And there were, of course, many sports car prototypes and show cars from various Divisions that made the rounds of GM’s Motorama shows.Īnd then there was the Ford Motor Company. been less invested in revamping the standard lines. Even the 1953 Studebaker Starliner/Starlight was considered as something of a sports car, albeit a more practical one with a back seat.Ĭhrysler was busy with a series of Virgil Exner-conceived one-offs, any one of which could have made it to showrooms had K. The Nash-Healy, the Hudson Italia and the Kaiser Darrin all made it to production. In addition to the most famous one (the 1953 Corvette) there were many others. Sports cars were all the rage in the early 1950s. The basic story of the Thunderbird is well-known. It is this one: The 1957 Ford Thunderbird. And the 1950’s? Sorry, but it is not the ’57 Chevy. Then there was the 1941 Lincoln Continental and the 1965 Mustang, two cars that reached a kind of styling perfection in the 1940’s and the 1960’s. The 1936 Ford (or the ’39 if you are a contrarian like me) did the same thing the following decade in that each was virtually perfect in its own way. Think about it: in the 1920s it was the Model A, one of the most beautiful cars of its era, never mind its diminuitive size. However, it seems that once every decade it was the Ford Motor Company that hit the stylistic home run which made all other cars seem ordinary. Names like Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell are well known for the long stream of attractive and trend-setting cars that they guided from paper to clay and into showrooms everywhere during the company’s long term domination of the American auto industry. It is generally accepted that General Motors was the long-reining king of automotive styling. At least not without its older brothers along. Hard as it may be to believe, in all of the years that curbside classics have been gracing the pages of Curbside Classic, we have never given the 1957 Thunderbird its day in the sun.
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