This one looked pretty complete. The paint was a bit dull, but the chrome looked good and everything was there. The low-end Chevrolet was the Delray in 1958. The Biscayne wouldn't fall to entry-level status until 1959. Technically, the 1958 Impala was called the Bel Air Impala. The Delray was the equivalent to the 1957 150 and the Biscayne was the equivalent of the 1957 210.
Ah, okay. Still, most of the 4 doors were stripped to make parts for the two-doors and convertibles. I wonder if you saw a 6 cylinder car, which weren't gutted as quickly. I never got the '58 Chevy thing. Even as a kid when it came out I thought it was weird-looking, and I guess so did everybody else more or less. It also had that not so great truck motor in it, the 348.
It's been several years, but I've spotted two '58 Chevies in my neighborhood. One was a Bel Air 4-door, kind of a two-tone brown and beige. I remember seeing it sitting for sale in a parking lot at one point. It was after I bought my 2000 Intrepid, because I remember parking the Intrepid next to it and being surprised that they both looked to be about the same size. It's funny, how much bigger they look in pictures.
Now that I think about it, I believe the other was an Impala hardtop. It was a faded pastel green, and looked solid, but had a nice patina on it.
Even though the 348 was available, I'd imagine most '58 Chevies just had the 283?
I always liked the '58 Chevy, because I thought it had an expensive, upscale look to it. Plus, I just prefer the long/low/wide look to the more upright, stubby '57 Chevy.
I thought Chevy made a really good looking 2- and 4-door sedan in 1958. In hardtops and convertibles I prefer the Plymouth, but in the more mundane styles, I think the Chevy brought a touch of class to that type of car. My biggest beef with the '58 Plymouth is that it shared the same passenger cabin with the Dodge, DeSoto, and Chrysler, and the large, upright passenger cabin just looked too big on the smaller Plymouth.
that many historians considered the '58 Ford to be the most successful of the Low Priced Three that year. While the Chevy outsold it, the Chevy was a new design, whereas the '58 Ford was just a facelift of the '57. So Ford didn't put nearly as much effort into their '58 as Chevy did.
I think the '58 Ford is one of those rare instances of a 1958 car looking better than its 1957 counterpart, although I know just about everybody else in the civilized world will disagree with me there! :P It's just that I never liked the desperate looking, bug-eyed style of the '57, whereas the '58, with its quad headlights, just seemed so much sleeker. Only thing I don't like about the '58 is the taillights.
I think the '58 Plymouth looks better than the '57, as well, mainly because of the true quad headlights and the stone shield that matches the grille. The '57 stone shield is mismatched, and makes the car look like it swallowed a Jeep!
Come to think of it, Ford got a lot of use out of that 1957-59 body shell. The car looked radically different each of the three years, much more so than what they can usually get out of a facelift.
All '58 designs (pretty much) strike me as chaotic,which to me violates the first principle of good design, which is harmony. '58 cars look like acts of desperation to me.
The 58 Chev was a strikingly pretty car when it came out. It rocked Ford because the 58 was similar to the 57. The 59 was an attempt to move into the jet age for Ford and the wings design for Chev was really off the wall after the tailfins of Chryler's products from 55 on.
It seemed to me that Ford had the motors and GM had the glamour with the 58 Chev as I recall (I was very pro Ford). Nothing was pretties than the 4-dr hardtop Chevrolet.
I had a 1/25 scale model of a '57 Chevy, and one of a '58, among other cars. I remember the '58 was one of my favorites, even back then.
Unfortunately, one rainy Saturday in 4th grade, I was bored and in a destructive mood, and decided to have a demolition derby with all those cars! :sick: Looking back, I wish my mother would have stopped me. :mad:
that probably helped the '58 Chevy was that it bore a strong resemblance to Cadillac, style-wise. Whereas a Plymouth or Ford looked nothing like an Imperial or Lincoln, the Chevy pulled off a "baby Cadillac" look pretty well, and I'm sure that made many buyers feel a bit of prestige with their cars.
Personally, I think the biggest "loser", stylewise, for 1958 is the Oldsmobile, when compared to its 1957 counterpart. I thought the '57 Olds was a real looker, but I think the following year is pretty much the ugliest of all the 1958's.
Interestingly though, the 1958 Olds was a fairly strong seller. '58 was a bad year in general, with only Rambler, IIRC posting higher sales than in '57. As a percentage of '57 sales though, Olds saw one of the smallest losses.
So I guess even in 1958, it took more than a pretty face to sell cars!
For me the 55 Chev and the 58 Chev were markers in the evolution of the automobile. I don't remember if 58 was facelifted to the 59 gullwing or if that was a whole new design but it seemed that everyone was falling over themselves to get to the front of the evolution. Then came the 61-64 Chev quiet sleek designs with accents giving the visual movement cues to the eyes rather than body metal shapes.
