Mystery car pix

andys120

SAAB started making hatchback wagons in late 1959
I've been in these so I know the seats folded, note the one piece liftgate>



Now it's true that the liftgate went down to the rear bumper unlike domestic wagons of the era which all had split gates but that doesn't tule it out my '96 900S had a similiar tailgate but it's considered a five door hatchback not a wagon>

kyfdx

Are you sure that isn't a wagon?

imidazol97

fintail

Citroen Traction 'Commerciale', indeterminant year, these were made even prewar IIRC, all the way through ca. 1956.

andre1969

1992-99 Buick LeSabre Limited. Oh, you mean that big thing parked in front! :P Looks like a '56 Mercury. I'm guessing a Montclair? The 4-door hardtop style was called "Phaeton"

andys120

That's a '56 Mercury and it's in really terrible shape. Too bad I kinda liked them.

imidazol97

You got it. 56 Medalist. I think it also is called a Phaeton because of the reverse C pillar filler and Crown Victoria like strap over the roof.

The rear bumper is held on by two steel bars on each side. The rear seat was springs only. The dash had lots of missing parts. Speedometer was fogged out in the plastic layer over it. Radio missing.

Is this called a project car!!! Hope he finishes it. This was parked next to a cruise-in.

andys120

Are you sure that isn't a wagon?

I dunno :confuse: People always called them wagons back in the day but I think we oughta just say that "hatchbacks" have sloped rather than vertical rear decks. Whaddya say Shifty?

andys120

How about that optional "Continental Spare"

texases

Here's what I think of for Saab hatchback (started in '74, right?)
edit-GM missed the boat when they quit making these - that was something that made a Saab a Saab, regardless of whether they sold a lot of them.

seminole_kev

To me hatchbacks are shorter than wagons, but can have vertical backs. Fastback hatches (sloped back) are a subset of hatchbacks.

That's my personal opinion on hatches (which I love).

fintail

Is that imidazol97's clean Buick behind it?

jbollt

This is (was) admittedly a concept, but you need to see this!

andre1969

That's actually more attractive than the offspring of a '61-63 T-bird, Vista Cruiser, and Mercury Bobcat has any right to be!

jbollt

..everyone for a splendid day!

imidazol97

Good call!

british_rover

Oh I agree the Saab Hatches were some of the best. You could stuff so much stuff in them and they look good.

davethecarnut

Isn't a Phaeton a four door convertible? Like the Lincoln Continentals?

Mr_Shiftright

I would say that a real hatchback has to be a very small two-door. The whole idea of creating the hatchback was to avoid having to pull the front seat forward to load the car. Also, the hatch was meant to turn a little 2-door into something very useful for a family. That was the whole idea. The concept falls apart when you have a huge 4-door wagon.

A 4-door with a boxy shape and a hatch/lid/tailgate/whatever is a station wagon IMO. My Scion xA is not technically a hatchback, it's a crossover, which is a fancy word for "wagon".

Also by my definition any 4-door with a upward hinging tail gate like the Saab is a "liftback" and the Italian Joby is a wagon. The Aston Martin seems like a hatchback but has such a deep well it also rather defeats the whole concept of a hatchback....which was "small car, two doors, easy rear loading".

Ya know, it all gets kinda fuzzy, like "what is a sedan"?

I think, such as has happened to terms like "sedan" and muscle car", the original definitions have been mutilated by careless application and are now rendered useless.

seminole_kev

...so a 2 door VW rabbit would be a hatchback, but the 4 door version (same size, length...same footprint) would be a wagon or a "liftback"? Ehhh, to me they're both hatchbacks. :P

The gray area to me is how long does a hatchback have to be before it becomes a Wagon. The old Protege5 was right on that limit for me as it was a tough call between wagon and hatchback by my feeble standards.

british_rover

I think the 4 door GTI is a hatch but the Protege5 is a wagon.

seminole_kev

That's about how I'd see it as well. There's just enough rear overhang on the Protege 5 that just gets it into wagon territory in my mind, but it is close.

andys120

This Boy's Life 1993

andre1969

I think technically, a Phaeton is a 4-door convertible, but not with roll-down windows. It would be the old style with clear plastic flaps that you snapped into place. In a sense, kinda like a 4-door roadster?

