Mumbai: By the end of this year, some of the oldest carmakers in the US like Ford, Cadillac, Oldsmobile and Buick will have celebrated their 100^th anniversaries as automakers. But how many people know that automotive design is only 75 years old?

What that means is, 75 years ago, getting a car with some style meant you could have any colour you wanted as long as it was black.

By the year 1926 Alfred Sloan, then president of General Motors, realised that all cars were very similar to each other and design was going to be a deciding factor in purchases. So he set up an art and colour section to GM and got Harley Earl to head it up.

Harley Earl was running a speciality auto body shop in Hollywood, California, much like Dilip Chhabria does in Mumbai. Earl took Cadillacs, Buicks and Ford Model Ts and fashioned custom-built coaches for movie stars.

Earl went on to influence design by giving recognisable features to cars such as chrome, tail fins, curved windshields, and the infamous Motoramas. He also delivered the first concept car, the low, wide Buick Y-job. Never meant to be built, the Y-job was instead a conceptualisation of the company's design direction.

Even today, Earl's design legacy still influences modern cars.