I had a 61 Biscayne that I'd picked up when my car got wrecked (by a distaff driver). It had a 283 with the X-frame underneath slowly rusting away. Fianlly gave it to someone to come tow it for the motor and trans.
well as an eye-witness I can recall that most of the world (or my world) looked at a '58 Chevy and went EWWWWWWWWW....we were so let down!
And the '58 Ford was worse....nobody even bothered to look at it who was under 25 years old. You can still see the prejudice in the classic car prices. A '57 2dr hardtop will fetch a LOT more than a '58. In fact, in just about every make and model of every American car made, you will see this prejudice in the market values today. Interesting, no?
Of course this was the age when people were still buying anything that Detroit made, good or bad. So sales figures are based mostly on exchange rates between the Big Three...one goes up the other goes down. So GM was better than Ford on the Ford/Chevy duel that year, that's true.
These '58 designs are really off the wall---they make no sense, as if someone in California designed one have, and welded it to a completely different car they designed in Detroit. They are borderline schizophrenic.
ENGINES: I don't recall Ford engines being particularly good back then. Chevy's 283 was the "hot one" and Ford was strugling with that boat anchor---what was it....the 292?
ENGINES: I don't recall Ford engines being particularly good back then. Chevy's 283 was the "hot one" and Ford was strugling with that boat anchor---what was it....the 292?
I remember Consumer Reports doing two different Chevy/Ford/Plymouth V-8 comparos for 1957, and both times, the Chevy was the quickest. I forget the details, but I think the first time around they tested a Chevy 283-2bbl/Powerglide against Plymouth with a 277/Powerflite and I forget the what the Ford had. The second test, I think was a 283-4bbl/Turboglide against a Plymouth 301-2bbl/Powerflite, and again, I forget what the Ford had.
Plymouth engines tended to be durable and put out good hp numbers, but the Chevy engines were usually better revvers. The downside was that they weren't as reliable. I dunno what advantage, if any, the Ford engine had. Didn't Ford offer a big engine for '57, something like a 312 or 352 "Thunderbird" engine? I think that's what sparked off the trend of putting bigger engines in the low-priced cars, as Chevy countered with the 348 for '58, while Plymouth offered a 350 Wedge.
...was a one-year only design and that makes it unique. I kind of like the '58 Chevy as '57s are too common. You guys will think I'm nuts, but I'd love to have a #1 condition 1958 Buick Limited four-door hardtop. I also missed out on a really nice 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88 four-door hardtop back in 1981 when I purchased my first car. I didn't have much money as the car I bought was only $650. The '58 Olds was $2,500 which was an astronomical sum to a poor 16 year-old a quarter century ago.
I don't remember if 58 was facelifted to the 59 gullwing or if that was a whole new design but it seemed that everyone was falling over themselves to get to the front of the evolution.
The '59 Chevy, and the rest of the big GM cars, were a new design. However, the '59-64 Chevy still used an X-frame similar to the '58, so that may have caused some confusion as to how "all new" they really were. IIRC, the '59-64 Buick also used the X-frame, while the '59-64 Pontiac and Olds used a perimeter frame.
You guys will think I'm nuts, but I'd love to have a #1 condition 1958 Buick Limited four-door hardtop. I also missed out on a really nice 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88 four-door hardtop back in 1981 when I purchased my first car.
I think the '58 Buick is really overdone, but somehow, I think it manages to pull it off. Call it "ugly yet cool", "delightfully tacky", "so bad it's good" or any other number of cliches or what have you, but I still like it.
Now the '58 Olds is a totally different story. Still, that blue '58 we saw at the GM Nationals this past year wasn't too bad. I think it's because the monotone paint and that darker color tended to tone it down. I think the biggest problem with the '58 Olds is that they took what was originally a rounded-off design and tried to square it off and make it look too bulky and swollen. If that thing had more rounded fenders with headlights a bit more deeply set and a sleeker hood, like a DeSoto or Chrysler, I think it would have looked much better. Or even if the fenders around the headlights had more of a thrust to them, like a '59 Mercury.
I almost forgot...there was a 1958 Chevy lowline 2-door at the show as well. You can see the Olds in the background.
Right! the 312....I think you can tell nobody thought too much of that motor because today you don't see many parts to beef them up. Everyone uses the later Ford V-8s for any kind of rod work. I always remember that they were very hard to get to idle smoothly and they seemed to run out of revs pretty fast.
I had a 292 cu. in. 57 Ford and I don't recall trouble getting it to idle. I believe it drank gas compared to today but I don't recall Chevs being better about gas at least in V8 versions. Of coure I don't know about running out of high revs...
