All those elaborate wheel-arch forms we see on automobiles are the result of decades of evolution and the work of hundreds of designers looking at each other’s creative output. Are they done out of habit now?
Perhaps some designers have forgot the wheel arch is first a hole in the body for a wheel arranged so as to allow the wheel’s movement and manage water spray. Like many features on a car they are often drawn as sculptural entities or purely graphical forms. I personally have sketched shapes from purely a formal viewpoint: two blobs for lights, a block in the middle some lines underneath…. And there’s a car’s front end, divorced entirely from the relationship of each shape the thing it represents.
Driven To Write 