All Boxed Up

Podcast Episode: 0232
Why are there Box cars?

     Ever wondered why the boxy shape of early automobiles continues to be a favorite among modern car designers? Follow AutoLooks, as we unbox the history and evolution of the iconic two-box design, a structure that revolutionized automotive aesthetics and functionality. 

         Well, it's that time of the year, the time that we box up gifts or box up food for people we all talk about. Well, let's just say a lot of boxes. We have to put stuff in boxes, we have to get boxes, we have to wrap boxes, we have to deliver boxes. There's a lot of boxes going around. Well, at one point in time in the automotive history, boxes were just like Christmas time. They were everywhere and we used them on nearly every style of automobile. Well, except for supercars, they went to a wedge, still flat surfaces, but they weren't a boxed design. Today, AutoLooks is taking a look at the two-box design, one of the simplest designs ever and going back to my school roots, today we're going to talk about why some companies decide to still utilize this design for new products that are coming out. So today on AutoLooks, we're getting all boxed up, not just for Christmas, but for automotive design.
 
       Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I'm your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings and go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all Car companies from around the globe, all available on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks Podcast the globe all available on the AutoLooks.net website. The podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at net. 

​           So, like I said in the beginning, box designs they've existed a very long time in the automotive history but, unlike our true beginnings, where we utilized box designs because of the most simplistic things to build, later on became part of the evolution of the automotive design. Yes, boxed designs, they were here and they've been kicking around for a long time. But why do we still utilize them and why do utilize them in full force? Well, let's just take a look back to my automotive design years. In my first year at college, our first design course, when we're starting to teach people other than myself how to truly design a vehicle, either in 2D or 3D format, we get them to draw a box. Then you draw a point in the horizon. You bring all the angles up to that point in the horizon. That gives you your cube. That's how you're designing this thing. That's how it's going to fade into the background. But why do we do this?
 
        Even today, professional designers utilizing even computer programs and a digital draft board are still utilizing the box design to start all of their design aspects. Nobody just looks at it and goes whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop and makes a full, amazing design. Sure, there are a lot of us out there that can do that. And you watch people online and watch people in TV shows, I don't know. For years I remember hearing from people oh, have you seen Chip Foose and what he could do? I'm like he's drawing existing vehicles. He's not creating something new; he's creating something that already exists. But if you look at his designs, he still starts with essentially a boxed image.
 
          And the best way to get a start on drawing an automotive design is by creating two box the lower portion of the box for all of your workings this is your trunk, your engine compartment and the seating arrangement and then your top box. Because humans sit upright in vehicles, we need a viewing area, which essentially is the top tier of the box design. It's a viewing area. That's all its purpose is. But as we learn from the initial stage of automotive development and design. You can even look back to the original Ford Model as and see how boxy those designs were. Now we get it. The wheels were exposed, they had wheel well covers, they had running boards, but the initial compartment the human sat in and the covering for the engine compartment were essentially two boxes. And if you watch the original construction where you sit in the original Model A was one solid coach build seating compartment. It was literally just dropped right down on the frame; the engine was placed in and then it was covered over. You had essentially your front box and your rear box. That's how automobiles started.
 
          And then we started adding trunks on the back. Now, literally trunks were just bolted on trunks like traveling trunks onto the back of a vehicle. That's where the name came from. This kind of gave it a three-box design. But those trunks were added effect to the vehicle, kind of like roof rails and your headlights. They're all added on after the initial design of the vehicle. So, the trunk was a forethought. The passenger compartment and the engine compartment were the initial two boxes in the original two box design and from there we eventually started evolving and taking those two box designs and morphing them into something better. Then we start moving into the bathtub designs, the streamlined designs, the winged designs, then we get the wedge shape, then we get the wide arches, all the while remembering the original theory of the automobile. And it really wasn't until trucks started getting the wheels integrated into the fenders that we again started to see a two-box design. 

​          Taking a look at pickup trucks in the 1950s when they start going from sidestep rear designs to fully integrated boxes. Personally, right now I'm taking a look at a 1957 Mercury M-Series and even the Dodge Customs Sport Special. These weren't sidestepping, these are streamlined designs which had a passenger compartment on top and a full straight-line body line on the bottom. Essentially, a two-box design has a full body line that goes straight from front to rear. Some of these are tapered upwards towards the back, if you remember the BMW 7 series in the late 80s, early 90s but some of them are directly straight across. One of the most memorable two box designs in history was in the late 70s and into the 80s the Chevrolet C10, Silverado’s and K5 Blazers. Those were the epitome of two box designs and they lasted forever. A passenger compartment as one upper tier box and a lower tier where the front hood was the exact same body line as the box of the truck. It was the bottom box of the vehicle.
 
