Year to year, decade to decade and one stylist to another, most evolutions of any manufacturer's cars from one generation to the next carry some common components. Engines, gearboxes, instruments and controls are common. Sometimes, other secondary mechanical parts find their way from one model to its successor. Find an Italian car of almost any era, and then play 'spot the part sharing' amongst cars its junior and senior and you'll undoubtedly come up trumps on indicator lamp lenses, light control stalks or horns that are all, inevitably hidden or utilised in a fashion that conceals their true origin, or indeed the fact that the very part in question has been in production for decades, often on a far lesser model.
The key, is that when parts are shared they are shared discretely to avoid the common consumer from drawing often pointless comparisons from one car to another.
One design element that has always perplexed me in the sheer length of time that it saw production is the classic, pressed tin and colour-coded Mercedes Benz hub cap. I think the design first saw the light of day in the fourties on the curvy, separate-chassied 300s. Then, on the car considered by most to be the first 'modern-era' Mercedes; the W120 'Ponton', which was released in the early 1950's. Into the 60's, it adorned the wheels of the subsequent W111 'heckeflosse', or 'Fintail', the W108 S class of the late 60's and early 70's and its W113 SL contemporary. When Bruno Sacco replaced Paul Bracq at the helm of the styling department and brought forth the new generation cars such as the W116 S-class and the R107 SL, that famous hubcap remained, as it had upon the steel wheels of the compact W114 & 115 cars that saw the end of Bracq's Stuttgart styling days. The W123 compacts that saw Mercedes cars enter the late 70's and early 80's mainstream? Yes, they also had that ubiquitous, colour-coded design conceal the car's hubs and lug-nuts. In fact, the classic metal hubcap nearly made into the nineties, only Sacco's W124 and W126 medium and large sector models respectively, with the newly unadorned, plastic-clad styles giving way to a plastic hub cap with a chrome-plated three-pointed star doing service to designate the car's origins to the profile observer.
A lot of words for a mere car part. But think, what other external, decorative adornment has done time for three decades very nearly unaltered? Bar the generic badge on most cars,
Not one.
1 comment:
Great little epistle on the M-B hubcap. My wife drove, and I maintained, a W113 SL California for years. The caps, when lost, were relatively easy to find replacements for, even in the correct color. The advantages of such ubiquitous details are grossly underrated. I teach Vehicle Design at Art Center, and such nuances are very difficult to convey.
An interesting fact, not apparent to the eye, is that the caps' outer surfaces were fully chromed, and then wet finished in paint, leaving only small chrome details still revealed. Simple but extravagant.
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