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THE FINAL IN A SERIES OF FOUR STORIES

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Snapshots can only show a split second, not tell a whole story.  The same can be said of meetings, or sales figures.  Taken alone, they only share a little information.  But it takes context and perspective to show what a snapshot really represents.

The meetings taking place in and around Detroit celebrating (for the most part) the results of the 1957 model year showed that the men who ran the biggest companies in the world had no better idea of what the future held than anyone else.  “Past results do not guarantee future performance,” as the old saying goes.

While some consider the 1957 offerings of GM, Ford, and Chrysler to be some of the best ever offered, what followed for 1958 never gets those same accolades.  In fact, 1957 represents to many the last year before things took a turn for the worse that changed things for good.  Or for a long time, anyway.

At General Motors, things were gussied up, to be sure.  In what would become the last of the Harley Earl designs, the 1958 models were festooned with more chrome than they could handle.  Buick applied 160 separate “Dyna-Stars” for a front grille, gangly fins at the rear end, bulbous bulges and angles in between that made people scratch their heads.  Oldsmobiles went with chrome musical scales on each side of the rear flanks, jet-inspired exhaust tube tail lights and a plethora of color options that did nothing to distract from the awkward designs.  Pontiac took the Chevrolet design and heaped on excess to prove it was worth more money.  Chevrolet probably came across better than any of them, starting with a six-tail light motif at the back end that would prove to be a design element off and on for decades.  They regained the Number One sales position and held on to it for the foreseeable future.

All the GM offerings looked ridiculous beside the Chrysler lineup and even the GM designers knew it.  All new models for 1959 would be a belated response.  Some would say the response was both ill-timed and poorly executed.  Harley Earl waved goodbye and Bill Mitchell took over.  In 1960, the Corvair debuted and caused more of a stir in the press than a rush to dealerships.  The Chevy II, later called Nova, would be a better effort, although the Corvair did more for automotive safety regulations than probably any other car.

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Simple inertia would allow the monolithic automaker to continue to grow so big that some thought the government would step in and force it to break up into two smaller companies.  GM dodged that bullet.  Falling market share due to imports in the decades that followed coupled with poor management that was rewarded for mediocrity drove the company into eventual bankruptcy.  The government eventually had to jump in to save the company, rather than break it up.

At the Ford Motor Company the optimism held at the end of the 1957 model year did not last long.  The gussied up 1958 models that were basically reworked 1957s lost the appeal of their predecessors.  Extra headlights at the front, extra tail lights at the rear, and fussy details added in between did nothing to approve the appearance.  The Ford brand wouldn’t see Number One again for a long time.

The 1958 Lincolns and Continentals were poorly received.  They were over-styled and under engineered responses to Cadillac that did end up selling better than Imperial, but caused management at the Blue Oval to consider killing off the brand completely at the end of the three year run of the design.  Only the decision to turn what had been designed as a Thunderbird into the 1961 Lincoln by stretching it and adding back doors, suicide doors at that, saved the division.

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Mercury grew into something that was the opposite of what the market was looking for.  After four years of selling its own line of unique cars, the brand turned back into a Ford with allegedly fancier features.  Relegated to ‘also-ran’ status they struggled to find an identity and market until they were put out of their own misery in 2010.

Changing the Thunderbird from a two-seater to a four-seater and making it an even more aspirational car created a whole new market niche that Ford held exclusively for five years till Buick unveiled the Riviera.  Sales doubled from 1957 to 1958.  It was one of the few success stories for any of the Big Three that year.

That of course was not enough to outweigh the biggest failure of 1958, possibly the entire decade of the 1950s.

The Edsel was an effort to make the Ford Motor Company a reflection of the five-brand lineup of General Motors and Chrysler.  The Edsel was supposed to be the car Ford owners could move up to who couldn’t afford a Mercury.  The Edsel competed with Pontiac and Oldsmobile; the Mercury targeted Buick.  It seemed like the right move in 1954, when the plan was hatched.  By the time it was unveiled to a waiting public in 1957, everything had changed.  Divided into four series in two price rangers, the Edsel lineup suffered from a multitude of woes.

