Ok, we've put Italian in the title above.

when you use the filter at the bottom is actually not that confusing as when you see all the makers together

Creases seem to me to suggest the way cloth folds or ripples, or possibly muscles. Both of which were features of sculpture before cars.

There's also the sharpish edges of air intakes, or fake intakes, due to the association with race cars and fast motorcycles. Sometimes creases make intakes look more integrated in the body.

For a reason, well, people used to complain about contemporary (when that meant 90s) cars being blobby or ovoid. The survival of exotic car companies probably depended on being strikingly attractive and different from mainstream cars. I assume that when you say "hard lateral crease" you would agree that a late 90s Ford Taurus, or a Porsche 928 did not have one.

I think the air intakes are overdone these days and don't like fake ones any more than tailfins. There's something wrong when even the top of the line trim doesn't have all of the intakes functional.

> I assume that Lamborghini no longer has to use Nissan headlights due to lack of resources to develop their own.

Note on this, Lamborghini is now owned by the Volkswagen/Audi Group, so while they don't use nissan parts any more, basically every component bears a VW or Audi logo

It was pretty common in the 1960s, 70s and 80s for the supercar makers to freely use parts from Alfa Romeo or Lancia or Fiat. Door handles, switches, rear view mirrors, vent outlets, headlights, interior lights, sometimes even tail lights and indicators although these were sometimes disguised. The door handles on a Dino were designed for the Alfa Spider.

Its only in the relative recent past that Ferrari or Lamborghini created their own minor bits and pieces.

One thing that highlights for me was just how stylish prosaic Italian cars could be. Nobody would ever want to reuse a door handle from a Ford Fairmont for anything, but Alfetta door handles ended up on exotica.

You are hard pressed to guess which country modern cars are designed in, but it used to be easy to tell.

Ferraris had cheap interiors, as all the money was spent on the engine. Not a bad tradeoff, who buys a Ferrari for the carpets?

Great work! I was going to ask if there is any specific reason you stopped at 1976, but I see from your About page that you plan to go further. I reckon that Italian car design peaked in the mid-80s, so it would be cool to reach 1990 or so. Afterwards there were some interesting designs in mass-produced cars but the top range is fairly bland (with Lambos just being Lambos).

It's probably more fair to say that as far as "exotic" brands go, Ferrari has never deviated and produced a boring sedan or suv based no some other companies car.

Maseratti, Porsche, and Lamborghini are good examples of companies that make supercars that also make some pretty pedestrian models. To make it worse, those are usually built on an existing car platform from another manufacturer. Not to say those cars are bad, they just don't belong at an exotic car meet.

The Masseratti Ghibli, the Porsche Macan/Cayenne and whatever the Lambo SUV is called all fit this mold.

What do you mean by neural network embeddings?