Virgil Exner

And indeed, in this year, they are not.

Chrysler, under the styling direction of Virgil Exner, who's a former protege, a graduate of the Harley Earl Design School, but a really original thinker, introduces the so-called forward look.

And these cars have somewhat of a wedge shape.

Their fins, instead of just jumping up at the end in a sort of curving fashion, draw almost a continuous line from lower down the front of the car to all the way at the peak at the back.

I think it's actually the DeSoto.

For me, the DeSoto is the winner here.

Under Virgil Exner's Ford look guidance, and this is a style that only lasts for a couple of years, these cars were really incredibly sleek.

They had razor-thin roof lines, really emphasizing this idea of the hard-top coupé with no B-pillars, and without the additional styling encumbrance that you got on General Motors cars of the time, they were very sleek, and...

And basically all the designers who e- even once other car companies ended up with design styling studios, which didn't happen until after the war, um, all of the designers who would head up the other car companies were trained under Harley Earl.

So Chrysler in the '50s under Virgil Exner, he was a former, uh, Harley Earl protege, and, and so on and so forth.

The '30s was the time in which all American car companies were consolidating in the wake of the Depression.

And so Duesenberg began struggling in '29 and went out of business at the very beginning of the '30s.

And it's funny because we think of the '57 Bel Air as one of the greatest Chevys of all time, but they thought the '55 was better and, and perhaps it is in its way.

The, the point is that people be- had begun to think that other car companies were going to outpace them.

And certainly, um, the '57 Chrysler division cars are really extremely dramatic with their razor-edge roofs and a sort of wedge shape, the Ford look, in other words, that Virgil, that Virgil Exner had introduced.

And, um, in '58, there was kind of a jumble where, uh, Harley Earl was, was getting sort of everything that he wanted, but he no longer quite had as fine a feeling for what people wanted.

Yeah, it's really cool.

So the '47 Studebaker is Virgil Exner and Bob Bork.

Apparently, uh, Loewy fired Exner over that because, um-

Oh