Everything from the name to the styling missed the mark.  The Edsel quickly became the but of a million jokes and the case study for how corporations can make deplorably bad decisions.  The debacle lasted technically three model years before the plug was pulled, though the 1960 offerings shouldn’t even count.  Less than 2,600 1960 models were even built.  By then they were just gussied up Fords, but the amount spent for tooling to gussy up 2,600 Fords had to make the cost for each 1960 Edsel more than an equivalent Continental.  Ford lost $250,000,000 on the Edsel experiment.  That’s nearly three billion dollars in 2024 dollars.

The 1960 Ford Falcon unveiled in 1959 was a winner, although it came at a severe cost to the full sized Ford line.  It was the most successful new car launch in years and far more successful than the efforts of GM with their Corvair or Chrysler with their Valiant.  So well received was the Falcon, in fact, that its basic model architecture would be used in 11 Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln models over the next two decades. The Mustang, debuting in 1964 was the most successful reimagining of the basic Falcon structure, the Lincoln Versailles in 1977 being the most dubious.

Of the industry giants sitting around the hypothetical Ford conference room with Henry II in 1957, Lee Iacocca would go on to be one of the most famous, first with the Mustang, next with resurrecting Chrysler from the ashes.  Robert McNamara would assume the presidency of Ford Motor Company at the end of 1960, only to give it away months later to follow John F. Kennedy to the White House as his Secretary of Defense.  Later, under LBJ, he would achieve  notoriety as the architect of the Vietnam War.  That effort was not nearly as successful as the Ford Falcon had been, although it may have had a bigger impact on the country overall.

At Highland Park, the fortunes of the Chrysler Corporation seemed to take a tumble faster and further than either of the other of the Big Three.  The successful products of 1957 quickly developed a reputation of shoddy quality when they left the factory and designs that had been rushed to market without proper testing and development.  The Plymouths, Dodges, De Sotos, Chryslers and Imperials customers drove home in 1957 were often already rusting in their driveways in 1958.

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In 1960 Lester “Tex” Colbert stepped down as president of the corporation.  His ten years at the helm; was considered by most to be a successful one. His friend and neighbor in Bloomfield Hills, William C. Newberg was chosen to take over as president.  And then, just days later, things went to hell in a handbag.

A prominent attorney by the name of Sol A. Dann owned 51,000 shares of Chrysler stock, twice as many as Colbert himself.  Having recently targeted Studebaker-Packard and American Motors for a litany of bad corporate behavior, at the 1960 annual Chrysler shareholders meeting, Dann stood before the audience and declared the Chrysler Corporation had turned into a bastion of “nepotism, favoritism, payola, reckless disregard for the rights of shareholders, bribery, misconduct, perpetuation of themselves in office, creating a Pearl Harbor that would lead Chrysler to the same fate as Packard.”

What followed were a series of accusations, audits, lawsuits, and scandals that nearly brought the corporation to its knees.  It was discovered that Newberg and his wife had half interest in at least two different companies that supplied parts to Chrysler, establishing a conflict of interest as well as explanation for the high costs and poor quality on a lot of Chrysler parts.  Newberg was forced to resign after only 64 days as president.

As interesting an aside, it was reported that Colbert had secretly arranged for Newberg to be named as Chairman of Studebaker to get him to step down quietly, but then later reneged on the deal.  Newberg confronted Colbert at the country club they were both members of and punched him in the face.

Sol A. Dann, the attorney who had exposed the entire thing, clinched his place in history a few years later by managing to win a reversal of the death penalty Jack Ruby had received for the murder on live TV of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.

In 1961 Chrysler shuttered the De Soto brand, just like Ford had killed the Edsel.  The following year, needing a scapegoat for the 1962 Chrysler, Plymouth, and Dodge offerings that were as bizarre as any that had ever been offered, the company fired Virgil Exner.  The man who had led the company to its highest success in the 50s took the fall for its downfall in the early 60s.  The architect of “The Forward Look” had become the father of the “plucked chickens”.

Chrysler became synonymous with a “Cat of Nine Lives”, barely surviving from one crisis to another.  Lee Iacocca, government bailouts, near bankruptcies and sales to Daimler, then Fiat, then Cerberus, and eventually Stellantis led the company to the precarious position it still holds today.  Plymouth was shed in 2001.  The Chrysler brand itself is down to just the Pacifica minivan.  

But at the end of the 1957 model year, things were as bright as they could be for the Big Three.  Cars were big and bold and festooned with chrome and colors that appealed to the buying masses.  Import cars were for college professors or their students.

Of course, that was just a snapshot.

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