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Cord 810/812
Cord 810/812, designed by Gordon Buehrig, 1935
Buehrig did away with the upright radiator grille most cars of its day still wore and ran horizontal louvers around the nose instead, which is why it earned the nickname "coffin nose." The fenders hid the first retractable headlights on a production car, an idea that took decades to become ordinary.
It was a sensation when it appeared at the New York Auto Show in late 1935, and the Museum of Modern Art honored it some sixteen years later. Start here to see how early a car could look clean, low and unornamented.
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Volkswagen Beetle
Volkswagen Beetle, engineered by Ferdinand Porsche
Few shapes have been asked to do so much for so long. Ferdinand Porsche drew up the people's car in the mid-1930s, and its rounded body stayed recognizably the same until the last one left the Puebla plant in Mexico on July 30, 2003, after 21,529,464 had been built since World War II.
That continuity is the design lesson: a form simple enough to be built, fixed and loved by millions without ever needing reinvention. MoMA's collection holds a 1959 Type 1 sedan. The car's origins in Nazi Germany are part of its story, and the long postwar life is what made it a design classic.
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Cisitalia
Cisitalia 202 coupe, body by Pinin Farina, 1946
This is the car that taught the world to treat a car body as sculpture. Pinin Farina gave the small grand-touring fastback taut lines and a low hood, a clean break from the bulky, upright shapes most cars still wore just after the war.
The Museum of Modern Art put it in its 1951 show 8 Automobiles, and in 1972 Pininfarina gave a 202 to the museum, the first car in its permanent collection. If you want to understand the postwar Italian grand tourer, and half the coupes that followed it, this is where the idea starts.
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Citroën 2CV
Citroën 2CV, by André Lefebvre and Flaminio Bertoni
The brief is the design. Citroën wanted a car that could cross a freshly plowed field with a basket of eggs on the back seat and break none of them, and boss Pierre-Jules Boulanger described what he was after as an umbrella on wheels.
Chief engineer André Lefebvre and stylist Flaminio Bertoni answered with a plain, light body and nothing that did not need to be there. It stayed in production until 1990. Choose it as the clearest example of form following a brief, and as the warm-up act for what Bertoni did next.
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Mercedes-Benz 300 SL
Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, styled by Friedrich Geiger, 1954
Here the famous feature was forced by the structure. Engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut gave the car a tubular lattice spaceframe, one of the first true spaceframes on a road car, and its sides ran so high that conventional doors would not fit. Hinging the doors from the roof solved the problem, and Friedrich Geiger shaped the body into the silhouette people still sketch from memory.
It made its debut at the 1954 New York motor show, pushed into production by importer Max Hoffman, who promised to buy at least 500 cars. A lesson in how honest engineering can produce the most glamorous shape on the road.
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Citroën DS
Citroën DS, styled by Flaminio Bertoni, 1955
If one car on this list looks as though it arrived from a later decade, it is this one. Chief stylist Flaminio Bertoni gave it a low, tapering body that sat on hydropneumatic, self-leveling suspension, so the shape and the ride were conceived together.
Paris understood at once. Unveiled at the Paris Motor Show on October 5, 1955, it took more than 700 orders within minutes and 12,000 by the end of the day, and Robert Opron later handled its 1967 facelift. MoMA's collection holds a 1973 DS 23. This is the purest case for a family car as a work of design.
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Fiat 500
Fiat Nuova 500, designed by Dante Giacosa, 1957
Dante Giacosa, an engineer who spent 43 years at Fiat, worked out how to make a real car in almost no space, and the friendly rounded shape follows from that packaging rather than from styling for its own sake.
Launched in 1957, it became a symbol of postwar Italy, and MoMA has since acquired an original-condition 1968 Fiat 500F for its collection. Pick it as the counterpart to the Mini: two answers to the same small-car problem, reached from opposite ends of the car.
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Mini (Mark I)
Mini, designed by Alec Issigonis, 1959
The original Mini is a design you read from the inside out. Alec Issigonis, chief engineer at BMC, turned the engine sideways and put the gearbox in the engine's sump to save length, then pushed tiny 10-inch wheels out to the corners so almost all of the car was cabin.
It went on sale on August 26, 1959, and the basic shape lasted until October 2000, with more than 5.3 million built in all its versions. Nearly every small front-wheel-drive hatchback since owes something to its layout, which makes it essential on any list about cars that changed design.
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Jaguar E-Type
Jaguar E-Type, shaped by Malcolm Sayer, 1961
The long hood and tight tail were not drawn by a stylist in the usual sense. Malcolm Sayer was an aerodynamic engineer who worked the curves out with slide rules and log tables, which is why the shape feels inevitable rather than decorated.
Jaguar built it from 1961 to 1974, and in 1996 it became only the third automobile placed on permanent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which holds an E-Type roadster. Choose it as the proof that a mathematically derived form can still be the most sensual thing in the room.