I do know it was faster than my buddie's 312 57 Ford. The Interceptor 352 in a 58 Ford was faster than both. A school friend ended up with one of those.
Now that I think about it, I had a great-uncle who had a '57 Ford. He burned up its transmission within about a year, and traded it on a '58. In reminiscing about that car (it was well before my time) Uncle Buddy used to talk about what a piece of junk that car was, but Granddad told me that he had gotten it stuck in the snow and burnt it up trying to rock it loose.
the '58 Chevies, or anything else from that year. I can remember being in homeroom 202 (eight grade) discussing the drawings of the new styles with the guys and expressing my dislike of the new '58s and being thoroughly razzed because I was a minority of one.
I think time has borne my out pretty much. AFAIK '58 cars are not nearly as popular with collectors as '57s.
I'll give Andre his due and say that then as now I thought the MoPars were the best looking cars out of Detroit.
Don't even get me started on what I thought of the '59s and '60s. :sick:
All '58 designs (pretty much) strike me as chaotic,which to me violates the first principle of good design, which is harmony. '58 cars look like acts of desperation to me.
But Shifty. Don't you remember that the beautiful Edsel debuted that year?
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
if one reason that '57 cars might be more popular with collectors has to do with the old "rose tinted glasses" thing? People tend to look back fondly on 1957 for whatever reason, regardless of how good or bad they really had it. But in 1958 the country fell into recession, and no doubt as a result, a lot of people fell on hard times. As a result, more people might look back on 1958 as a year they had to do without a new car, or had to downsize to a Rambler or Bug, or some other less than savory memory.
I'll agree for the most part, I'd rather have a 1957 car compared to its 1958 counterpart simply because of the styling (with the exception of the '58 Chevy and '58 Ford). But I wonder if, for a lot of people, it may have something to do with their memory of the times?
I'm not much of an economist, so I dunno the facts, but does anybody know what caused the recession in 1958? One factor leading to the dramatic downturn in car sales that year could be that 1955-56, and to a lesser degree 1957, had been strong years, so maybe the market was just getting flooded?
I don't think that many people were aware of the recession of 1958, we were mostly too young to worry about such things, I was all of 14 when the '58s came out.
For most people my age and background the '50s were all "happy days".
I think the '57 is "iconic" and that helps, but basically it's a cleaner and more coherent design. One couldn't help but find it easier on the eyes than a '58, if you looked at both in the showrooms in say December 1957. The '58 looks like the front half is standing still and the back end is rushing to collide with it. The '57 sweeps back from front to rear---it's got a coherent "line" all the way through. The '58 looks like a supermarket cart in front and the back view is a total mess...the lines of the car go in every direction.
One thing that DOES NOT WORK on a car is a severe diagonal line (getting up to 45 degrees) off the horizontal in the front and rear view. The back end of the 58 Chevy, the back end of the early Valiant both come to mind, as do the diagonal headlighting on some of the...was it Lincoln?
Good point about the dioagonal headligghts on Lincolns and Chryslers. In general most of the four headlight designs of '58-'60 were a bit awkward, if not plain awful. It always takes stylists a few years to get new elements like that right.
because of the classic vintage (well they weren't then!) cars. On an episode I say today a guy driven a '59 Edsel picked a hitch hiker. When she got in the he told I am having car trouble so I don't know how far we'll make it. It finally had to be towed into town. This was made in 1960 or thereabouts. I am sure Ford apprecriated that scene!
for the most part, I thought Chrysler got the 4-headlight setup right from the get-go. They made the fenders wide enough to accept either single or quad headlights. As a result, I thought the quad headlight setup looked better, because it filled out the fenders more completely.
With the Chryslers and the bigger DeSotos, which the headlights recessed in their bezels, the single headlight models look like some giant alien eye, or something that will shoot a death ray at you, like out of "War of the Worlds" or something.
As for that '57 Firesweep ambulance pictured above, I always thought the DeSoto Firesweep was the most awkward looking of the '57 Mopars. First of all, the DeSoto grille doesn't mate well to the Dodge front-end clip, so it juts out about two inches more than it should. Secondly, on the Dodge/Plymouth cars, which used that same fender, the turn signals were oversized, and mounted inboard of the headlights, giving the car the illusion of 4 headlights. On the DeSoto, the single headlights on that front just look too big yet at the same time make the opening look too narrow, and the Dodge "eyebrows" just don't look right, IMO.
I think the 1958 Firesweep: looks much better, even though the grille is more ornate and fussy. I think another thing that might help is that the '58 had silver trim around the headlights, giving the headlights a finished-off appearance. IIRC, on the '57 Firesweep, the empty area around the headlights was just body color.
