Cutaway or ghost drawings or diagrams or whatever you call them are wonderful things. It’s hard to think of a way you can take the idea of a car into which you can see all the complex internal mechanisms and fluids and goops and somehow make it better, but GM found a way, in the 1980s: by jamming the whole mess right into outer freaking space.
Yes, when it comes to styles of cutaway diagrams that GM used, I think it’s safe to say that the pinnacle was reached when they gave everything a strange, etherial glow and placed the transparent vehicle upon a linear or sometimes gridded force field plane, and shot that plane into interstellar space.
Have another look at this GMC S-15 (the bedge-engineered sibling to the Chevy S-10) in all of its astronomical glory:
It’s not like the rest of the brochure really had any sort of space theme to it; it’s just that when it came to the cutaway diagram, GM’s marketing people understood the value of the infinite cosmos.
There were some similar, more subtle approaches, like this 1980s Oldsmobile Toronado cutaway that takes place in a black void, and enhances the illuminated lights with startbursts. This one also uses a double-exposed photographic approach to the cutaway, which may improve accuracy but loses significant amounts of charm.
Older GM cutaways were much more straightforward, preferring the clinical tidiness of a white void. This Monte Carlo one, for example, is also a strict profile view, which loses some of the drama of a three-quaerter view but makes the overall packaging a lot easier to comprehend.
Others, like this Buick Electra cutaway, have a much more utilitarian and informative bent, with obvious outlines and color-coding of various elements.
Maybe these are more rational, but wouldn’t all of these be improved if they were floating nobly in the great majestic void of space, with purple galaxies and nebulae spattered across the starry background?
Of course they would.