The Mazda MS-X Concept was shown in 1997 at the Frankfurt and Tokyo Motor Shows. It was apparently designed at Mazda Research and Design Europe, to explore advanced design and interior concepts for a possible future production sedan. The 2003 Cadillac CTS, as it turns out.
Ok, it’s not exactly a dead-ringer all-round. But the front end has way too many similarities to be a coincidence.
Obviously, the rear ends are significantly different in the C pillar and certain other respects, yet there are some very key similarities too. The way the rear fenders peak above the trunk lid and attach to the C pillar, and the CHMSL integrated into that protrusion from the trunk lid. ironically, the rear tail lights on the Mazda have a decidedly more Caddy vibe than the CTS.
Obviously the Mazda is rounder and softer, while the CTS shows more hard edges. But with the exception of the rear half of the roof, the basic proportional and stylistic similarities cannot be dismissed.
I’m stunned!!! are you saying Cadillac copied Mazda???????
Well it was just a Mazda concept and one that had no impact on any production Mazda models. I’d imagine there are plenty of concept cars automakers put out that never lead to anything.
I see more 2007-2008 Maxima in the front end. The back of that MX-S definitely has a very strong Cadillac vibe to it though; the lights, the shape of the trunk & third brake light. Very strange
Maxima front could have been cloned from Citroen.
So, obviously these bold young-Turk designers had the same professor in design school but ended up working at different companies?
Seriously – there aren’t that many schools….. perhaps they’d even collaborated on a similar project design together as students.
Intriguing. I was not aware of the MS-X, but your observations seen to be spot on. I had wondered what inspired Cadillac to use that front end. It seemed like a real break with Cadillac traditions.
Personally I like the Art & Science look and hope it continues. It’s modern and retro at the same time. If you squint at the front you can see the pointed prow and vertical headlights of 60s Cadillacs. Same goes for the cathedral tail lights. I saw a couple of Cads on the H1 expressway yesterday coming back from Incheon, one a CTS and the other an STS,
and man, did they stand out from the crowd even from a long distance back.
Say what you will about other qualities of the brand, but they sure do look distinctive. More so than contemporary Lincolns,
that’s for sure. I saw some kind of Lincoln crossover (even I can’t keep their alphabet soup straight) and thought it was some kind of Kia until I got close enough to see the badge.
I really wanted an ATS but i checked the reliability data on them and apparently, they are not so hot.
I like the CTS as well, but here in Korea they are just a touch oversize for my needs, plus i ‘d have to pay a goodly sum to the .gov here for road tax due to the engine size.
So, Cruze it is for now.
What Cadillac “look” came before Art & Science? One of my old bosses had a ‘98 or so Eldorado that I was enamoured with. Maroon with white interior. It gave off modern, sleek, yet unmistakable Cadillac vibes.
The next Cadillac style that came down the road, I called “butt ugly.” Big and chunky lumps with approximately zero personality. Were these early A&S or their own thing?
The current A&S Cadillacs are much more acceptable, IMHO.
Soft sheer look is how I’d describe 90s Cadillac styling.
Ford did a better job copying the Audi 5000 w/ the crib job Taurus.
Lesson: copy something worth copying.
I like what Cadillac came up with vs. that Mazda thing.
Yes, copy or not, the Cadillac does seem more muscular than the somewhat bloated Mazda. That airy greenhouse on the Mazda is very appealing these days, though.
Agreed. The Cadillac takes the angle theme further and looks more edgy and muscular.
I thought the first CTS was a breath of fresh air for Cadillac but I think some of the details could have used some finessing, particularly the lights, grille, and wheel selections. Still, a great design.
I’m not sure I see enough of a similarity between the two to say the Mazda influenced the Caddy. Other than a vague similarity in the headlights and the body color panel between the lights and the grille there is barely a resemblance.
Why did Cadillac have to subcontract grille production for this car to Rubbermaid? It looked like shit new. With years of sun exposure it looks worse.
+1
I actually saw my first CTS on a revolving turntable at Narita airport.
That cheap grill was such a huge embarrassment. This is what’s supposed to pass for a Cadillac?
I couldn’t even image Elvis’ housekeeper driving one, let alone The King himself.
It didn’t help that being on the raised turntable made the car’s
asslook huge.The second generation grill was much better, though, and I have no objections to the latest iterations of the A&S look. I find the CT6 very handsome, although I note that
a. I think I have only seen one ‘in the wild’ in an area where they should be plentiful.
b. I had to look up the name – I could only remember Cadillac and 6.
All you were missing was the “T”, then… 😉
Yeah, but it could have been a Q or a V or an X or any other of the 26. Not as emotionally evocative as “El Dorado” either. I can never remember if CLR is a Cadillac or a bathroom cleaner.
