Remember 1958? Eisenhower was president, Pope John XXIII was crowned pontiff, 14-year-old Bobby Fischer won the U.S. chess championship, and Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army.
It was also the year American automakers produced the worst looking cars of the last 60 years: great tail-finned land barges draped in ornamentation and dripping in chrome. Designers had been trying to outdo themselves for so long, they'd lost touch with reality.
Chrysler Corp. got a jump on the competition in 1957 by tearing up its product plans and rushing out a line of cars with big tail fins and three-tone paint jobs. It was called the "Forward Look." General Motors, Ford, and American Motors hurried to compete. Excess was piled on excess. So many design changes had a predictable effect on quality, with Chrysler suffering the most of all.
Customers stayed away in droves. Tastes were changing as more restrained foreign cars made inroads and the paycheck-pinching Eisenhower recession took hold. By 1960 it was all over. Fins were all but gone, along with all the baroque frills that produced cars like rolling jukeboxes.
1958 should serve as a caution to today's automakers as they rush faddish styling ideas -- like four-door coupes, LED lights, or body side molding -- into production. Novelty quickly leads to the commonplace, and then to overuse -- with concomitant results for sales.
Herewith, ten egregious design examples from that forgotten year when designers ran wild, and American motoring taste hit a post-war low.
1. Buick Limited
When asked to describe the minuses of the Buick Limited, one critic summarized it thusly: "Dreadful styling, high thirst, gargantuan size, and barge-like handling: There's no bigger or flashier example of the best and worst in late-50s American cars."
Rushed to market to halt slumping Buick sales, the Limited was decorated rather than designed. Its grille was composed of 160 chrome squares, each styled with four triangular concave surfaces to reflect the light. The body-colored side insert panels featured slanted hash marks for no apparent reason. Heavy chrome surrounded the taillights, and the bumpers featured a pair of "Dagmars," so-named in honor of a busty female TV personality.
The Limited failed to arrest Buick's sales slide, and the model was gone the following year.
2. Chrysler Imperial Crown
While it is comparatively devoid of chrome, the Imperial Crown was a rolling mishmash of unfortunate design ideas.
Quad headlights under heavy brows, Forward Look tailfins, and gunsight tail lamps were standard. The ultra-kitschy FliteSweep Deck Lid with its spare tire bulge was an option, but buyers had to wait a year for the Silvercrest roof, which featured a stainless steel front with a rear body-colored canopy.
The Imperial was supposed to compete head to head with Cadillac, but Chrysler never got around to setting up separate distribution for it, so sales remained only a fraction of the GM brand's.
3. DeSoto Adventurer
By now almost forgotten, DeSoto was a Chrysler brand manufactured from 1928 to 1961. It can't be said the Adventurer did anything to halt its decline.
Another victim of Chrysler's rush to the Forward Look, '58 DeSotos were plagued with leaky roofs, flimsy transmissions, rusting metal, and faulty power steering units. They sure made a statement, though, at more than 18 feet long and two tons in weight.
A side sweep along the flanks directed attention to its fins, tall enough to be mistaken for the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. Unnecessary decorative touches included anodized aluminum triangles in the fins and chrome strips on the trunk lid.
4. Dodge Custom Royal
A late addition to the Dodge lineup, the Custom Royal's Regal Lancer model was added in February as a two-door hardtop with special colors. It featured nameplates at the front of the side spear trim and heavy eyebrow trim over the headlights. In the rear of the car were rocket-booster-shaped taillight fins, stacked to differentiate them from DeSoto's.
To match this dramatic style, Dodge equipped the Custom Royal with five available V8 engine options that sucked gas at the rate of one gallon every ten miles.
5. Mercury Turnpike Cruiser
Making a conscious effort to stand out from GM, Ford mostly ignored tailfins, but its designs were equally awful in their own way. Chief among them on the Turnpike Cruiser were rear fender side channels, twin air intakes at the top of the windshield, a retractable rear window for "Breeze-way" ventilation, and a three-tone paint job.
The car remained in production for only two years. Troublesome electronics and poor assembly quality were partly to blame, but a bigger problem was the unmistakable air of poor taste. Wrote one reviewer: "As one of the great artifacts from the age of automotive excess, it was the wrong product with the wrong features, built at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons."
