Arcadipane
March 10, 2026
Alex KiersteinConnecting some nerd dots between a Mad Max obsession and Peter Arcadipane’s other work.
A grim, dusty, unrelentingly violent vision of the future, set far away amidst a societal collapse. Cultish, deranged motorcycle gangs with (to contemporary reviewers) a distinctly Manson Family flavor. Cops who differed from the gangs mainly by having a marginally more coherent philosophy, but outnumbered and dwindling. The Hall of Justice is filled with trash, its near-mythical pursuit vehicles kept and maintained in a dim vaulted crypt. And the hero car, the XB Falcon Interceptor, with its Arcadipane Concord nose.
All of this forms a mythology of sorts in my brain, a sense-memory from a pre-internet era in which knowing only enough to just barely satisfy your curiosity was often as much as you could glean. Years of learning more, made easier by the internet, hasn’t dulled the feeling. The cars, and the societal regression they roar through, are a black mirror, an alternate universe recognizable but also distinctly different.
Any chance I get to revisit the subject is welcome, and I’m still surprised about the connections I haven’t made yet. If you’re a Max Max cultist, you might have already realized that Peter Arcadipane had a significant career beyond the late 1970s body kit work that put him on George Miller’s map, but I didn’t. I suppose I assume that his story began with the kit business and ended there, as well. So I was delighted to discover, through some random clicking around on a lark, this wasn’t the case.
Since so many already know the Arcadipane story, I will only give a short overview. Peter Arcadipane is an Australian designer who started out with a design job at Holden in the late 1960s. After that, he went to Ford Australia, and that’s where the Ford Concorde concept was born—a Ford Falcon panel van, one of several excellent body styles unique mostly to Australia, wearing huge box fenders, a deep and blocky front bumper, and that famous nose with the glassed-in headlights. You can see, beyond the show-car flash, a bridge of sorts between the decidedly un-aerodynamic Falcon underneath and the aero cars Ford would soon develop, with the Sierra in Europe and the Aerobirds at home.
On the strength of the reception of the Concorde, Arcadipane left Ford to found Arcadipane Design, through which he sold kits for folks to recreate the Concorde look. The nose cone, of course, went on to be a major part of Max’s car. He also did some bits for the Holden Torana. This is roughly where my knowledge of Peter Arcadipane ended.
Peter Arcadipane, however, existed outside of and beyond my knowledge. He went on to work for Mercedes-Benz in the early 1990s, doing some design work under Bruno Sacco. It’s not entirely clear which aspects of which designs are mainly his work, but I’ve read that he has some degree of responsibility for one of the two SLK concepts and the production design for the second-generation CL. Then, it was off to Kia, where he designed the Kia KCV-II concept. (Draw your own conclusions about that one.)
At some point, he was freelance, and at other points, he was in-house. It seems he was often part of design teams, in which the lead designer was named but the specific contributions of other designers like Arcadipane were not as specifically credited. He had a hand in doing the ninth-generation Mitsubishi Lancer, integrating the ideas of other designers into the final coherent product.
More recently, he’s been doing work in China, with a BYD-Daimler brand named Denza and then with BAIC. What he’s done at BAIC, I haven’t a clue, as the internet remains mute on that point.
Not that I mind. Takes me back to the foggy knowledge gaps that started this whole inquiry. When I fill them in, figure out what Arcadipane did at BAIC, I’ll revisit this topic.
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