I’ve seen pictures before of Loewy’s BMW 507 Coupe that he designed and had built for himself, but they were invariably in profile or from the rear. When I came across a shot of its front end, I was downright startled. With its small rectangular quad headlights set into that smooth turned-down front end, it looks more like 1975 than 1957. It anticipates a raft of front ends with a similar design theme that was first seen on a few exotics (Miura, etc.) in the mid-sixties and became increasingly in the seventies, and almost ubiquitous in the mid-late 80s.
As a point of handy comparison, there’s a few production 507 Roadsters behind it, that came just one year earlier, and is considered stylistic classic, penned by Albrecht von Goertz. The two seem a decade or two apart, rather than one year. In 1957, all of the most advanced front engine sports-racers still wore their headlights proudly high on each fender peak, with a grille in between. The Loewy Coupe is something altogether different.
Admittedly, the downward curving bumper is a bit odd, but then Loewy’s personal cars invariably were. It looks like a mustache, but one has to get past his eccentricities to fully appreciate his genius.
The Loewy BMW Coupe’s rear end is a very obvious foreshadowing of the Avanti. Well, for that matter, the front end is too, if not quite so obviously.
Giorgetto Giugiaro’s 1963 Bertone Corvair Testudo concept, itself a very influential design, shows some very definite influences from the Loewy BMW, most of all in the way that the front end is just a gently turned-down extension of the hood, with the headlights faired into the sloping front. The single round headlights in turn may well have influenced the Avanti’s original single round lights.
The Testudo’s expansive rear window also seems to echo the one in the Loewy coupe. There’s no question that Giugiaro created a much sleeker and more refined car, and with significant unique qualities. But I couldn’t help but notice certain elements that seemed somewhat familiar.
It’s the front end that I keep coming back to. It is very prescient.
Much more than this rather bizarre and gaudy Jaguar-based coupe he head built for himself just one year earlier.
That goes for the LoReMo, another one-off he had built for himself in 1960. Its rear end was even closer to that which would be seen on the Avanti.
I eagerly await a detailed identification of those headlights by our resident expert, D. Stern.
I invariably have very mixed feelings about Loewy, especially his personal cars, but the BMW 507 Coupe certainly stands out as the best of the bunch, especially from the right angles.
I keep being told that Raymond Loewy was a great designer–then I look at his cars. Have you seen his “improvements” on a contemporary Cadillac? Is this a personification of his philosophy–“Cars should be smooth and sleek and functional, but without dryness?” I’m having trouble thinking of a domestic car uglier than this Cadillac. Maybe a bullet-nosed Studebaker? I’m not a big fan of the Avanti either.
So was Loewy a design genius or a charismatic salesman/promoter who put his name on the occasional good designs that came out of his organization?
The rear view is much better!
We, as Car Guys®️, tend to think of Loewy as an Automotive Designer, but cars were not what made him famous; he was an Industrial Designer (some call him ‘the father if modern industrial design’) who later ventured into automobiles. He designed everything from locomotives to furniture to pencil sharpeners, and well, everything. As an example: as a car guy you know about “Coke Bottle Design” on many beautiful cars of the 1960’s of course. Well, Loewy was the guy who designed the actual Coke Bottle itself.
https://www.wired.com/2008/12/gallery-loewy/
Root Glass designed the coke bottle in 1915.. not RL…
He did a good job on the 1939 International Harvester tractors, especially the Farmall H and M.
He must’ve still been in Tractor Mode when he drew up the front of that Caddy, or the LoReMo.
We must remember that Loewy was not an automobile stylist, but a man with a flair for aesthetics who hired automobile stylists and judged their work as worthy (or not). Most “Loewy designs” got filtered through talented guys who were familiar with styling cars. I have a feeling that these got a lot less filtering.
I wonder if this 507 influenced the designers of current ND Miata (MX5)? I see some common themes.
Front view, with the bumper straightened.
An improvement for sure. Improve it even more by jettisoning the bumper altogether.
I’m kinda mixed on Loewy’s designs. Kudos for early on recognizing that “weight is the enemy” and his penchant for smaller, stylish cars like the postwar Studebakers and early fifties Starlight coupes. Some of his other efforts come off as just bizarre. I wonder how much Virgil Exner was influenced by his onetime mentor in designing the downsized ‘62 Plymouth and Dodges.
While there’s certainly the possibility that Loewy influenced Virgil Exner, it’s a common misconception he was responsible for the 1962 Mopar downsizing. Those were cheapened, bastardized versions of traditional, full-size Exner car designs that he had virtually nothing to do with.
But Tex Colbert needed a scapegoat and, besides the guy who actually called for the last-minute, very expensive debacle (then Chrysler president Charles Newberg), the blame has been incorrectly assigned to Exner.
Further, when Exner showed some restraint, he could come up with good-looking cars. A case in point is the 1963 Valiant, which, except for the little ‘finlets’ which were added by Elwood Engel, is a total Exner design. Engel gets the credit for the successful second generation Valiant and, while it’s true he cleaned it up well for the later 1964-66 cars, it was a total Exner effort, his last at Chrysler before being fired..
That’s not to say that Exner still did goofy stuff, like those weird asymmetric concepts, and the infamous ‘toilet seat’ fake spare tire slapped onto the trunk lid of upper trim 1960 Chryslers. It’s the one flaw of what is arguably the best of the Forward Look cars.
Less weird but looks like a wide-eyed dog carrying a bone.
The headlights are a bit close together (even more than the Allegro’s…) No bumper, headlights moved out a little so the centre of the nearside one lines up with the badge:
Much better!
Ha….now you can stop calling my 99 Riv a catfish….
The asymmetrical BMW roundel and following sculpture bit on the hood right in front of the driver, and the little rectangular turn signal lights on a flattened finny front fender edge also presage style elements of the Avanti.
