Wedges, Waymos, and Movie Star Wheels

A look at the Petersen Automotive Museum’s exhibitions and hidden treasures in the Vault

E arlier this week I wrote about the Petersen Automotive Museum’s permanent collection of historic cars, some stately, some snazzy, some faster than the Road Runner on steroids. And they’re presented with clarity and intelligence. In the Los Angeles museum, we move at an easy, absorbed pace from gorgeous cars to the history of car parts, from airbags to horseshoe grilles, dorsal fins, tires, and teardrop fenders. I love it, and I’ve never been a car nut. Today I’ll write about the museum’s top-notch temporary exhibitions and the Vault, less an underground garage and more a treasure chest and an experience I’ll never forget.

Its exhibitions point to catholic curatorial taste — they’re not blinkered — and edgy themes. Driven by Possibility: Waymo’s Road to Autonomous Transport was a revelation, first because I’d wondered what those ubiquitous, squat cars in L.A. were, all with a revolving dome. Driven by Possibility taught me that they weren’t new designs gone wrong, or nerdy cars with an overhead espresso maker, or drone launchers — we’ll all have drones sooner or later — but driverless cars.

The show is straightforward and provocative. It looks at the car, the tech, and the history and charts its move from science fiction to today’s roads. And it’s comforting. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m willing to give it a try and without an EMT tail.

The exhibition starts with the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and its Futurama exhibition, which imagined America in 1960. Then, Norman Bel Geddes, the visionary curator, predicted magic highways where driverless cars would scoot via electromagnetic waves. Daimler-Benz developed a prototype in the 1980s — the tech cost a fortune — and the Defense Department got involved, too. Carnegie Mellon produced the 1984 Terregator — short for “terrestrial navigator” — which had video cameras, a sonar ring, and a scanning laser range finder. It’s on view, stumpy and awkward but insistent. Handy for hazardous waste removal and a road trip on the Moon but what about we plebes?

After 40,000 test drives through closed-course mini-cities, Waymo inched into its niche in the marketplace. The 2015 Firefly looks like a scoop of ice cream with a cherry on top, but this cherry is packed with radar and cameras. It’s called a perception dome. Mixed with the vehicles on display is wall text written by someone with a talent for matching words with images deftly enough to enhance both.

The Firefly resolved a central dilemma of fitting equipment and riders in one comfortable space, a comforting one, too, since it looks like a marshmallow, too sweet and innocent to be a death trap. A 2021 Jaguar I-PACE is there, too. Who wouldn’t want to ride in a Jag? There’s plenty of video, with testimonials from parents who use Waymos to transport children, confident that they won’t be molested or kidnapped. Blind riders have had new worlds open to them.

Driven by Possibility is a collaboration between Waymo and the museum, a tricky business, but the Petersen is frank about it, and the exhibition is about design and tech history. The cars have gone millions of miles over a very short ten-year period. Museum shows aren’t obliged to address every question or issue touching the topic at hand. That Waymo horror stories are in the news, though very rarely, is left to others. The topic is fascinating and the story telling coherent and engaging. These days, that’s a gold medal performance. And how often do we go into a museum and feel that we’re looking at something radical unfold?

The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, which closed a couple of weeks ago, was a design exhibition and about cars as art and art history, since wedge-shaped cars are mostly creatures of the 1960s into the early ’90s, the age of minimalism. Wedge car design reacted to a surfeit of round forms in, say, Art Deco cars such as the 1939 Bugatti Type 57C Cabriolet, a voluptuous car, or even a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, a car you want to hug. Too much ornamentation troubled Italian stylists and American hot rod designers as well. Cars with flat planes, sharp edges, and tapering fronts looked as if they could cut through air. No curves. No chrome. No fins. And, as it unfolded, no market.

About ten cars are on view. There’s the 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP 400 “Periscopio,” designed by wedge guru Marcello Gandini. It was so much of a slice that it had a roof-mounted periscope as a rearview mirror. Its flat planes are dramatic. A steep nose pitch provides a front-end downforce, so the bumper-to-roof shape looks like one unbroken line. Wedge cars ascend, period. Gandini’s 1970 Lancia Stratos Zero concept car, 33 inches tall, has a recumbent front seat and is entered through the windshield. I wouldn’t even try to get into either. The dashboards look like cockpits.

These radical, impractical designs did creep into the mass market. The chic, angular 1976 Honda Civic “Lady” wasn’t intended for production, but its shape more than flirted with the wedge and influenced future Hondas. The Pontiac Fiero was a mass-market car with wedge blood, but the look never had much zoom in it. Americans like their cars Rubenesque. Still, the concept’s not dead. The black, menacing Lo-Res Car, designed in 2016 by the architect Rem Koolhaas, is, let’s call a spade a spade, a sculpture. Yes, it has an engine and can hit 31 mph, but it’s based on the Lamborghini Countach — a scanner morphed it into its purist form. Then there’s the Tesla Cybertruck, a blot on the roadways.