By 1956, "Phaeton" was just a marketing term that Mercury added to the name for their 4-door hardtop. So if you had a Mercury Montclair that was just a regular 4-door, it was just a Montclair. If you had the 4-door hardtop, it was a Montclair Phaeton.

This was actually a pretty common practic back in the 50's. Buick attached the name "Riviera" to its hardtop models, while Olds attached "Holiday", and Pontiac used "Catalina". "Bel Air" originally started off as the name of the hardtop model. Dodge used the term "Lancer" (I think they also used "Regal" a couple years), DeSoto used "Sportsman", and Chrysler used names like "Newport", "Nassau", and "St. Regis"

imidazol97

This is the reverse C-pillar where the "Phaeton" is written.

texases

No car guesses, but a question - were '50s cars as colorful as the movies make them out to be? Did the majority have the two tones, pastels, etc? Or do we paint most of them that way now, when they were in the minority back then? I do wish modern cars had more colors available.

jbollt

two tones were VERY popular in the 50's...as was chrome

bryan

Yes, 50's cars were indeed very colorful. Hopefully Andre will post some of his brochures from that era, which show the various color combos available back then. It was not unusual to see two and three-colors together on the same car.

lemko

Blue and white car parked by the curb is a 1956 Oldsmobile.
Taxicab is a 1949 or '50 Nash.
Red and white car obscured by the tree is a 1955 Pontiac.
Car approaching taxicab is a 1956 Ford.
Red and white car parked diagonally to curb near the bus is a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air.

hudsonthedog

If hatchback's must be small 2-door models, what does this classify as?

...and if this model had actually been given the rear opening it was planned to have, wouldn't this have been classified as a hatchback?

andre1969

I think by 1955-56, two-tones, pastels, bright colors, etc were becoming all the rage, but there were still a lot of cars painted in more conservative, darker colors. I'd imagine that many of the cars that were considered sportier, like the hardtop coupes and convertibles, tended to be delivered in brighter colors than a stodgy 4-door sedan. And it's the sportier models that tended to survive.

I think one thing that's overdone in that movie still is that there are just too many 1956 or so models showing up at once. I see a '56 Chevy, a '56 Oldsmobile, I think that Ford is a '56 as well, and that Pontiac peeking through the trees to the left is a '55-56. Maybe that Pontiac is the Ricardos and Mertzes coming into town on their way to Los Angeles, and Ethel's going to wow the local yokels down at the theatre with a live performance of "Shortnin' Bread" and follow it up with an operatic tune such as "My Hero", from "The Chocolate Soldier"?

For that scene to look more realistic, I'd say there really should be more older cars in it and not so many brand-new ones. I mean, the current year is 2007, but if I look out the window, the majority of cars that I see are NOT going to be 2006-2007 models!

Back to the two-toning for a moment. On more basic cars like a Ford, Chevy, or Plymouth, it was less common, but as you moved up the ranks, it became more common. By the time you moved up to something like a '56 DeSoto or Chrysler, it was actually pretty rare to see one in monotone!

texases

Cutlass - depends on whether you buy Shifty's 2/4 door difference. Here's my take - it's a hatchback if the length after the rear wheel is shorter than on the sedan (think Rabbit vs. Jetta: 5-door Rabbit = hatchback, 5-door Jetta = wagon). So, had the Cutlass actually had a hatch, I guess I'd go with hatchback, but it's borderline. The slant would push it to hatchback territory, I guess.

andre1969

I'd say that Kaiser would actually qualify as a bit of a hybrid. It's part hatchback, part wagon, part 4-door sedan. As for that '78-79 Cutlass Salon. I'd call it a mistake. I think Oldsmobile would, too. They changed that roofline for 1980, and sales took off.