          But, like I said, in the 60s and even before in the 50s, we had these two box designs coming in trucks. Then we started seeing them in SUVs with the release of the Ford Bronco, giving us more of a two-box design. But why were we utilizing boxes, hard edges and box-like designs? Space two-box is the biggest thing you get out of a two-box design and with trucks, especially with single cabs, maximizing space in the cab while pushing the cab as far forward is better when people sit in more upright position. And because pickup trucks back in those days didn't have to get good gas mileage, didn't have to look good and never went fast, they didn't worry about any of those special features, proper airflow or fuel consumption in them. Pickup trucks weren't included in this until the early 2000s when the CAF agreement came in and started saying fleet management had to have 35 miles per gallon across the entire fleet of your vehicle. So, all these car companies with massive pickup trucks had to realize oh, we got to squeeze some more fuel out of these bad boys by having a box design. That's not very aerodynamic.
 
         Boxes have been used for a long time, but from the advent of the automobile, by the time the 1930s were rolling around, box designs had disappeared. We were starting to streamline our designs. We loved curves, we loved tail fins, we loved chrome. It was only really in the pickup truck and SUV marketplace that you saw a two-box design. Cars were still designed this way. Even if you look back to old designs in the 1950s, you'll still see people utilizing the standard box format to make automotive designs for car corporations. Even to this day, people still utilize that feature. It's ingrained in our heritage of automotive design.
 
         Box design is the easiest way to start. Essentially, it's one of the easiest ways you can start with anything, and I'll give you a perfect example of this. If you've ever watched the Simpsons and, yeah, I'm getting back to one of my most favorite TV shows of all time Do you remember the one episode where they're in the attic and they find out that Marge is an incredible painter and painted a ton of Ringo Starr images back in the 1970s when she had a major crush on him? Well, she decides to take a class and learn how to draw, and the teacher shows her a cube and how you can turn even the simplest of cubes, spheres, cones, and even you can turn that into a wonderful little bunny. Yeah, I'm actually quoting right from the show because I've seen these things hundreds of times so I kind of have them memorized. But he's showcasing to us how we can use this box design, essentially creating the 3D images using cubes and spheres and cone. 

         That's where automotive design starts. Like I said, it starts with a box, a box and a point on the background. That's where everything fades into it. And even when you draw people, animals, buildings, the box design comes into play. For designers, learning to draw a box in 3D format is your first step to learning how to design a car. But bringing that into the automotive world is something completely different. We all try and take those boxes and make them look amazing.
 
         Well, at one specific time in history we had to revert back to where our original theory of automotive design started, utilizing boxes yet again, during the gas crisis in the 1970s, everybody was trying to find new ways to bring down their fuel consumption. We thought smaller engines was part of it. Well, to get the money to put it into these car companies to build the products that we needed with lower fuel mileage and better safety features. Because now we had to have integrated crash bumpers and we were also moving into a time period where round headlights were being changed for the square headlights. And if you want to know about headlights, we're going to be doing this in a future podcast. So, trust me, we're. It's in the books, it's going to be coming there. There's an explanation, the reason why we went from route square and then we started allowing the bubble, and it'll all be exposed on our headlight episode.
 
          But as we made those changes in the late 70s and into the 80s and more and more safety features got started being added in to the automotive industry, we needed to get vehicles changed and out into the marketplace as quick as possible and to do that we had to revert back to the most simplistic designs of all time. All these new safety features were just coming in line. We didn't know how to add them to all these amazing designs. You get a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. You're going to add front impact zones, you're going to add body cladding, you're going to add radial tires, a fully integrated independent suspension system, a front wheel drive system, airbags, seatbelts, crash proof glass, as safety features came out heavily during the 1970s.

          All along, while we're trying to save fuel because we can't sell these big, burly V8s anymore, the automotive industry and the evolution of automotive design took a back seat. We started going back to our first theory in automotive design. We went back to our square. That disappeared into the horizon. We started utilizing the box design to make brand new vehicles. It was easy to add all of these safety features to a standard box. 