Now for a real mess of a quad headlight setup, just look at the '57 Mercurys with that option. Ford and Mercury got wider fenders for '57, but they still didn't seem quite wide enough to accept a quad headlight setup. The result, IMO, is something really nasty: Not only are the quad headlights too wide for the fenders, but they seem mounted a bit too low, and they jut out, giving it a bug-eyed look that I could never stand.
Now the single headlight model isn't exactly a beauty queen either: but I think the headlights are a much better fit. They fit inside the fenders properly, without jutting out.
For a real atrocity though, I remember looking through an old 1958 issue of Popular Mechanics that my Granddad had. It had an advertisement for an aftermarket quad headlight setup that let you modify a 1957 Chevy or Ford. "Make your 1957 look identical to the new 1958 models!" it touted. Well...to put it nicely, it didn't! :surprise:
I wish I could find a picture of that setup. Hopefully, few were actually ordered. As I recall, it was a desperate looking attachment, kind of like what Studebaker/Packard did for 1958:
I remember taking a test ride with my father in a 58 348, I was 11 at that time. Didn't the 58 Chev offer "upscale" options such as shiftless "turboglide and air ride suspensions?
for the most part I don't care for them, but I think they come in varying shades of hideousness.
For example, I think the '58 Lincoln is one of the worst: I think my biggest complaint here is the way the headlights are in their own assembly, separate from the grille. The headlights stick out too far, while the grille is inset too far, giving it a look like it's been punched in the face.
I think the 1959 is a much cleaner design, with the way the grille and headlights are integrated, and more on the same vertical plane with each other. It also helps, IMO, that the grille texture is "softer": Ditto the 1960 Lincoln. I think it cleaned up pretty well here, with a slightly toned down bumper, while retaining the feature of the grille and headlights blending together, and a finer grille texture.
The 1961 Lincoln instantly made them all look like dogs though, almost overnight.
I think the '61-62 Chrysler and to a lesser degree, the '61 DeSoto, carried off the slanted headlight look better. However, one thing that probably helped these cars is that on the Lincoln, the slanted headlights were merely the icing on a cake that was none too appetizing to begin with. Too big, massive, blocky, clunky, disjointed, whatever you want to call it. In contrast, the Mopars had a much more sleek, clean body, toned down, simple bumpers, and just less clutter overall.
The '61 DeSoto was a bit clumsier than the Chryslers. On one hand, I do like the way they connected the headlights and the grille, much in the way that Lincoln did in '59-60. That makes them look a bit more aggressive than the Chryslers. But then that disjointed "upper grille", where the letters D E S O T O are spelled out just gives the car an odd looking bulge where there shouldn't be one. I've always had a theory though, that they made the '61 DeSoto ugly on purpose so that more people would buy a Chrysler, and fewer would mourn the passing of DeSoto.
If anything, I'd say that the '58 Chevy is proof that a severe diagonal line CAN work. I think the key here though, is that with the Chevy it looks like they took a lot more work to integrate it into the design of the car, whereas with the Valiant it looks more tacked-on.
Another difference, is that the way the Valiant's taillights finish off the fin is kinda vulgar and "alien" looking. If Chevy had tried slanting their taillights, and actually working them into the rear diagonal blade, instead of doing it the way they did, the result would have been pretty nasty too.
I think the Valiant looked better for 1962, when they got the taillights off the fin: Losing the "toilet seat" helped alot, too.
Don't have a picture, but the 1961 Mercury Comet had the taillights on the fin ala the 1960-61 Valiant. The Comet was supposed to have been an Edsel and used the old 1960 full-size Edsel taillight units.
Yep, the Comet just used the outer taillight from the 1960 Edsel, turned at an angle.
The Comet was a cheap enough car back then that backup lights were probably an option. And when you specified them, they probably just slapped them on the rear or the bumper as an afterthought.
The '58 Chevy just has this bat-wing quality that makes it hard to take the car seriously. It looks like it was designed in prison, by someone who had all the time in the world to doodle.
Geez, after looking at all those unfortunate-looking cars, I got the jitters.
Let's post something beautiful next time. I feel like we've been digging up a graveyard.
Bat-wing design? Are you sure you're not thinking of the 1959 Chevrolet? I always thought the '58 Chevy was rather subdued compared to other cars of its time.
Oh I mean the diagonal lines to the rear-reverse fins...like a bat taking off. The '59 fins are horizontal. Also a mess of a car. The '61 bubbletop is nice though, and surprise, surprise, that's the one everyone wants.
My second pet peeve in car design in the "big nose" syndrome, where the front of the car extends too far past the front wheels, and protrudes too far past the headlights. Also the chiseled fender going past the headlights aggravates this.
This gives the car a very nose-heavy look I think, and pulls your eye down toward the ground. I'd expect to brake hard and have the car tip up like a bad landing with a small plane. If rear overhang is a no-no, so is (logically) too much front-overhand.