lemko

My Dad went to high school during the 1950s and said the majority of people had mostly 1930s and 1940s cars. So, for the scenes to be more accurate, there should be a lot of 1940s cars with a few newer 1950s cars. Same thing with today. If a film maker of the future wants to capture and accurate look of 2007, he'd use a few 2000s car with a majority of mid-late '90s models and even a few '80s cars.

andre1969

I don't think it was really common for them to start showing the color choices in car brochures until the 60's, or maybe even the 70's. But there's a whole slew of brochures online at this site: http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/ and they at least have tons of illustrations, pictures, etc that give you an idea of a lot of the colors available at the time.

magnette

I agree with your comment concerning movie cars etc being too glitzy and all new for the year in question - I think the same is true for our TV programmes as where there is a film set in say late 1960's they always have cars which are from exactly then and all looking new, wheras if you look at anything that was contemporary then the cars in the background are of varying ages and in a more dilapidated state too - ie The Sweeney that featured a couple of weeks ago....
There is a series called Heartbeat on British TV, set in about 1967 Yorkshire, and apart from a few characters who are supposed to be poor and who therfore drive cars which are old and wrecked, everybody else in the background apparently had a new car this year, and specified the white-wall tyres, extra chrome, etc - not at all typical of rural 60's Yorkshire but of course typical of trends in car preservation. In reality even Brit cars of that era lasted for quite a few years...
I talked to someone at a car show about this a few years ago, and he told me that his car - a 50's Austin saloon which would have been typical in any British street scene from 1955- 75, really - was turned down for Heartbeat because it was too old (about an eight year old car at the supposed time of the episode) and it was too scruffy - he was restoring it and it needed a repaint!

Mr_Shiftright

seminole hit the nail on the head for the defining characteristic we were all missing....the rear overhang over the wheels. Basically if there's an entire "box" back there behind the axle, it shouldn't be a hatch.

Okay let's try again:

"A hatchback is a small truncated automobile with very little front or rear overhang, FWD or RWD, 2 or 4 doors, characterized by a top hinging vertical or slightly angled hatch, located at or very near the rear axle area."

Did we satisfy everybody this time? :P

stever

Edmunds says a hatchback is "A car with a two or four-door body configuration and a sloping back with a hinged rear cargo hatch that opens upward." (link)

The sloping back part gets at your definition I think.

A wagon on the other hand is "A car with a wagon body configuration and a roofline that extends past the rear doors." link

Hmmm, maybe you should rewrite the definitions for Edmunds Shifty.

urnews

Andre1969,
Many, many thanks for that link. Really neato stuff. Quite a trip down memory lane. I made it a "favorite," bookmarked it. Got any more nostalgia sites?

andre1969

"A hatchback is a small truncated automobile with very little front or rear overhang, FWD or RWD, 2 or 4 doors, characterized by a top hinging vertical or slightly angled hatch, located at or very near the rear axle area."

Even here, there are going to be exceptions. When you say "truncated"...is that compared to what? For example, the 1980-85 GM X-cars were available as a notchback 4-door sedan, a 4-door hatchback, 2-door hatchback, 2-door notchback, and a 2-door notchback with a more sloping rear (Citation only). However, the hatchback versions were not any shorter than the sedans and coupes.

I think sometimes it's easy to tell a hatchback from a wagon, when both styles are offered. For instance, the 1981-1990 or so Escort, which could be had as a 2-door hatchback, 4-door hatchback, or wagon. Actually, in this case, no sedans were offered. And IIRC, the wagon actually was longer than the hatchbacks.

One car that really blurred the distinction for me was the Mazda Protege5 To me, this thing just screams "wagon" more than it does "hatchback". However, to its credit, the Protege5 did have a shorter rear overhang than the sedan version.

What are cars like the Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix considered? IMO they're small wagons, although if you compare them to something like a Ford Focus wagon, the Focus is definitely more wagon-ish.

Perhaps a sliding scale needs to be set up to classify vehicles? For instance, something like a Focus wagon might be considered 100% wagon, while a Vibe/Matrix/Protege5 might be 80% wagon/20% hatch, and something like an xA might be more like 100% hatch?