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Chevrolet Corvette (C2)
1963 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray split-window coupe, by Larry Shinoda under Bill Mitchell
Detroit's own answer to the European coupes. Larry Shinoda drew it under the direction of GM styling chief Bill Mitchell, with pop-up headlights and a spine that ran down the roof and split the rear window in two.
That divider is the whole story in miniature. Chief engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov argued it hurt rear visibility, Mitchell reportedly said that without it you might as well forget the whole thing, and the split window lasted just one model year. Look at it for American design confidence at its peak, and for a famous detail that won the argument only once.
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Porsche 911 (classic)
Porsche 911, original generation, design led by Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, 1963
The 911 is the rare shape that has been refined for six decades without ever being replaced. It appeared at the Frankfurt show in 1963 badged as the 901, and when Peugeot objected to the number, head of design Ferdinand Alexander Porsche simply doubled the 1.
The sloping roof, upright headlamps and rear-engined stance are still recognizable on the car Porsche sells today. MoMA's collection includes a 1965 911. Choose the early cars to see the purest version of a silhouette that designers have been careful not to break ever since.
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Ford Mustang (first generation)
Ford Mustang, first generation, by Joe Oros's studio with Gale Halderman and David Ash, 1964
The Mustang created a whole class of car, and its look came out of a sketch. Gale Halderman's rendering was the first to really define the shape, including the long scoops running down the sides, and the full-size car was developed by David Ash under the direction of styling executive Joe Oros.
Ford introduced it at the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, on April 17, 1964. Credit is shared among the three men, which is honest to how studio design works. Choose it to see how a few strong lines, rather than any single innovation, can define a category for sixty years.
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Lamborghini Miura
Lamborghini Miura, designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, 1966
Put the V12 sideways behind the driver, and suddenly a road car can be low, short-nosed and impossibly wide. That layout, first shown as a bare rolling chassis at Turin in 1965, needed a body, and Marcello Gandini, newly arrived at Bertone, gave it one of the most graceful shapes of the decade.
It was introduced at the 1966 Geneva show and is widely regarded as the original supercar. Choose it for the curves, then look at the Countach to see the same designer tear up his own rulebook.
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Range Rover Classic
Range Rover, by Spen King, Gordon Bashford and David Bache, 1970
The luxury SUV starts here, and its look came almost by accident. Engineers Spen King and Gordon Bashford wanted the comfort of a Rover sedan with the off-road ability of a Land Rover, and the plain, straight-edged panels they made to cover their test mule were so right that management told stylist David Bache to refine them rather than start again.
The result, with its clamshell hood and roof that seems to float above black pillars, was chosen in 1971 for a design exhibition at the Louvre, shown there as a quarter-scale model. Choose it to see restraint win: later Range Rovers kept coming back to those same details.
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Lamborghini Countach
Lamborghini Countach, designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, 1974
Only a few years after the curvaceous Miura, Gandini threw the curves away. The Countach is a wedge of flat planes and sharp edges, first shown as the LP500 idea car at the 1971 Geneva show, and it entered production in 1974 almost untouched, which almost never happens to a show car.
That wedge became Gandini's signature and shaped experimental car design through the 1970s and 1980s, not to mention a generation of bedroom-wall posters. Choose it as the moment supercar design stopped imitating nature and started looking like the future.
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Volkswagen Golf Mk1
Volkswagen Golf, first generation, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign, 1974
Volkswagen needed a successor to the Beetle and turned to Italdesign for it. Giorgetto Giugiaro answered with crisp flat planes and a distinctive rear pillar drawn with his famous folded-paper method, turning the boxy hatchback into something clean and confident.
Not every line survived: Volkswagen swapped his preferred square headlamps for round ones. The first cars left the line in March 1974, and close to 7 million were built including the related Jetta. Choose it to see where the modern compact hatchback's look was settled, and compare its packaging with the Mini's.
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Audi TT
Audi TT, first generation, designed by Freeman Thomas under Peter Schreyer, 1998
A rare case of a show car reaching the street with its nerve intact. American designer Freeman Thomas drew a pure, compact coupe under Audi design chief Peter Schreyer, and Audi itself describes it as inspired by the Bauhaus, every line with a purpose and every shape with a function.
The study appeared at the Frankfurt show in September 1995, and when series production began in 1998, the trade press noted how little had changed from concept to showroom. Choose it to see late-1990s design at its most disciplined.
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Hyundai Ioniq 5
Hyundai Ioniq 5, from the Hyundai Global Design Center under SangYup Lee, 2021
The newest car here shows that the electric age can have its own look rather than a smoothed-over gasoline one. The Ioniq 5 pairs a crisp, almost origami-like body with "Parametric Pixel" LED headlamps and taillamps built from small squares, a detail you recognize from a block away.
In 2022 a six-member jury from France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US named it World Car Design of the Year, and it took World Car of the Year as well. SangYup Lee led Hyundai's Global Design Center during its development. Choose it as the current proof that a mass-market car can still be a design statement.
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