Automorrow '89 was a remarkable combination of substance and showmanship. Luigi Colani wasn't parodied on The Simpsons, but if he had been, the scene could have written itself. The auteur, draped in a white poncho, his handlebar mustache billowing magnificently, gestures toward a lineup of absurd shapes. A torrent of artspeak pours forth, rendered in sneering Berliner Schnauze by Hank Azaria.
Homer watches, blinking. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Where'd the car show go?” This story originally appeared in Volume 35 of Road & Track. With his big mustache, preachy pronouncements, and wild curvilinear designs, Colani would have been easy to lampoon, but he was hard to pin down. A visionary designer whose creative abandon inspired generations of automotive stylists? Yes. An idealist intent on remaking the world to his own utopian blueprint? Also yes. A showman in the grand tradition of self-mythologizing crackpots? Sure, that too.
View Price on AmazonStill, if anything could have launched the German provocateur and self-described 3-D philosopher into American pop culture such that he'd be immortalized with a kiss of cel-vinyl paint from Matt Groening and company, Automorrow '89 was his best shot. More than three and a half decades on, Automorrow '89 stands as one of the most ambitious and baffling acts of self-promotion in the car world, both for what it was—a traveling festival of future-looking concept vehicles, punctuated by Colani haranguing automakers for their lack of imagination—and for what followed: an unlikely partnership with a family of hot-rodders that echoed across the Bonneville Salt Flats for the next several years.
An invitation from Ford Motor Company set the project in motion. Colani was asked to speak at Ford's design center in Detroit in October 1989. He would do more than talk; he would put on a show meant to become an annual festival of mobility innovation. With a year to kill before the date, Colani whipped up a fleet of concept vehicles that projected his radical vision: aerodynamic, lightweight, and artful, with a range of human and internal-combustion power. “Tomorrow's vehicles have to be lean and mean,” Colani said in an L.A. Times interview. “They must generate maximum use within a minimum size. There is no future for the overweight, overpowered monsters now being churned out by the world's auto industry.”
Automorrow '89 would kick off in Detroit, make a pit stop at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and wrap at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Along the way, Colani would give the auto industry a piece of his mind. “Most car styling is pure design prostitution,” he told the L.A. Times. “It is made to please a legion of publicists who have conned a gullible public into lusting after false smiles. We cannot continue for long in this massive obscenity that is destroying our cities and our souls.”
Adding a twist of validation testing, Colani asserted that “existing records will be challenged.” For Colani, setting and breaking records for both speed and efficiency was vital to Automorrow's innovative spirit, just as it was a way to prove to a skeptical engineering establishment that his concepts could also deliver function. “That was always his dream,” says Robert Ward, an American designer who was then working as a sculptor and modeler in Colani's studio in Bern, Switzerland, and would become Colani's project manager for Automorrow '89.
Source: roadandtrack.com
