957 Porsche 695 prototype (#06045) is ground breaking. It opens up a whole new era of scale models with an immense wealth of potential subject matter because it represents, in authentic detail, a particular stage of prototype development, where drawing board designs (in the pre-CAD era) were translated from 2D into 3D studies in carved wood or sculptured clay. There are so many prototypes that never get beyond this stage yet lay the foundations for subsequent iterations that finally reach series production.They are therefore invaluable additions.
The 695 was another example of a design studio vision proactively presented to a manufacturer.
In this case by Albrecht Graf Goertz a German aristocrat living in the USA.Although Porsche declined the design, I can’t help feeling that in fact Goertz’s design planted some seeds of thought in influential minds in Stuttgart. If you set aside the more overt atomic/mid-century styling traits of the front and rear lights, the front wing lines, bonnet slope and rear roof line have an uncanny preemptive air about them. DC