Also that rear quarter window looks like the sliding window on a pickup truck. The trim around it is too big, almost industrial looking. Not nice to my eyes.
This car definitely has big nose syndrome (BNS, not curable). But to be fair, it's not the worst offender. We'd have to go to Pontiac for that.
But if you ground off the chiseled front fenders and mated them to the headlights, thinned out the grille chrome and pushed it back about 4 inches, thinned out the trim on the rear quarter windows, and chain-sawed another foot off the front of the car, it would look....better...IMO. More like a Benz front end---Benz knows how to do "big-grille". They integrate it with the hood.
This car definitely has big nose syndrome (BNS, not curable). But to be fair, it's not the worst offender. We'd have to go to Pontiac for that.
Ya mean like this? :shades:
Actually, I think just about every FWD car out there is a worse offender for having the front of the car stick out too far. Especially when you consider the percentage that sticks out compared to the overall length of the car. With what sticks out at the front of my NYer, it's really not that much when you figure the car's about 221" long and rides a 118.5" wheelbase. If they cut it off and made it stubbier at the front, I don't think it would look right.
Also, to me, the "big nose look" really only applies when the actual grille of the car is sticking out too far. If you have a bumper that juts out well beyond that, it helps to give the car a look like it has a chiseled chin or something like that. Most of the modern "bumperless" designs, like the Accord, Camry, or 300C have more of a "big nose syndrome" to me.
Actually, the rear quarter windows are my biggest complaint about the car! Proportion wise, the quarter window is too big compared to the roll-down window. I think they did that so that they could make the window roll down all the way. And also, since Chrysler stopped making big coupes after 1978, I think they were trying to take a sedan and give it a coupe-like look. I think the car would look better, proportion-wise, if they added about 5 inches to the back seat, putting it all into the roll-down window area. But then that would put these cars up to about 226", which would kinda be a contradiction of the term "downsized"
Anyway, the windows are actually frameless, so when you open the door, seeing that quarter window with the surround seemingly free-standing, it just seems out of place. And worse, they leak. With age, they just get to the point that they don't seal correctly anymore. And if you roll the window up as far as it will go, it actually pushes the quarter window and its surround out just a bit. For some reason, Chrysler didn't put rain gutters on these cars either, so that just adds to the problem.
I had a 1979 Newport, which also had frameless windows, but the quarter window was smaller in relation to the roll-down part, and it sealed better. On the down side, the window didn't roll down all the way, more like 3/4, but it was a much larger window. Here's an old pic of it:
I also liked the way its front-end was more slicked-back than the NYer. Actually, that's one thing I liked about the R-body in general, the way they sloped the nose back. The GM and especially the Ford competition had much more upright, squared-off front-ends. Well, now that I think about it, the Buick LeSabre/Electra were slicked back around the headlights, although the grilles were upright.
Notice how the Pontiac tried to allieviate BNS by kicking up the front fender as it approaches the grille. That helps somewhat. Slanting the grille back also helps BNS...which of course is now a Benz trick.
Still these cars suffer from too much front wheel overhang.
More interesting, if you open the hood on these types of older American cars, you'll see that the space behind the grille is totally wasted....another example of poor design if you ask me...adding weight and length to a car for no good reason whatsoever.
Comments
Oh and even more bizarre/stupid this morning at about 10:00 AM in North western CT with temps down in the 20's I saw...
A Pantarea in bright yellow with California plates.
There is still ice on some parts of the road here not bright at all.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
james
Now that I think about it, I believe the other was an Impala hardtop. It was a faded pastel green, and looked solid, but had a nice patina on it.
Even though the 348 was available, I'd imagine most '58 Chevies just had the 283?
I always liked the '58 Chevy, because I thought it had an expensive, upscale look to it. Plus, I just prefer the long/low/wide look to the more upright, stubby '57 Chevy.
I thought Chevy made a really good looking 2- and 4-door sedan in 1958. In hardtops and convertibles I prefer the Plymouth, but in the more mundane styles, I think the Chevy brought a touch of class to that type of car. My biggest beef with the '58 Plymouth is that it shared the same passenger cabin with the Dodge, DeSoto, and Chrysler, and the large, upright passenger cabin just looked too big on the smaller Plymouth.
It's no accident 1958 styling was a one year thing for Chevrolet. Those reverse fins are really weird.
I will say though that a slammed black on black '58 Chev two door hardtop and conti kit has its own period charm.
I think the '58 Ford is one of those rare instances of a 1958 car looking better than its 1957 counterpart, although I know just about everybody else in the civilized world will disagree with me there! :P It's just that I never liked the desperate looking, bug-eyed style of the '57, whereas the '58, with its quad headlights, just seemed so much sleeker. Only thing I don't like about the '58 is the taillights.