It’s both! Getting the tire marks off the tub when you’re finished is a bear, though.
Great catch and investigative work Paul. No question there is a strong similarity in the details you highlight. Sadly, I don’t think the car business is any different than any other industry influenced by design. Copying competitors, and using other’s design look and feel seems to be common place. It’s rampant in many industries including marketing. And car styling is marketing.
I remember when I took graphic design courses in the 80s, professors were saying back then that thanks to computers and the ease to copy any electronic file, our work was never less safe from plagiarism. The Internet just makes using others ideas for ‘inspiration’ that much more seamless. So much so that it is totally accepted (and expected) now in many fields.
Even if it doesn’t appear ethical.
The sad thing of all of this plagiarism is that it really cannot be fully proven and certainly not enforced in any meaningful way. What could Mazda do? Sue GM? After years of litigation and millions spent, it would boil down to a judge determining it all moot, or a jury awarding a token amount. It would never pay for any damages, and only lawyers would make money off the suit. How long has the Apple/Samsung war over the design of the iPhone and S phones gone on now? And really, who has benefitted from the suit save the attorneys?
It has been said that there really is nothing totally new in design, and there is more than a bit of truth in that statement. Add in the regulations and requirements needed to meet government mandates, and cars look more and more the same. Since fins and doo-dads are kind of out of the question as design features any more, really, the shape of the lights, some creases and body lines, and the choice of what aerodynamic roofline one chooses is about the only thing differentiating different makes and models. Even the supercars all look similar to me. We are seeing more cars look similar rather than anything really standing out with a bold new design statement.
I don’t see Mazda suing GM in 2018 for a design that went out of production 10 years ago. They’d also have to prove damages, and they never used the design nor its details themselves.
One of my favorite things about A&S right from the get-go is the vertical headlight stack which DID go back to Cadillac’s past. It’s not hard to imagine wider horizontal headlights on the CTS which wouldn’t have been shocking after years of Cadillacs having wide horizontal rectangles for headlights. I like it the way it was actually built better. As nice as the CTS was, and others have been, I think that the second CTS is still the best look of A&S. It didn’t have an awkward line on the coupe or sedan (the wagon looked like an obvious afterthought to me, though I still like it).
I didn’t mean that Mazda would (or should) sue in 2018, but they may have had a better chance in 2003 when the CTS came out. Even then, it would have been a long row to hoe, and at the end, all probably for naught. The courts in the US have very few cases where a design has been considered cribbed from another’s work, and the only recent verdicts that seem to enforce any rights of an artist to their work has been in music (think of Robin Thicke’s losing the case that Blurred Lines was a ripoff of Marvin Gaye’s work Got to Give it Up.) More likely, any lawsuit would end up a hot mess like the Apple/Samsung fiasco, never really settling the issue and different courts handing down different verdicts.
However, it really does beg the question on whether the Cadillac design “borrowed” elements of the Mazda design, or if it was just a case of similarly trained designers (most went to the same three design schools, which supplies the majority of designers in the automotive industry worldwide) all producing similar product.
Say what you will about Art & Science, it does give the brand a distinctive design language that’s easily recognizable. I was driving in heavy traffic last week and a big Caddy sedan in black pulled out ahead of me; I immediately knew what brand it was in a sea of mostly blobs.
Lincoln doesn’t have this brand recognition any more, they are completely lost.
That’s some fine sleuthing!
The funny thing is there have been subsequent Art & Science Cadillacs to follow the first CTS where the details are even more blatantly cribbed from this Mazda, the headlights resemble the STS more and the taillights heavily resemble the DTS.
One design language I really liked was Ford’s “New Edge.” The Focus, Cougar and original Ka were all interesting designs. I also liked how they tried to incorporate it onto the Fox-platform Mustang.
My favorite New Edge design was the 1995 GT90 concept.
https://youtu.be/oWp9BndPIFY
It’s too bad it didn’t last very long.
I liked new edge styling too, I felt even at the time when the CTS debuted Cadillac simply copied that language. I still hate that Ford called that generation Cougar a Cougar though, but it actually was nice looking in its segment, and I still hold those Mustangs in quite high regard, I vastly prefer them to the current gen ones in terms of aesthetics and packaging.
I loved the New Edge makeover of the Mustang. Terrific mix of angles and curves.
People gave some New Edge designs grief at the time but they were distinctive and some of them (Cougar, AU Falcon) have aged well.
Fords new edge designed ruined the AU falcon much the same way as a certain MG styling mock up (basically a pile of clay) by an Austin stylist hijacked another British Leyland division small sports car and ruined it with its odorous stying despite hundreds of thousands of pounds of tooling already built along with steel bodied prototypes.
