Photos: When GM's designs ruled the road
This week's bankruptcy news brings on a bout of nostalgia for GM cars of yesteryear, from the 1938 Buick Y Job to the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray.
GM brands in 1925
So we took a tour of GM's photo archives and came up with this somewhat arbitrary showing of automotive designs from the company's heyday in the broad middle of the 20th century, before the first oil crisis and the surging presence of Japanese imports on U.S. roadways. We'll start here with a "market segmentation price ladder" of GM models from 1925: Cadillac sedan, Chevrolet touring, Pontiac coupe (first year), Buick touring, and Oldsmobile sedan.
1927 LaSalle Roadster
British automotive journalist Giles Chapman had this to say about the significance of GM's design efforts, in an interview Monday on Public Radio International's The World program:
"I think you can safely say that General Motors invented car design, because in 1926 they opened up a department called the Art and Colour department, and that was really the first time that they had actually decided to expend some attention on how cars looked as opposed to the design of the car underneath its metal. So that is something they brought to the entire global car industry. And that's what their success was founded on, being absolutely brilliant at that. We think of something like the 1959 Cadillac with those gigantic fins, or the '63 Corvette Sting Ray with the split rear window. They were the result of years and years of trying to create spectacular automobiles."
1935 Chevrolet Suburban
But now we jump ahead a few years, to see that some of the older stylings still prevailed. This is a 1935 Chevrolet Suburban and what looks to be an advertising-friendly all-American family heading out on a road trip.
Pontiac Studio designers
1938 Buick Y Job
1940 Oldsmobile
Scale model in clay
1951 Buick Le Sabre
Motorama 1953
1954 Cadillac El Camino
1956 Buick Centurion Dream Car
1956 Oldsmobile Golden Rocket
Firebird concepts
1957 Suburban 100 Series
GMC 100 series
1959 Firebird III
1959 Cadillac Cyclone
1959 Cadillac Eldorado
1960 Chevrolet Corvair
It didn't help matters at all that the Corvair, with its rear-mounted engine and potentially dodgy suspension, had a featured role in a landmark of consumer activism, Ralph Nader's 1965 book "Unsafe at Any Speed."