William L. Mitchell (July 2, 1912 — September 12, 1988) was an important General Motors designer from the late 1930s to 1977 per GM's mandatory 65 age retirement.
Born in Pennsylvania, Bill Mitchell was the son of a Buick dealer[1]. As a young man he moved to New York where his artistic talent gained him a job with an advertising agency named "Barron Collier"[1] . Here he prepared the first ever US advertisements for MG cars[1]. Mitchell was recruited to General Motors' new "Art and Colour Section" on 15 December 1935 by Harley Earl himself: Earl's had been impressed by Mitchell's sketches of racing cars[1].
Mitchell succeeded Harley Earl as Vice President for Styling in December 1958[1]. Though Earl had great respect for Mitchell and appointed him as his successor, the men had diametrically opposed styling philosophies. Earl favored bloated bodies festooned with gimmicky effects and chrome trim, while Mitchell favored smoothly sculptured, unadorned shapes that let their artful sculpting provide the drama. The transition between the two designers' regimes came at precisely the right time, as the garish excesses of the fifties had run their course and Mitchell had a fresh approach that perfectly fit the times.
In the sixties, Mitchell promoted what he called the "sheer look," a "shoulderless" drop off from a car's windows to its sides.
Mitchell gave GM designers the assignment of combining Rolls Royce and Ferrari styling cues to create Buick's classic 1963 Riviera. According to a popular story, Mitchell got the idea for Riviera in Paris. He had originally envisaged the design for Cadillac Division, as a new La Salle, "a baby Cadillac". An encounter with a shark while skin diving in the Bahamas inspired Mitchell's Corvette Shark show car, his SS racer and the production 1963 Corvette Stingray, largely designed by Larry Shinoda under Mitchell's direction. Mitchell's quirky fondness for split rear windows as featured on the 1957 Buick and 1963 Corvette Stingray coupe wasn't shared by his fellow stylists or the buying public and both cars dropped the feature after public resistance.
William "Bill" Mitchell's staff appreciated his ribald sense of humor. He was known as one who enjoyed adult beverages and the occasional party. In addition to his work in the auto industry, Mitchell was also an accomplished artist.
During the 1973-74 energy crisis which brought on a greater demand for smaller cars in place of the larger cars that had been GM's bread and butter profit machine for decades, Mitchell oversaw the styling and design efforts of GM's downsized full-sized and intermediate-sized cars which were introduced in 1977 and 1978, respectively, some of the last designs that he would lead. However, when it came to compact and subcompact cars, Mitchell's was quoted in Ed Cray's "Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times" that "Small cars are like Vodka. Sure people will try them out but they won't stay with them."
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