Scorpio intro	Styling	Design & engineering	Manufacturing	Marketing	Service & maintenance	About my Scorpio

The cars we drive all began as ideas in the minds of stylists, designers and engineers. The Scorpio was born in the studios of Ford in Cologne, Germany. Here's a sample of the sketches and renderings that gradually evolved into the Scorpio.

There's a seductive fib behind concept drawings like these. The shapes are longer and lower than a manufacturer would risk in a mass-produced car, so the evolution from pad to street inevitably compromises the drool-factor. For me the sexiness of any automobile is never higher than it is in the early sketches of the stylist who first catches the idea on paper. Perhaps my admiration for these images arises from my own total inability to create anything similar.

As you'll see below, much of the drudgery in the details of taking a sketch to reality is removed by the assistance of CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software. I suspect that the concept artist will be the last to adopt the technology. Disney animator Glenn Keane once commented to me that he'd kill the man who tried to take the pencil out of his hand. As I look at the glorious spontaneity of these pre-Scorpio renderings, I hope that the concept artists feel the same way.

Even in the impractical exaggeration of the forms in these early drawings, you can see some of the Scorpio's realized features. The massive liftgate, the illusion of an uninterrupted sweep of glass, the air-defying rake of the windscreen, the wraparound taillights -- they're all here in one or another of these pictures.

Even this prototypical dash and instrument panel are recognizable ancestors of what greeted us as we settled into our Scorpio's driver's seat this morning. These renderings are from a booklet in the press-kit distributed at the Scorpio's European introduction. The kit contains many more pictures than I have space for on this webpage, and it's interesting to me how many of them address the layout of the car's interior. Apparently a designer pays substantial attention to creating a unity between the vehicle's exterior appearance and the feeling we get once we're inside.

In this fourth rendering we can see many of the Scorpio's design elements more fully developed. The severe notch in the beltline near the liftgate didn't survive, but on the whole we can believe this was to become a Scorpio. The slotted wheels were a stylist's whimsy (although easier to clean than the ones Ford ultimately chose, I'll bet). Personally, I'm glad that the Scorpio's proposed rear fender skirts were relegated to the imagination's dustbin. I thought they'd been discarded in the 1950's, but I guess stylists yearn for a world in which no one ever has to change a tire. Hmmm... come to think of it: so do I.

And now forgive me, but I can't leave this styling topic without showing you the neatest and silliest idea of all: two sketches of a Scorpio Estate. Perhaps we should have a contest to enumerate all the implausibilities of this design? I wonder what view of a following vehicle I'd see out the back window in my rearview mirror. The license plate, maybe? And it seems that this stylist intended to realize his ideal of no flat tires to change, as he made the rear fenders solid with no cutout at all for the wheel. Ah well, perhaps he enjoyed the Oktoberfest....

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