Let’s Look At Some Car Cutaways Made With Saws, Not Pens

Who doesn’t like car cutaways? Monsters, that’s who. Filthy, depraved monsters. And while we usually think of car cutaways as being the incredible product of a skilled illustrator’s hand, there’s another way to make them: for real. What I mean by this is not drawing a precision, beautifully-rendered cutaway, but actually taking a car and cutting it pretty much in half, then taking pictures! So let’s look at some of those.

Of course, in modern times, these sorts of things would be done with CGI and computers and math and punch cards and all of that sort of thing. But back in the day, these kinds of things took some incredible skill, even beyond the incredible skills needed to do normal car illustrations.

I mean, look at some of these:

They’re incredible! But what do you maybe do if you don’t have access to such an illustrator? Or maybe you want to have many views of a cutaway, or see it in true three dimensions? In that case, carmakers tried a different approach, one that took a very different set of skills, but significant skill nonetheless: just cutting the damn car in half.

Well, it wasn’t always strictly in half, there seem to have been a sort of spectrum of approaches, which I’ll try to show you here. Also, and I’m not really exactly sure why, but this approach seems to have been much more common among European carmakers? I know I’ve seen American cars cut in half as well, but they tended to get used for training schools and things like that more than showing up in ads. I have no idea why.

Anyway, let’s look at some of these. We’ll start with this Fiat 500:

This 500 is sort of the baseline minimum of a physical car cutaway: remove a door/s, cut out any pillars, and if there’s a passenger area with seating, cut away the body there. This is the quickest approach, and is really only used to show the passenger accommodation, not the overall packaging of all a car’s systems.

Also, that lady looks kinda pissed to be stuck in a Fiat 500 with one whole side missing. And the dude sure looks focused on not-driving.

Then there’s a much more comprehensive version, as seen on this pre-’62 Volkswagen Beetle. I think it may be a ’59 or ’60:

Here we have an entire side removed, but the car isn’t exactly halved; seen from the front, I’d think we’d have oh, 75% of the car’s width remaining? For example, note that the bumpers and corner of the rear fender remain intact. So, it’s still mostly there, just peeled open.

VW seemed to like to make these, and would sometimes use them without shoving a colorful family in there first, as you can see in that Type 3 above.

Enough is cut away on these that from a side-on view, you can see the car’s full packaging: where the engine is, the size and location of the luggage compartments, all that. This gives a very clear view of the car’s full packaging.

We can go further, though! This Mini, from about the same era as the VW, is cut pretty much completely in half, right down the middle. You can, of course, see exactly how everything is packaged, and as a bonus, things like the rear seat and even those suitcases in the trunk are cut in half, too, and the drivetrain is very exposed, though the engine/transmission hasn’t been bisected.

But we can go even further!

Now we’re getting even a bit beyond a cutaway and into a cut-off. Here we see a Citroën 2CV, with the body not just cut away, but entirely removed, and replaced with a bent pipe in the shape of the former body’s silhouette. You can definitely see how everything would be packaged here, including the 2CV’s gloriously weird shifter setup, which I once covered here in detail, if you’re curious.

Okay, there’s only one place to go from here:

Just to hell with the body completely! That’s what Renault did in this brochure for the Renault 4, just took the whole damn body off. You get a sense of the packaging this way, but without at least some kind of boundary of the body delineated, it’s a lot less useful.

Like, would that dog actually have enough headroom to perch on those suitcases with the body in place? Maybe?

Also, note the R4 uses a similar hand-through-the-dashboard sort of approach to the shifter as well, like the 2CV.

I’m all for cutaways, though, however they’re done. And if you get a chance to see one of the physical ones in person, oh boy, that’s a treat.