           To add all of these safety features to a standard box, and because the industry in the 1970s took such a hit with the loss of big, burly V8s and the ability to design anything they wanted? Because we didn't understand how to get all of this new technology into brand new products, especially ones that look good and follow clean, smooth lines. We wound up going back to the drawing board, taking a look at the first theory we ever learned in design class and applying it to the automotive industry. We understood the fact that a two-box design, or in some cases almost a three-box design, can maximize space more efficiently than anything else, and by maximizing space we could fit as much as we need to into the product. So, by the mid 80s, nearly every car company around the globe was now utilizing a two-box design. It started becoming mainstay in every automotive corporation around the world. We were maximizing space but still creating brand new products with all the safety features and environmental regulations we had to have in. As the world around us changed and more things evolved and started getting added in to the plethora of brand-new vehicles, we started evolving our designs around it, our box designs.

         As I said, we went back to the most simplistic form of automotive design in the 1980s, just to fit all those new features and new regulations into one small package and sell it to the customers. We needed to make them look good, handle good and have everything in it. If you ever take a look back at the original Range Rover, it wasn't very luxurious. It was essentially a giant toaster on wheels. Hell. The original Caravan maximized interior space to the extreme. The only thing other than that that maximizes it even more are products like the Honda Element and Scion XB.
 
       Every market in the 1980s, like I said, except for high performance vehicles, was being taken over by the two-box design. Even entry-level sports cars like the Nissan Pulser, the AXA Sport and the Hyundai Scoupe they were all standard two-box designs. Volvo evolved out of the 70s out of what they were already using for two-box designs and made their vehicles look even more like two-box designs. Volvo, from the 80s and until the early 2000s, was essentially known as the car company who made the safest vehicles in the world. Why? Because what's tougher than a box? Literally Well, an egg. That is where automotive design started to make a change in the world. Why? Because what's tougher than a box? Literally Well, an egg.

​       That is where automotive design started to make a change in the 90s, where the teardrop in egg shapes. But that's because we started to learn the technology that was around us. We started smoothing out the edges of our box designs. If you look at the original Ford Bronco II, the first generation, and then you look at the second-generation kind of like the Broncos in the late 80s to the Broncos in the early 90s, like the one OJ Simpson was driving it's still a two-box design with clean edges. As technology got better and we became more advanced in adding all of that into our designs and into the vehicles we were creating for the marketplace, we're slowly managing to take away the two-box design. It still exists even in today's marketplace, and some companies still swear by them for specific markets Sedans, SUVs and trucks and vans. 

​            So, sedans, SUVs, trucks and vans were the number one place for two-box designs and as crossovers started coming out in the late 90s, this became another segment of the marketplace that utilized the two box designs. Crossovers maximized it because of their small footprint and essentially a crossover is a vehicle that's supposed to maximize and create the most efficient use of space around you. Because, you have to remember, crossovers are essentially tall wagons. The Ford Flex is a big part of that. It's a tall station wagon. Station wagons essentially had the two-box designs in the 80s and into the early 90s, but as they smoothed out and became more stream-like, like sedans by the mid to late 90s, they were losing that two-box image. Crossovers and compact vans were one of the few markets where this was still sticking together, even the SUVs.
 
           If you take a look at nearly every major SUV that started coming out in the 1980s and the early 90s, they were all box designs and some of the most famous ones were the biggest box designs out there the Broncos, the Cherokees, how the Blazers. They were all boxes on wheels, giant toasters rolling around the world. But boxes can still be cool and the utilization of a two-box design could still be something for the future. But as we learned through the 90s with the egg shape and teardrop, we learned how to make boxes not look like boxes. We started rounding out the corners. New technology into headlight designs allowed us to add bubbles so we can go anywhere we want. If you look at the Dodge Dynasty and Chrysler New Yorkers of the late 80s and early 90s, their evolution and changeover came from the Dodge Intrepid, which looks nothing like a two-box design but eventually then morphed into the Dodge Charger, which you may fight with me on this one and say that it's not a two-box design, but it is. It's just because a few of the corners have been rounded out.
 
       Two-box designs are still around. My Borrego is a two-box design. The Nissan Frontier's held on to the two-box design all the way up until three years ago when they finally changed the design. General Motors still utilizes the two-box design for their pickup trucks and even large-scale SUVs. It's still there and still kicking around, and there are new products utilizing it. 

​       Now, with the increase in the electric vehicle industry, box designs are starting to make a slight comeback Because, like I said, when new technology comes into play, we have to resort back to the most simplistic design format. Once we figure out how to get all of that technology into the most spacious design of all time, we can start working out the kinks to moving that technology into some of the most streamlined designs out there.
 
