Hasta La Ideas

In what can only be considered a blow to the field of automotive design, yesterday Ford announced the pending retirement of J Mays amidst a management shake-up (our words, not theirs) at the company. Group Vice President and Chief Creative Officer of Design Mays will place his pencils in the can for the last time on January 1st, the last day of his 33-year career. (Interestingly enough, it was also revealed yesterday—this time by Reuters—that Ford CEO Alan Mulally is on the shortlist at Microsoft to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Whether these two things are linked will presumably become the source of much speculation.)

J Mays is a man we’ve covered plenty of times before, going all the way back to the inception of this blog, when he was fresh off of VW and Audi and a relatively recent addition to Ford. In the ’90s and early 2000s the Art Center alumnus revitalized the VW Bug and brought back the Ford T-Bird at a time when retro seemed like something interesting to try, rather than returning to the well after the taps had been depleted. Most recently he’s had his fingerprints on Ford’s F-150, Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, forthcoming Falcon, and even two cars that don’t begin with “F,” the Mustang and the Taurus.

Ford cannot help but miss him; never mind his production work—during his 16-year tenure, his concept work alone shows a man who never settled into a staid bag of tricks, but instead continued to innovate and jump between different styles as it pertained to each project. And while we’ll continue to see roadgoing cars that he’s worked on long after he’s retired, we thought we’d take a look at the awesome-looking never-rans, our favorite J Mays concepts from his time at Dearborn:

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