I think the '58 Plymouth looks better than the '57, as well, mainly because of the true quad headlights and the stone shield that matches the grille. The '57 stone shield is mismatched, and makes the car look like it swallowed a Jeep!
Come to think of it, Ford got a lot of use out of that 1957-59 body shell. The car looked radically different each of the three years, much more so than what they can usually get out of a facelift.
It seemed to me that Ford had the motors and GM had the glamour with the 58 Chev as I recall (I was very pro Ford). Nothing was pretties than the 4-dr hardtop Chevrolet.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Unfortunately, one rainy Saturday in 4th grade, I was bored and in a destructive mood, and decided to have a demolition derby with all those cars! :sick: Looking back, I wish my mother would have stopped me. :mad:
Personally, I think the biggest "loser", stylewise, for 1958 is the Oldsmobile, when compared to its 1957 counterpart. I thought the '57 Olds was a real looker, but I think the following year is pretty much the ugliest of all the 1958's.
Interestingly though, the 1958 Olds was a fairly strong seller. '58 was a bad year in general, with only Rambler, IIRC posting higher sales than in '57. As a percentage of '57 sales though, Olds saw one of the smallest losses.
So I guess even in 1958, it took more than a pretty face to sell cars!
I had a 61 Biscayne that I'd picked up when my car got wrecked (by a distaff driver). It had a 283 with the X-frame underneath slowly rusting away. Fianlly gave it to someone to come tow it for the motor and trans.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
And the '58 Ford was worse....nobody even bothered to look at it who was under 25 years old. You can still see the prejudice in the classic car prices. A '57 2dr hardtop will fetch a LOT more than a '58. In fact, in just about every make and model of every American car made, you will see this prejudice in the market values today. Interesting, no?
Of course this was the age when people were still buying anything that Detroit made, good or bad. So sales figures are based mostly on exchange rates between the Big Three...one goes up the other goes down. So GM was better than Ford on the Ford/Chevy duel that year, that's true.
These '58 designs are really off the wall---they make no sense, as if someone in California designed one have, and welded it to a completely different car they designed in Detroit. They are borderline schizophrenic.
ENGINES: I don't recall Ford engines being particularly good back then. Chevy's 283 was the "hot one" and Ford was strugling with that boat anchor---what was it....the 292?
I remember Consumer Reports doing two different Chevy/Ford/Plymouth V-8 comparos for 1957, and both times, the Chevy was the quickest. I forget the details, but I think the first time around they tested a Chevy 283-2bbl/Powerglide against Plymouth with a 277/Powerflite and I forget the what the Ford had. The second test, I think was a 283-4bbl/Turboglide against a Plymouth 301-2bbl/Powerflite, and again, I forget what the Ford had.
Plymouth engines tended to be durable and put out good hp numbers, but the Chevy engines were usually better revvers. The downside was that they weren't as reliable. I dunno what advantage, if any, the Ford engine had. Didn't Ford offer a big engine for '57, something like a 312 or 352 "Thunderbird" engine? I think that's what sparked off the trend of putting bigger engines in the low-priced cars, as Chevy countered with the 348 for '58, while Plymouth offered a 350 Wedge.
The '59 Chevy, and the rest of the big GM cars, were a new design. However, the '59-64 Chevy still used an X-frame similar to the '58, so that may have caused some confusion as to how "all new" they really were. IIRC, the '59-64 Buick also used the X-frame, while the '59-64 Pontiac and Olds used a perimeter frame.
I think the '58 Buick is really overdone, but somehow, I think it manages to pull it off. Call it "ugly yet cool", "delightfully tacky", "so bad it's good" or any other number of cliches or what have you, but I still like it.
Now the '58 Olds is a totally different story. Still, that blue '58 we saw at the GM Nationals this past year wasn't too bad. I think it's because the monotone paint and that darker color tended to tone it down. I think the biggest problem with the '58 Olds is that they took what was originally a rounded-off design and tried to square it off and make it look too bulky and swollen. If that thing had more rounded fenders with headlights a bit more deeply set and a sleeker hood, like a DeSoto or Chrysler, I think it would have looked much better. Or even if the fenders around the headlights had more of a thrust to them, like a '59 Mercury.
I almost forgot...there was a 1958 Chevy lowline 2-door at the show as well. You can see the Olds in the background.
It was a toned down police motor.
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Gas hungry, too.
I do know it was faster than my buddie's 312 57 Ford. The Interceptor 352 in a 58 Ford was faster than both. A school friend ended up with one of those.
They were all hard on transmissions.
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Now that I think about it, I had a great-uncle who had a '57 Ford. He burned up its transmission within about a year, and traded it on a '58. In reminiscing about that car (it was well before my time) Uncle Buddy used to talk about what a piece of junk that car was, but Granddad told me that he had gotten it stuck in the snow and burnt it up trying to rock it loose.
was a minority of one.