​         Technology it's one of the evolutionary factors in automotive design and the two-box design. The only reasons why we've ever used them in history are for two reasons One, to either maximize the space for a small product, or two, because we had technology we didn't understand and we couldn't fit into any design we made. So, we resorted back to our beginning. It's kind of like us as a human species we eventually resort back to were. We Kind of like us as a human species. We eventually resort back to where we started to see where we went wrong. We evolve from what we've learned, but if we don't learn anything, we'll never evolve. Had we not evolved out of the reverse bathtub and added tail fins, we would have never got giant spoilers and those sleek, big, burly chrome designs in the 1950s would have never morphed into the more streamlined designs of the 60s. It would have never added harder edges to it and given us vehicles like the Cadillac CTS and Edge Design. 

       Taking a stance and going back to our roots can help improve us for the future. The electric vehicle industry is starting to do that. Even though its platform is more versatile than the internal combustion engine, we still need to work with it. And with new companies coming out, utilizing the most simplistic two-box design could help them break through. Two companies out there maximizing this is Monroe Automotive and Bollinger Motors. If you've seen the Bollinger B1 and B2 pickups and SUV, it is literally the highest use of two-box design in history. More so, range Rovers or Volvos from the past and the Broncos, their MK, their SUV and pickup truck are the same. They're the most basic design elements and they're utilizing it to evolve their technology.

          Boxes Whoever thought a box can be part of our evolution in the automotive world? Without boxes we wouldn't know where to start. Literally, it would just be lines on a piece of paper that eventually form a product. That is something I originally learned when I first started designing and became self-taught. I used two lines on a piece of paper and then started wondering why my designs didn't flow properly. But when I learned about the box design and the disappearing lines into the horizon line, that's when I understood how I had to make things and every design out there in the world all starts as a two box design a lower box and an upper box.
 
       The only design out there that doesn't start out that way is a wedge, because a wedge doesn't need to be more than one box. By adding a passenger compartment on top of a design, we create the two-box design and with it we just get all boxed up. Thinking about it and designing it Hard boxed edges every single portion of the design until we start curving them into each other to give us our final look. All cars start out that way, but not all cars wind up that way. We only wind up that way when we don't understand the products that we need to put into it, that we make the design the simplest form we could think of, fit all of the technology in it and learn to evolve from there. Hell Henry, Ford did it when he put the world on wheels, when he built mass-produced vehicles at a lower rate than anyone else with the most simplistic design in history, and today new car companies are trying to do it. Hell Tesla is attempting to do a two-box wedge design for the Cybertruck, simple and yet evolutionary in the future of automotive design Boxes.  They're a wonderful thing. Even if your tour of the box factory is not a wonderful thing, it could still be something, part of your future. 

         So, have you been all boxed up? Do you remember boxy vehicles or known people that have owned boxy vehicles? How many of you have known somebody that owned an Element or a Nissan Cube or a scion xB or even a k5 blazer biggest toaster boxes on the road. Do you think they're cool? Do you think they're way too simple? Hell, tell us below, write a comment and send it out to everybody.
 
       Send this podcast out to people. Hell, wrap them up from last year's Christmas episode and throw them in a box, because that's what we're all about. We've wrapped you up and now we've boxed you up. I guess next year we're going to talk to you about bows on a car. But there are no bows, except for the bow tie on the front of a Chevrolet, which is a very funny story about where that symbol came from. We could talk about it in a future episode. Or send me an email and ask me where the original Chevrolet bow tie comes from.
 
         And after you, send this podcast out to your friends, your family, your well-wishers, your boss, your co-workers and you know person that always comes around looking for their stapler. Have you seen my stapler? I believe you have my stapler. After you send it out to those people, stop by the website, read some reviews, check out some of the ratings and go to the big or small. We have them all on the AutoLooks.net website.
 
           If you want to find something hell, you're looking for something or you're having trouble finding something send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. We can help you out. All from the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So for myself, Everett Jay, the host, the creator and operational manager of the AutoLooks website and the AutoLooks podcast, I'd like to say thank you from the AutoLooks podcast and we wish you all the best in this holiday season as you box up all the crap you don't want after Christmas and strap yourself in for B one fun wild ride as the AutoLooks.net podcast and AutoLooks podcast bring you as we all get boxed up this Christmas. 

Everett J.
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