Every discipline has its own jargon, and so does car design. These are five of the most interesting terms from the car designer’s vocabulary, “translated” into plain English.
DLO or daylight opening
Nothing beats a well-placed acronym and sounds smarter than a meeting companion. DLO, or Daylight Opening, is probably the worst example. The term probably comes from architecture, but today’s car designers use it to describe the glass area on the body side of the vehicle between the first and last roof pillars. A widespread visual trick is to finish one or more roof pillars in black and visually connect the glass plates to make the “DLO” look bigger than it really is.
Pillars A, B, C
The columns that support the roof are alphabetically identified in the order of “A” for the columns other than the windshield, “B” for the columns behind the front entrance, and “C” for the rearmost columns. Station wagons, minivans, and SUVs also have “D” pillars due to the roof extending further back, requiring more structural support.
Beltline
The “belt line” is the ideal line connecting the bases of the side windows and is an important graphic element of car design.
shoulder
Car designers have applied quite a few anatomical terms to vehicle parts, but perhaps the strangest because the “shoulder” is below the “beltline.”
With the exception of minivans and small cars, as part of the vehicle’s “mission”, the interior space needs to be maximized relative to the outside dimensions, but the body extends beneath the side windows.
This is something designers can’t have enough to make the car look more “planted” and have a more aggressive “stance” on the road … at the expense of internal space. Its surface area is called the “shoulder” and is especially noticeable in cars disguised as sports.
From dash to axle
This is the distance between the front wheel spindle and the car dashboard. Its aesthetic importance comes from its impact on car proportions and the way it “reads” the shape of the car. Since the 1900 Daimler “Mercedes” first placed the
engine under the steel bonnet in front of the driver, the long front end has visually suggested a powerful engine, speed, and status. This hasn’t changed, given that even the innovative Tesla Model S is compliant with the visual language of 100 years ago. Still, you may see this concept gradually disappear as we move to the mass adoption of electric vehicles.
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