I think time has borne my out pretty much. AFAIK '58 cars are not nearly as popular with collectors as '57s.
I'll give Andre his due and say that then as now I thought the MoPars were the best looking cars out of Detroit.
Don't even get me started on what I thought of the '59s and '60s. :sick:
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But Shifty. Don't you remember that the beautiful Edsel debuted that year?
2009 BMW 335i, 2003 Corvette cnv. (RIP 2001 Jaguar XK8 cnv and 1985 MB 380SE [the best of the lot])
I'll agree for the most part, I'd rather have a 1957 car compared to its 1958 counterpart simply because of the styling (with the exception of the '58 Chevy and '58 Ford). But I wonder if, for a lot of people, it may have something to do with their memory of the times?
I'm not much of an economist, so I dunno the facts, but does anybody know what caused the recession in 1958? One factor leading to the dramatic downturn in car sales that year could be that 1955-56, and to a lesser degree 1957, had been strong years, so maybe the market was just getting flooded?
For most people my age and background the '50s were all "happy days".
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One thing that DOES NOT WORK on a car is a severe diagonal line (getting up to 45 degrees) off the horizontal in the front and rear view. The back end of the 58 Chevy, the back end of the early Valiant both come to mind, as do the diagonal headlighting on some of the...was it Lincoln?
'58-'60 were a bit awkward, if not plain awful. It always takes stylists a few years to get new elements like that right.
Some '57 Chryslers had two headlights>
Some had four>
Two looked better IMHO.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
With the Chryslers and the bigger DeSotos, which the headlights recessed in their bezels, the single headlight models look like some giant alien eye, or something that will shoot a death ray at you, like out of "War of the Worlds" or something.
As for that '57 Firesweep ambulance pictured above, I always thought the DeSoto Firesweep was the most awkward looking of the '57 Mopars. First of all, the DeSoto grille doesn't mate well to the Dodge front-end clip, so it juts out about two inches more than it should. Secondly, on the Dodge/Plymouth cars, which used that same fender, the turn signals were oversized, and mounted inboard of the headlights, giving the car the illusion of 4 headlights. On the DeSoto, the single headlights on that front just look too big yet at the same time make the opening look too narrow, and the Dodge "eyebrows" just don't look right, IMO.
I think the 1958 Firesweep:
looks much better, even though the grille is more ornate and fussy. I think another thing that might help is that the '58 had silver trim around the headlights, giving the headlights a finished-off appearance. IIRC, on the '57 Firesweep, the empty area around the headlights was just body color.
Now for a real mess of a quad headlight setup, just look at the '57 Mercurys with that option. Ford and Mercury got wider fenders for '57, but they still didn't seem quite wide enough to accept a quad headlight setup. The result, IMO, is something really nasty:
Not only are the quad headlights too wide for the fenders, but they seem mounted a bit too low, and they jut out, giving it a bug-eyed look that I could never stand.
Now the single headlight model isn't exactly a beauty queen either:
but I think the headlights are a much better fit. They fit inside the fenders properly, without jutting out.
For a real atrocity though, I remember looking through an old 1958 issue of Popular Mechanics that my Granddad had. It had an advertisement for an aftermarket quad headlight setup that let you modify a 1957 Chevy or Ford. "Make your 1957 look identical to the new 1958 models!" it touted. Well...to put it nicely, it didn't! :surprise:
I wish I could find a picture of that setup. Hopefully, few were actually ordered. As I recall, it was a desperate looking attachment, kind of like what Studebaker/Packard did for 1958:
I get what you're saying. I just think that this doesn't look too bad:
Not that it's on par with the 55-7, but it's not exactly an Edsel either.
This on the other hand is a mess:
WVK
For example, I think the '58 Lincoln is one of the worst:
I think my biggest complaint here is the way the headlights are in their own assembly, separate from the grille. The headlights stick out too far, while the grille is inset too far, giving it a look like it's been punched in the face.
I think the 1959 is a much cleaner design, with the way the grille and headlights are integrated, and more on the same vertical plane with each other. It also helps, IMO, that the grille texture is "softer":
Ditto the 1960 Lincoln. I think it cleaned up pretty well here, with a slightly toned down bumper, while retaining the feature of the grille and headlights blending together, and a finer grille texture.
The 1961 Lincoln instantly made them all look like dogs though, almost overnight.
I think the '61-62 Chrysler and to a lesser degree, the '61 DeSoto, carried off the slanted headlight look better. However, one thing that probably helped these cars is that on the Lincoln, the slanted headlights were merely the icing on a cake that was none too appetizing to begin with. Too big, massive, blocky, clunky, disjointed, whatever you want to call it. In contrast, the Mopars had a much more sleek, clean body, toned down, simple bumpers, and just less clutter overall.
