Some people who want to know the future spend a lot of money on Barron's, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, market newsletters, and so on. Others read tea leaves, sheep entrails, and the like. We're here to push an underutilized crystal ball: car design.

Turns out you can use car design from the period right after World War II as a kind of sociological crystal ball. Let's try it, and then we'll see if we can do the same trick with present-day, millennial design. What we're aiming for here is a way to make a guess about life and culture in the coming decade (2000-2010).

PART I: The 1950s

Consider the vehicle above, General Motors' 1950 high concept car, the LeSabre. It toured the country, indeed the world, for several years, and in its time was famous, seeming to embody in one object a convenient summary of what everybody agreed was bound to be the capital-f Future.

Sleek ("streamlined" was the word then), curvy and just a little bulbous, the LeSabre showed us as masters of metal. We could bend it and join it in the most seductive, quasi-sexual ways. You call those massive chrome projections up front "bumpers." Freudians had another name for them.

And check the "wraparound" windshield. Not only did we do fancy metal-bending. We also did windows any way we wanted.

Which brings us to the, how shall we say, derrière.

The LeSabre, another view.

A rocket on wheels, complete with huge chromed intake and exhaust (both fake of course)--and fins. Not just fins, but FINS, huge swoops, with four near-vertical silver accent lines to be sure you didn't overlook them.

The year before (1949), Cadillac had shocked America (we were more easily shocked then) with fins as well, but they were only the tiniest of pre-pubescent protrusions, little more than a whispered hint of things to come.

Cadillac finlets (1949).

Primary inspiration behind this vehicular efflorescence? Partly it was a carry-over from the pre-war trend toward streamlining. There had been a few cars already headed in this direction before the war stopped all private passenger car production. Here's General Motors' slightly clunky one-off, a Buick with the crypto-sexual name "Y-Job":

Buick Y-Job (1939).

The big leap was caused by another visual icon of the time, North American Aviation's F-86 Sabrejet fighter plane. The design was released in 1946 and the plane was in full production in time for Korea:

The Sabrejet, by North American Aviation (1947).

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