I dunno, I think no matter how you try to classify these things, you're going to run into conflict.

andre1969

Thanks, glad you like that link! I can't think of anything else right off the top of my head (went out to the bank for lunch and I think I'm still recovering from heat-stroke!). But if I run across anything else, I'll let ya know!

Actually, here's a site with more info on the 1957 DeSoto than most sane people would want to peruse. There's a color chart in there somewhere. And tons of pics of them. I know there's a crappy, low-res pic of my '57 in there, somewhere.

Mr_Shiftright

Okay, let's try AGAIN:

"A hatchback is a small truncated automobile with very little front or rear overhang, FWD or RWD, 2 or 4 doors, characterized by a top hinging vertical or slightly angled hatch, located at or very near the rear axle area, and with NO THIRD WINDOWS beyond the rear passenger seat."

Goodbye protege, citation, saab et al. "truncated" presumes no space for a third side window area.

ateixeira

A funny example is the Toyota Matrix.

Overseas they sell a Corolla Fielder that is a true station wagon. It's much longer and larger than the Matrix.

So the Matrix is actually a 5 door hatchback if you think about it.

Some do have windows behind the rear doors, they're just not very big.

bumpy

That would make this a wagon, then? :confuse:

andre1969

Heck, even a Scion xA has a third side window!

And where would you put something like a 70's chevy Nova, which was available as a hatchback?

I don't think that it's necessarily written in stone that a hatchback has to be small. It's just that, as you move down to smaller cars, a hatchback makes more sense than a sedan for utility purposes, and often starts to even look better stylistically, whereas with bigger cars, there's a diminishing return on utility. Plus, bigger cars usually start looking awkard as a hatchback, unless it's a style where it's blended to try and hide the fact that it's a hatchback. Like the aforementioned Nova. Or the Mazda6 hatch.

stickguy

Too many people with time on their hands today?
Anyway, the Mazda 6 is a good example. Compare the hatch (aka 5 door) to the wagon, and it is obvious what the difference is, and which is which.

andys120

I'd have to say 2-tones weren't quite as commonplace as that picture makes it seem. My Dad bought two cars during the decade and neither was two tones although the '53 Pontiac could've used two-tones since it was really rather drab in monotone baby blue

Our '59 Merc in Silver w blue velour inside looked as nice as anything from that benighted year but really wasn't that snappy for a car of the era.

The heyday of two-tones was the middle of the decade, after '57 they became less prevalent althought plenty of early 60s cars carried roofs or other trim in contrasting colors.

My folk's first two-tone was their black vinyl over olive green metallic '67 Firebird, certainly the spiffiest car they ever owned but they didn't keep it long.

urnews

I, for one, really liked the two tones (and some of the 1950s three tones). It's too bad automakers today don't offer them.

hudsonthedog

I don't think that "small" is necessary to define a hatchback. If the Cutlass and Century had liftgates, I would have called them mid-sized hatchbacks. Even the Saab 9000 was available as a full-sized hatchback.

And I don't think that rear overhang necessarily has to be shorter than in the notchback versions; the X-bodies are a prime example. And the roof length rule isn't necessarily hard and fast either...how about the late 1980s Honda Civic or first-generation Geo Metro?

As with the famous quote about art, I don't know how I would define a hatchback, but I know it when I see it.

Mazda Protege5...wagon.
Suzuki Aerio SX...hatchback (even though Suzuki says wagon)
AMC Gremlin...hatchback.
AMC Hornet Sportabout...wagon.

imidazol97

It was in 1956 that the strong color combos really showed up. The 1956 black with bright yellow Chevrolet comes to mind. And the 1957 Oldsmobile with a green and yellow two-tone combo was really bright. I can't find pictures of either one on the web. Before that two tones with white as one of the colors showed up.

The DeSoto site that andre posted is a good example of bright color combos.

I saw a 1956 Ford with a rare color pairing of a light, thin green with white two tone. Most were one of the other two greens that are darker and blue and red.