The '61 DeSoto was a bit clumsier than the Chryslers. On one hand, I do like the way they connected the headlights and the grille, much in the way that Lincoln did in '59-60. That makes them look a bit more aggressive than the Chryslers. But then that disjointed "upper grille", where the letters D E S O T O are spelled out just gives the car an odd looking bulge where there shouldn't be one. I've always had a theory though, that they made the '61 DeSoto ugly on purpose so that more people would buy a Chrysler, and fewer would mourn the passing of DeSoto.
Another difference, is that the way the Valiant's taillights finish off the fin is kinda vulgar and "alien" looking. If Chevy had tried slanting their taillights, and actually working them into the rear diagonal blade, instead of doing it the way they did, the result would have been pretty nasty too.
I think the Valiant looked better for 1962, when they got the taillights off the fin:
Losing the "toilet seat" helped alot, too.
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The Comet was a cheap enough car back then that backup lights were probably an option. And when you specified them, they probably just slapped them on the rear or the bumper as an afterthought.
Geez, after looking at all those unfortunate-looking cars, I got the jitters.
Let's post something beautiful next time. I feel like we've been digging up a graveyard.
Fine then, how about this? :P
My second pet peeve in car design in the "big nose" syndrome, where the front of the car extends too far past the front wheels, and protrudes too far past the headlights. Also the chiseled fender going past the headlights aggravates this.
This gives the car a very nose-heavy look I think, and pulls your eye down toward the ground. I'd expect to brake hard and have the car tip up like a bad landing with a small plane. If rear overhang is a no-no, so is (logically) too much front-overhand.
Also that rear quarter window looks like the sliding window on a pickup truck. The trim around it is too big, almost industrial looking. Not nice to my eyes.
This car definitely has big nose syndrome (BNS, not curable). But to be fair, it's not the worst offender. We'd have to go to Pontiac for that.
But if you ground off the chiseled front fenders and mated them to the headlights, thinned out the grille chrome and pushed it back about 4 inches, thinned out the trim on the rear quarter windows, and chain-sawed another foot off the front of the car, it would look....better...IMO. More like a Benz front end---Benz knows how to do "big-grille". They integrate it with the hood.
Ya mean like this? :shades:
Actually, I think just about every FWD car out there is a worse offender for having the front of the car stick out too far. Especially when you consider the percentage that sticks out compared to the overall length of the car. With what sticks out at the front of my NYer, it's really not that much when you figure the car's about 221" long and rides a 118.5" wheelbase. If they cut it off and made it stubbier at the front, I don't think it would look right.
Also, to me, the "big nose look" really only applies when the actual grille of the car is sticking out too far. If you have a bumper that juts out well beyond that, it helps to give the car a look like it has a chiseled chin or something like that. Most of the modern "bumperless" designs, like the Accord, Camry, or 300C have more of a "big nose syndrome" to me.
Actually, the rear quarter windows are my biggest complaint about the car! Proportion wise, the quarter window is too big compared to the roll-down window. I think they did that so that they could make the window roll down all the way. And also, since Chrysler stopped making big coupes after 1978, I think they were trying to take a sedan and give it a coupe-like look. I think the car would look better, proportion-wise, if they added about 5 inches to the back seat, putting it all into the roll-down window area. But then that would put these cars up to about 226", which would kinda be a contradiction of the term "downsized"
Anyway, the windows are actually frameless, so when you open the door, seeing that quarter window with the surround seemingly free-standing, it just seems out of place. And worse, they leak. With age, they just get to the point that they don't seal correctly anymore. And if you roll the window up as far as it will go, it actually pushes the quarter window and its surround out just a bit. For some reason, Chrysler didn't put rain gutters on these cars either, so that just adds to the problem.
I had a 1979 Newport, which also had frameless windows, but the quarter window was smaller in relation to the roll-down part, and it sealed better. On the down side, the window didn't roll down all the way, more like 3/4, but it was a much larger window. Here's an old pic of it:
I also liked the way its front-end was more slicked-back than the NYer. Actually, that's one thing I liked about the R-body in general, the way they sloped the nose back. The GM and especially the Ford competition had much more upright, squared-off front-ends. Well, now that I think about it, the Buick LeSabre/Electra were slicked back around the headlights, although the grilles were upright.
Still these cars suffer from too much front wheel overhang.
More interesting, if you open the hood on these types of older American cars, you'll see that the space behind the grille is totally wasted....another example of poor design if you ask me...adding weight and length to a car for no good reason whatsoever.
1958
Somehow I know one person who's not going to like the continental kit. (Me neither. I've been told that was a fad in that era.)
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