Since, 1945 designing had become a profession in its own right (Dormer 1995). Automobile design finally emerged from the shadows of World War II in 1949. The Integration era joined all the parts of the car to make a shell very similar to the modern car body we know today. This was the year that United States carmakers, General Motors, Oldsmobile and Cadillac, introduced modern one-piece auto bodies.


Fig.7 - The Integration era

The relationship between design and technology is not one sided. Technological developments do not determine what the manufacturer wants to produce, nor do they rigidly determine the shape a designer creates (Dormer 1995).

In this era Cadillac was the first company to successfully borrow the form of the missile and apply it to its cars (Hauffe, 1998 and Noblet 1993) (Fig. 8). Cadillac’s 1959 Cyclone is a prime example of the application of the semantic frame of a missile to an automobile.  In the late 1960’s General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford tried to market radical small cars, like the GM A-bodies, but had little success. In America, performance became the prime focus of marketing, exemplified by pony and muscle cars like the Ford Mustang, and the Plymouth Barracuda (Tambini 1996). In this era most of the cars had ‘Speed-lines’ on the sides, all of which contributed to the automobile’s message of ‘power, speed and sex’ (Sparke 2002). In this time the Chevrolet Corvair was a European-looking response, signaling the end of General Motors’ more fantastical line of cars (Julier 1993).


Fig.8 - Effect of the missile on Cadillacs

Third world countries entered the automobile race in the late 1950’s. Indian and Iranian car design can be traced from 1959 onwards (Fig. 12) The first Indian automobile produced in 1958 was similar to Germany’s 1953 Opel Capitan, shown in (Fig. 12) The first Iranian car introduced in 1968 (that was in the modern era) was similar to American cars designed ten years earlier, shown in blue, in (Fig. 12). Both were designed by UK designers. On the technology front, the biggest developments of this era focused on safety while designing the automobiles.

References:
http://www.netcarshow.com/
http://www.american-automobiles.com/Mackle-Thompson.html accessed in May 2010.