from Hacker News

Italian Car Design History

by spamalot159 on 6/2/21, 10:35 PM with 30 comments

• by rmason on 6/2/21, 11:23 PM

  Interesting site, like the fact that you can look by year. I was able to locate the Lancia Stratos HF Zero concept car. I remember the incredible response it got when it came out in 1970. It's so low to the ground they were able to drive it under the entrance gate to Lancia!

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHPqe4khs90&t=94s

  There's a YouTuber, Casey Putsch, who runs Genius Garage (offering on hands experience for students) and he's building an almost exact replica. In this video he tells how he's risking burnout and how it's kicking his butt to replicate the car.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbVgJ7zQhIA&t=4s

• by FridayoLeary on 6/2/21, 10:50 PM

  It's Italian car design history. But it's really just a bunch of confusing bubbles that makes me feel slightly dizzy. Not so dissimilar to some of the cars actually!

• by jibbit on 6/2/21, 11:08 PM

  I’ve long wanted something like this. I’m fascinated where the common elements of contemporary car design come from. Why does every car have a hard lateral crease? When did it originate? It wasn’t on early cars or carriages. I look forward to studying this carefully

• by perl4ever on 6/3/21, 5:44 AM

  What I thought of when I saw this was not the bodywork of Italian cars, but the rest of the engineering that you don't see until you look underneath.

  I was really struck by the chassis of, for instance, 90s Ferraris, when I first saw a picture. They look so primitive, like something from the 60s or earlier, compared to a vehicle made by one of the big Japanese or American companies.

  My impression is that until recently, the really prestigious brands that made super expensive cars were paradoxically impoverished themselves, so had to make severe tradeoffs in engineering and development. The only way to compensate was by racing and making beautiful sheet metal. I watched a Doug DeMuro video on an 80s Lamborghini and up close, it was just weird, almost like a kit car.

  Nowadays, Ferrari is an expanding public company, and probably suppliers can give small car makers parts that are more on the level of the big companies.

  I assume that Lamborghini no longer has to use Nissan headlights due to lack of resources to develop their own.

• by vsdlrd on 6/3/21, 10:04 AM

  Hi there! I am the creator of this website. Thanks for sharing it! If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it!

• by WalterBright on 6/3/21, 11:01 AM

  In Seattle, there's a weekly get together of exotic cars at the Redmond Town Center. They have a list of makes and models of acceptable cars you can bring, that fit their definition. There's a gatekeeper at the entrance to keep the riff-raff out.

  Under "Ferrari" it says "any model". Haha

  I love how Ferrari has totally won the marketing game.

• by Phrodo_00 on 6/3/21, 12:53 AM

  Including Bertone's design study of the already existing Mustang (which was designed internally at Ford) is quite misleading without clarifying, and I wonder how much else also omits information.

• by porphyra on 6/3/21, 12:26 AM

  It would be interesting to visualize trends by clustering car designs using t-SNE or similar methods on neural network embeddings.

• by emc3 on 6/2/21, 11:13 PM

  > I built this data visualization from scratch with D3.js, and Tachyons

  Looks good. Reminds me of Prezi.