Go to an entirely new area of the website unifying the Color Revolution, Interior Design, Fashion and Women Car Designer stories relating to Harley Earl, just click below:

There you will be able to better reflect on many different reports on the topic of how "The color revolution had its inception in the mind of Harley J. Earl, GM vice president in charge of styling, in the late '30s and development of the idea was started at once." 

The color story of GM Styling is an interesting and important one. Harley Earl learned through GM dealerships and his own departmental research that in order to more easily clear their showrooms of old models just before new-model announcement time, many dealers were painting their new cars. 

Reasoning that variety of color choice must be the customer's preference, Mr. Earl set himself to more closely scrutinize the situation. Only three or four basic color choices were available to the public at that time and these were conservatively somber. 

World War II and the switch from automobile to defense production delayed the development of Mr. Earl's color program. But, there was the opportunity to think and to plan ahead. After the war, and as automobile production began to climb back toward normal, GM Styling's color program began to blossom.

It's not like Earl started experimenting on the dramatic affects his "color revolution" would have on car sales in the first 10 years of his career in Detroit. As the two news stories below clearly confirm, he was going down this road long before he moved from Hollywood, CA. to Motordom in 1927. Obviously, this Earl-milestone dramatically impacted the modern auto industry and one thing still looms large: The world today would be a duller place if Harley Earl' had never started "a color revolution" in automobile designing.