I think New Edge was garbage, it did make the Focus distinctive, Ka was more influenced by the Renault Twingo and perhaps the 1983 Ghia Barchetta Concept Car, the Cougar was awful and GT90 is like a girl at school who thought was striking only to realise after a Larry David style epiphany wasn’t very pretty after all.
The retro GT was far more prettier and the current GT is like a slight but athletic supermodel compared to the fat/short looking GT90.
I glad corporate design language wasn’t a thing when Jaguar was designing the E type other wise it would have looked like some weird looking forerunner of the modern Morgan Aero 8 with design cues from the SS and XK120-150 series.
I don’t understand the need to make every car in the line up look exactly the same for next 4-8 years or whatever model cycle the company has.
Not related I guess. The Mazda looks like an ugly duck compared to the elegant Caddy.
As a trained car designer and design researcher (pompous, me?) I’d call this a coincidence. There’s also the chance the two cars drew on the same third set of references. The author should try to find as many other similar cars to show how close the Cadillac is before declaring the Caddy a copy. This kind of reinvdntion happens a lot in design and I’ve even done it myself with no intention to copy.
You’re welcome to your opinion. Having been a student of design for decades, I don’t find this obvious case of “copying” to be egregious. It’s been happening since the car was invented, and forever for other things, like art and fashion. It’s human nature.
Given that the Mazda or its design language never went into production, there’s really not much of an issue with this. Harley Earl at GM went to Europe every summer to be inspired by the latest automotive fashions, and his successor Bill Mitchell bought several new (usually Italian) sports cars to set in and around the GM design center to “inspire’ his designers. There’s countless cases of blatant cribbing in so many GM and other American cars.
And of course the Europeans did it too. As in the 1960 Corvair being copied by or influencing a raft of cars around the globe. https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/automotive-history-how-the-1960-corvair-started-a-global-design-revolution/
worse than copying a Mazda ? – sticking a (granted) good looking front end on a holden !
Wow, I didn’t know about this Mazda concept but the resemblance is uncanny. Good find!
This design language seems more appropriate on a Cadillac than a Mazda, though.
Yet it’s so unlike anything we’ve seen from Mazda before or since, totally out of step. You don’t suppose GM subcontracted out their new look for Cadillac, to make sure the old guard fuddy-duddies among their design staff didn’t mess up again? Surely not….
MRDE, eh? Oh, dear. I’ll file that along with Toyota’s TRD and, um, Toyota’s MR2 (as pronounced in French: very similar to “merde”, which is French for ѕhіt).
hehehe. The very reason Jack Brabham was advised to change the name of Motor Racing Developments…
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/automotive-history-jack-brabham-you-make-your-own-luck/
No different than TRD, pronounced turd.
Seems the Asians have a case of cophrophilia.
That’s got to be the cheapeat looking grill ever on that baby Cadillac. I am not a big fan of the 21 St century Cadillacs. It does look better than the stubby Buick cars though.
Sorry but I don’t agree, all that can be seen is vertical head and taillights and if you start searching for that design theme you will find plenty of other examples. Besides that they share no similarities in shape or character, actually this sows the difference between the slowly expiring 90s “bio” design and early 2000s trend that for example Ford called “new edge”. From my experience as a designer I can tell you that these two were following entirely different ideas and yes, it IS coincidence, you might not believe how often this could happen but that’s the dirty little secret of car design – it’s really hard to do something entirely new 🙂 As soon as you start sketching with your pen you can almost be certain that someone else somwhere drew the same thing 🙂
Actually what I see is the tail lights of the 90’s Eldorado used as an inspiration for the Mazda MS-X. But I must confess that in the middle of an old and outworn style from the 90’s, the designers of Cadillac could create a beautiful and long lasting style which is still very imposing and contemporary.
Well, who’s copying whom?
http://autoweek.com/article/car-life/conspiracy-exposed-we-uncover-real-origins-cadillacs-art-and-science-design
I’m not being too critical here; very few ideas are truly original. Cadillac made “Art and Science” their own, just like the Hoffmeister kink or Pontiac’s GTO. There’s a difference between emulating and owning the design, and I think both Cadillac (and I’ll assume Paul) own this.
Art and Science is far better than other branding motifs – Mazda’s “smile” was a miss, as is the current Toyota/Lexus grille replacing a bumper. Kia’s toothed grille is smart.
In short, Cadillac made this language their own and moved well beyond the awkward Mazda prototype.
That Mazda front end became the first generation Mazda3. The bonnet lines and grille are virtually identical to the Sedan version (which had different sheet metal to the more common Hatch). The rest of it, not so much.