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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen Peter Brock showed his sketch of the Cobra Daytona Coupe to his colleagues at Shelby American, there was 98 percent agreement among those in attendance. \"It was the ugliest car anyone had ever seen,\" he says.\n\nThat was back in 1963. The Daytona's long, tapered front end and abruptly cropped rear were a radical departure from American race-car design. None other than Carroll Shelby himself overruled the critics, however, giving Brock his blessing to create a vehicle that would be able to compete with the Ferrari Gran Turismos racing throughout Europe. (The Daytona, says automotive historian Jonathan A. Stein, was essentially a Shelby topped by a new body mold that \"made a world of difference.\") The car was instantly successful, reaching speeds of close to 200 miles per hour and winning the world championship for GT cars in 1965. It was also 25 percent more fuel-efficient than the automaker's previous roadster.\n\nSomething similar had happened back in 1934, when Chrysler introduced its Airflow, which had a long nose and a sharply curved back. \"The Airflow was so advanced that the public wouldn't accept it,\" says Stein. But the sedan is now widely viewed as the first production car in America to be built facing the right direction, as it were. (In wind-tunnel tests, many cars of the period were actually found to be more aerodynamically sound from back to front.)\n\nThe Mercedes-Benz Bionic concept car may turn out to be the 21st-century version of the Airflow, although it's likely to get a much warmer reception. Designers in Stuttgart, urged to study nonautomotive forms for inspiration, visited a local natural-history museum. There they discovered that the stubby boxfish, native to coral reefs, possessed a near-perfect aerodynamic form. A model based on the fish, tested in a wind tunnel, achieved astonishing results: a drag coefficient of 0.095. And the 2005 concept vehicle inspired by the boxfish, with the unprecedented drag coefficient of 0.19, was estimated to get 70 miles per gallon.\n\nThe field of automotive aerodynamics has evolved since the 1930s, from one in which aesthetics were paramount to one in which sleekness is seen as a key element in the quest for fuel efficiency. Inspired by airplanes, locomotives and the glory of the industrial age, \"streamlined\" design was all the rage in the early days of automobiles. \"The idea of speed lines affected design all over the place,\" says Dennita Sewell, co-curator of the 2007 exhibit \"Curves of Steel\" at the Phoenix Art Museum.\n\nThe exhibit told the story of how streamlining informed automotive design in the first half of the 20th century. A catalogue edited by Stein that accompanied the exhibit is filled with sensuous photographs of cars with teardrop chassis, chrome vents and shapes that look more suited to space flight than to the rutted highways of the period. For example, Andr\u00E9 Dubonnet's 1937 Hispano-Suiza, with its twin pointed tails, looks rather like a prototype for the Batmobile.\n\nDubonnet designed racing cars, but most vehicles in the 1930s and '40s weren't intended to sustain speeds of more than 50 miles per hour, the speed required for aerodynamic effect, so most of the trappings were merely for show. Even as late as the 1950s, cars had flamboyant features\u2014the large tailfins of the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, for instance\u2014that implied flight but contributed absolutely nothing to performance.\n\nIn the racing world, however, the study of aerodynamics became crucial as cars got faster and faster. Peter Brock recalls trials for the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, on which he began work in 1957. A somewhat jarred test driver reported losing control of the car at 140 miles per hour. The front of the vehicle was essentially lifting off the ground, in an attempt to take flight. Subsequent innovations, such as lowering a car's front end and adding things like air dams and spoilers, have completely changed the aerodynamics equation.\n\nAs a young designer assigned to work on the Cutlass Supreme during the 1970s and '80s, Ed Welburn, now global vice president of design for GM, drew a sketch for an Oldsmobile supercar. \"I nailed it on the display board and went back to my desk to work on a second and third, but management said, This is it.' \" The 1987 Aerotech concept remains one of the fastest cars ever built, holding a record of slightly more than 257 miles per hour at the Fort Stockton Test Center in Texas.\n\nThe pursuit of speed notwithstanding, streamlining has been approached with more pragmatism since the 1970s, when the international gas crisis spurred increased attention to aerodynamic engineering as a path to fuel efficiency.\n\nBut even today, there's tension between aesthetics and technology. Nina Tortosa, an aerodynamicist for GM, recently insisted that an air vent be removed from the front of the company's battery-operated Volt. \"It was a futuristic design element that the studio really liked, but it was obvious to me that it contributed to drag,\" she says. \"I'm torn when I have to remove all these cool things.\"\n\nWhen Peter Brock looks across the landscape of contemporary automotive design, he often sees adaptations of elements that he pioneered long ago. Aftermarket air dams now wrap the fronts of four-cylinder coupes, and that long Daytona nose is practically ubiquitous on midlife-crisis roadsters. And Brock says he has to chuckle whenever he sees one especially popular car with its back end sliced off\u2014not unlike the design so derided by his colleagues at Shelby.\n\nIt's the Toyota Prius, one of modern car manufacturing's biggest success stories."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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