The Vault is in the Petersen basement, running the length of the L.A. city block. Though it looks like an underground parking garage, it’s the mother lode of masterpiece cars and cars with provenance. Close to 300 cars and motorcycles live there. It costs extra to visit, but it’s essential. Last year it was reorganized with chronology in mind, more or less, so it makes more sense than the haphazard arrangement aboveground that was heavy on Hollywood.

Visitors can go on tours, but there are roving volunteers, too, and I was amazed at how deeply informed they were, and not just the geezers. Young volunteers were trivia troves, too. I chatted with one — a twentysomething woman — about the car that the little old lady from Pasadena would have driven. I knew it was, as Jan and Dean told us and the Beach Boys confirmed, “a brand-new, shiny red, super-stock Dodge.” She knew it was a 1964 Dodge Polara 500 Max Wedge, and, no, they didn’t have one, but the 1968 Dodge Charger R/T is close — it’s a muscle car in the Petersen’s Fast and Furious show. She took me to the very fast 1959 Balchowsky Ol’ Yeller. I’d never heard of it, but it’s built from scratch using secondhand parts and named after Old Yeller, a dog hero in a 1957 Disney movie and close to the colloquial junkyard dog. It was a homegrown American response to elite, expensive European race cars.

In the Vault, we’re free to wander and discover what catches our eye. Jayne Mansfield’s pink Lincoln Premiere is in the collection. She died in a car, driving another car, when I was nine. It was a huge headline story that sent me to the dictionary to look up “decapitated.” Her car slammed into the back of a 16-wheeler, sliding and impacting under the truck. Hence, I learned, the later safety addition of what are called Mansfield bars under the back bumpers of trucks.

The Petersen doesn’t do much with car safety, which seized control of much of car design in the 1970s and ’80s. In the Vault is a Tucker ’48, which its visionary maker, Preston Tucker, called “sassy,” and that it is. It looks a bit like a torpedo and seems to move even when standing still. The first thing I noticed was its cyclops headlight, a third headlight smack in the middle, between the traditional right and left headlights. That’s for safety. The car had seat belts and the cyclops light turned with the steering angle to enhance visibility around corners. The dashboard was padded, the windshield popped out on impact, and a roof bar protected drivers in a rollover. There were four-wheel disc brakes for faster stopping. The car infamously flopped because of engine problems, cost, financial scandals, and Big Three connivance in killing new ideas as well as small competitors.

The Vault’s high point for lots of visitors will be the suite of head-of-state cars displayed in a single line running nearly the entire length of the room. They’re relics but with a whiff of civic history. The selection starts with the first presidential armored car, a 1942 Lincoln Custom Limousine, with heavy steel plates everywhere, step plates for security to ride on, bulletproof glass, a rear-mounted antenna for one of the first FM car radios, and oh, yes, flag holders. The thing’s a monster and had to be reworked by hand to look normal. FDR used it first for travel in D.C., in Hyde Park, at Yalta, and, I learned, as a canoodle car for rides with Lucy Mercer, his mistress. Having Eleanor as a wife, he deserved a diversion. The Secret Service had seized Al Capone’s armored car and given it to Ford as a model.

Next to it is the 1971 Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman Landaulet, launched a few years earlier as its flagship model, its biggest and best, named after luxurious Pullman train cars, and meant for diplomats, royals, moguls, and heads of state. Lots of push-button features appealed to its notorious owner: Saddam Hussein. I asked why there were so many dings on the sides of the trunk and the hood. They’re from the Republican Guards dismounting the standing platforms. Their rifled butts would hit the car upon exit. I’m told that this three-ton beast goes from zero to 60 mph in less than four seconds.

In the Vault, many visitors go straight for the race cars or the motorcycles, not for the fame of past owners but for design and mechanical intricacy about which they knew a lot. The old, long-gone makers attracted me along with their distinct designs. I’d never heard of the Italian maker Cisitalia, whose 1947 cranberry 202 Coupe has a hood, roof, body, tires, grille, hubcaps, and fenders working together as a complementary, united group of curves. So subtle, but no surprise since Italy gave us Canova, Raphael, and Borromini, masters of the fluid curve.

I didn’t know that Du Pont made cars. Its 1929 Model G Speedster is rakish, with an internally lit eagle-head hood ornament made of Lalique crystal. The car is black with a red undercarriage and red interior for extra huzzah-huzzah. I loved the 1915 Petite Speciale, made with women in mind by, yes, the Princess Motor Car Company. It’s small, white, with a high roof for ladies with hats, beveled glass windows, puffed leather seats, lots of nickel plating, and no mussing and fussing with a crank. It has electric ignition.

I can’t write about a museum without helpful hints. That wouldn’t be me. The Petersen does a lot of expensive temporary exhibitions. After a point, they distract from the permanent collection, which is rich and intense. I’d do fewer of them, opening space for permanent galleries devoted to subjects like the energy that powers a car, marketing, and the dealer economy. I’d put the entire collection of cars online. Right now, only 100 are online, with minimal statistics and history. I’d enhance website pages on current and past exhibitions. The Petersen’s too stingy with describing what’s on view. All mere quibbles about a fabulous museum.