I have no idea if GM stylists even knew about this car, but the headlights remind me of the first generation Saturn.
That hood is taking roundel-worship a little too far.
Maybe I got it from this site, but once you know that Loewy studios did the 1956-67 Hillman Minx you can’t unsee the 1953 Loewy Studebaker in it.
No you cant and I liked them since I was a toddler the across the street neighbour had a brand new 1960 3A the same as the one I just sold,
Loewys designs were toned down a little for production cars I reckon its only his personal cars built exactly how he wanted them with no board of directors to also please.
True. We all brig our own likes and dislaikes when it comes to things like this. Few of us get to create a dream in the metal/fibreglass though.
And we are all influenced by the times we live through. It’s hard to see it as we would in 1957.
The gaps between the doors and hood and the body look huge…at least in these pictures. Really distracts from the overall appearance of the car. It makes me think that Loewy might should have stuck to something larger scale…like locomotives.
That said, I think the 507 is one of his better efforts. That “LoReMo” is just horrible, and the Jag he did looks like something that a Batman villain on the TV show would have driven.
Not just 1975, it would look current in 2021 (with a couple of modifications).
Got a time machine handy? Take that back to ’57 and see what Loewy thinks about it!
“I eagerly await a detailed identification of those headlights . . .” Well, I don’t know, but that “Honeycomb Grille” looks like it was lifted from a ’58 Ford or Thunderbird:
The V8 emblem centered on the hood came from the rear fender of a 1953-54 Studebaker Commander. Was placed on the forward side of the fenders, just behind the doors.
Loewy was simply a very good schill/promoter. A talented Industrial Designer……..meh. He was VERY GOOD at taking credit for other designer’s work.
The featured car hurts my “delicate” designer eyes: concinnity it does NOT have!
Just my humble opinion as a nameless Industrial Designer……. 🙂 DFO
If the man himself could sport a pencil thin mustache, why not his car?
By the way, the rear, and rear three quarters views of the Jag are much more impressive. I think this particular photo is from after Loewy sold it to that prize fighter. He’s the one that added those air horns and chromed the grille.
I eagerly await a detailed identification of those headlights by our resident expert, D. Stern.
Me, too. This is probably the earliest example of headlamps with both lens and reflector in rectangular shape (that is if they are really headlamps or just auxilary lamps repurposed as headlamps) on the automobile. The earliest production cars with such headlamps would be Citroën Ami and Ford Taunus P3 (both 1961).
Recessed square headlight converted C3 Corvettes actually have a striking resemblance to this
Ugh, I think I’m gonna hurl…!
I logged in to say just that! (that it strongly reminds me of a C3 Corvette sans headlight covers, not that it makes me hurlish!)
I knew I’d seen that same, recessed headlight treatment somewhere.
They’re not headlamps at all. They’re very small, very useless Marchal 650 frog (outboard) and driving (inboard) lamps. Placeholders for a heavily design-prioritised rolling prototype like this, probably never driven after dark, but not legal or effective anywhere. Loewy would’ve had to wait three and a half decades for there to be actual headlamps sized and shaped about like this.
Headlamps? Headlamps? HEADLAMPS???
We don’t need no stinkin’ HEADLAMPS.
The downward curving bumper reminds me of a Fisker Karma. Not unattractive for a 1957 concept car, or the Karma. The 507 profile is beautiful; the tail lights not so much.
The front end of the Testudo is gorgeous.
My first impression of that face was a 1975 Chevy Monza. The more I look the more I see a modified Bugeye Sprite with the square lights taking the place of the bug eyes.
I can see the resemblance to the Avanti and the Miata but it also reminds me of Seaview, the submarine from “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea”.
If I remember well he also had an E-type Coupé modified by a French coach builder.
That car was fitted with a pair of Cibié Panhard BT 24 quad-headlights, a large air intake and the taillights were from the Corvair.
My understanding is that as far as automobiles go, they were all designed by others under the Raymond Loewy Associates imprimatur. Bob Bourke and others. Raymond was obviously the face of the organization and he sold the ideas to executives, but he did not create the ’53 Stude, Avanti, even the Farmall tractor.
+1
Mr Loewy undoubtedly had his competencies, but they did not extend to being ahead of his time. He is, surely, the definition of “of his time.”
The oblong headlight was, unfortunately, released from some regulatory purgatory in the mid-’70’s, and upon its freedom, infested itself on the nose of every American car thereafter (and not a few Europeans as well).
Mostly, it looked like shit.
This ruined 507 may have some resemblance in the nose to the future ’77 Firebird or somesuch malaise horror that had, till then, looked rather nice, but that does not make this BMW prescient. It makes it, firstly, as ugly then as oblongification at large later proved to be, and secondly, a reflection of Mr L’s limitations (not to mention his probably happenstance finding of some leftover froglamps at some convention in 1956).
As for the Avanti, if this desecrated 507 presaged it, then it is good to note that the cues from that Studie went no further generally. The quite arresting Testudo, from a proper mad artist in Guigiaro, shows how it is that small refinements in detail and proportion so greatly distinguish the true masters from those who are not.
Alternatively, I will say it this way: if this car was ahead of its time, I am glad we have not yet got there.
I see some Jensen Interceptor in that rear glass too
That’s because the Interceptor was substantially influenced by the Avanti.
We covered that here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/jensen-interceptor-design-hand-me-down-two-times/
The middle one in the photo is the 1964 Brasinca Uirapuru, a Brazilian GT.
Thanks for the reminder!
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was it looks a lot like one of those VW-based, fiberglass kit-cars that were all the rage in the late sixties/early seventies, like the Fiberfab Jamaican.
Jag looks like it sprung from an SP250 Uglyfish.