T​he 10 greatest car designers of all times

N​ow I could fill up almost half of this article with the following people.

T​hey are Peter Szymanowski, Wilhelm Hofmeister, Paul Bracq and Claus Luthe and they all have one thing in common, or two things actually. They're all dressed in an incredibly stylish way and they all were responsible for BMW's design at some point in the 20th century. But since you would (maybe not completely falsely) call me biased if I did that, I will only put one of them into my top 10 list. Or maybe two.

R​ight, now to the unordered list

P​aul Bracq

Y​ou already saw him in one of the pictures above since he was BMW's head of design from 1970 to 1973. This is a rather short time considering that since the 1930s BMW only had six different chief designers, but it was long enough for him to carry Wilhelm Hofmeister's Neue Klasse design into a new age. He designed the first 3 Series, the first 5 Series, the first 6 Series and the first 7 Series as well as the BMW Turbo X1, a concept car that in many ways resulted in the M1, and all of them were literal masterpieces. Already before working for BMW, Bracq came up with some beautiful designs like the Mercedes 230 SL, 250 S and 600.

P​ietro Frua

W​hen talking about the best car designers, Italy is a good place to go to or at least to look at. In a recent article I wrote, I mentioned that Pietro Frua would easily be in the top 5 of my favorite car designers, so he obviously made the top 10 as well. It shouldn't be difficult to explain why, in fact I think the pictures underneath will speak for themselves.

G​iorgio Giugiaro

Thinking of Italian car designers it's hard to ignore one of the greatest names in automotive design, Giorgetto Giugiaro, or Giorgio Giugiaro because for some reason he couldn't decide for just one name. Unfortunately he couldn't decide for only making great looking cars either, but luckily there are a lot of masterpieces among his many many designs.

M​arcello Gandini

W​e will stay in Italy for a bit longer, because someone who definitely mustn't be left out is Gandini. He designed some cars that are often considered as some of the most beautiful ones to ever have been made, like the Lamborghini Miura, the Alfa Romeo Montreal or the Lancia Stratos while working for Bertone.

H​arley J Earl

L​eaving Italy for a lot of states that decided they're all one big country the first automotive designer most people would think of is probably Harley Earl. He was incredibly influencal and also incredibly good. He mainly focused on designing concepts, but they had a strong influence on GM's production cars from the late 1940s and the 1950s.

V​irgil Exner

H​arley Earl had one main rival, Chrysler's Virgil Exner. Whenever one of them designed a new car, the other one had to design one with slightly bigger tailfins and slightly more chrome. But there was a big difference, because while GM was thankful to have Earl with them, the boss of Chrysler made Exner responsible for the unpopularity of the compact 1962 models, even though he himself told Exner to make the cars smaller without Exner approving of that. This resulted in him being fired, but at least he left a considerable legacy. And even after leaving Chrysler, he created a series of Revival Cars together with his son, in which they imagined how the cars of gone car companies might have looked like in the 1960s, and when Stutz was actually revived he became their designer.

B​ill Mitchell

A​fter Harley Earl left GM, a new era of car design began with Bill Mitchell. He got rid of the tail fins, double antennas, continental kits and two tone paintjobs and designed his cars in a far more simple but still very beautiful way. The internet's favorite fact about Mitchell is that his designs granted GM around 72 million sales, so I think I'll mention it as well. In fact I just did.

R​obert Opron

M​oving back to Europe, you'll notice a country that's known for long breads and some fairly useless tower. It's also known for quirky cars, but there are beautiful cars that came from France as well. A man who designed several of those is Robert Opron, who sadly passed away earlier this year. But before he did that, he designed cars for Citroen, Renault and Simca, and brought up aerodynamic hatchback saloons like the Citroen CX and the Renault 25.

L​eonardo Fioravanti

I​f an Italian with that name designs Ferraris you just know that the results are gonna be great. And exactly this is the case with Fioravanti, who created the looks of legendary Ferraris like the 288 GTO, 308 GTB, 365 GT4 2+2 or the 265 GTB/4 Daytona. He also designed some cars for other Italian car brands and a lot of concepts for his own design studio.

W​ilhelm Hofmeister

I​ just couldn't resist putting Hofmeister into this list, as he's not only responsible for the "Neue Klasse" models and with that for BMW's jump into the future and onto the world market, but in some ways even for today's BMWs as apart from very few exceptions every BMW has the so-called Hofmeister-kink behind the side rear windows. It results in a more unique and beautiful looking c-pillar and has been copied by numerous other car manufacturers.

G​iovanni Michelotti

S​ince I didn't write numbers in front of the car designers in this list I'm just hoping now that nobody notices that this is actually the 11th member of my top 10, but I can't possibly leave Michelotti out. He's often called the Pablo Picasso of car design, partly because apparently he designed or at least helped designing more than 1,200 cars and partly because there are a lot of masterpieces among them. Actually he also was involved in the shaping of the BMW 700 and 2002, which are in the second and fourth to last pictures of Wilhelm Hofmeister's gallery as he was the responsible head of design.

O​bviously there are a lot more great cars designers, but the ones I listed here are my elev, ehh ten favorite ones. And before you storm off to the comment section to complain about certain designers not having made the list, keep in mind that quite a few of them nicely balanced out their good work with some proper trash designs.