We haven’t seen much recently from one of our favorite Cohort posters, Curtis Perry. But this rather dream-like composition of a ’58 Thunderbird shot just last week or so cannot be denied.
I was in awe of these when I arrived in the states in 1960 as a young kid, although I can’t really say I thought they were beautiful or attractive. I arrived just as the new ’61 Bullet Bird did; now that was a real dream car. The ’58 -’60 was more like a…bad dream car; as in something you’d see in a crazy dream after too much ice cream and cake right before bed. Or coming down with a fever. Not quite a nightmare, but not exactly a pleasant dream either.
And its gaping bass-mouth grille didn’t make it any less intimidating. (update: this picture of the front is by CC reader Teddy)
I called the ’58 T-Bird “The Most Revolutionary Car of the Fifties” in my CC. Of course I meant that strictly for America, and not in a technical way, but in terms of its impact in defining the whole genre of personal luxury car, one that kept growing and morphing, and eventually dominated the market, when the Olds Cutlass Supreme became the best selling car for several years on. But I’m not so sure I’d stick with that title today. Hmmm.
Great lighting in these photos indeed and I am surprised the thrift store leaves clothes outside in Portland’s climate. I miss the Dealer Plates this car had, but now it is officially an Oregonian.
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Love that 55 Dodge photo-bombing this shot!
Even further back there is what appears to be a mid-sixties Mercury hardtop. Is there nothing but old cars on the streets of that neighborhood?
Yup and I assume the average age of vehicles on Oregon roads is about 18 years old.
And yet the rear plate is one of the Pacific wonderland plates complete with special interest sticker.
@1963Lemans: This vehicle now wears a pair of Pacific Wonderland plates I assume since when I found it in February it had Washington Dealer Plates. Also, that is a Fuschia 2019 sticker not a Special Interest sticker.
Those body t birds look haunted to me. Cool.
Whenever I see I one I think of the character, “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark,” who had a mildly customized black ’59 convertible in an bad old movie.
“most revolutionary car”
It was the first unibody Ford, so if considering the manner of construction it was certainly a revolutionary Ford.
Fell in love with these Thunderbirds when they came in Sugar Rice Krinkles cereal. Enough said.
I would say it still deserving of the ” most revolutionary” title. Unibody was the wave of the future in 1958 and this car as well as the 58 Lincoln got Ford building cars using it. It created a whole new category of cars that swept the industry, leaving GM wondering what the hell was going on. The Thunderbird mystique trickled down to Ford’s lesser models by borrowing styling elements from it, most famously, the roof. That same successful formula applied to the Falcon chassis in the 60’s gave Ford a grand slam success with the Mustang. Lincoln’s success with the Mark III, IV, and v also has its roots in this car. In the auto business, this car was as far from a nightmare as they come.
When it comes to “most revolutionary” (for domestic vehicles from the 1950s), it’s either this car, or the 1956-59 “standard” Rambler, in my opinion.
Since there’s no thumbs up/down here, yeah, the 1958 T Bird was very revolutionary for US cars. We’re used to front buckets now, but not then. Plus individual rear seats. There were maybe some European high end precedents, but it was the first high production car that took the problem of a very low car with rear wheel drive – and to make it worse a live rear axle needing a higher driveshaft tunnel – and turned it into a front to back console.
In an interview back then a Ford designer said something about it looking a little “spooky”. It’s a kind of cool that no one had done before.
Also look at how the trunk sculpture motivated by the rear lights goes right through the rear window and into the interior. And the bumpers being integrated into the body. A few other cars were getting there as well. If they were body color it would be almost like a modern car design in that respect.
Were there any other Ford products that directly shared the Thunderbird’s 1958 specific unibody construction? I can’t imagine them devoting just a single model to one platform but maybe that’s exactly what they did for eleven years until 1969 when the Lincoln Mark III arrived which, I assume, shared the Thunderbird’s chassis.
Regardless, the formal, upright styling of the Squarebird, in the context of 1958, really wasn’t all that bad. In fact, the success of the personal luxury Thunderbird would seem to have done a good job of offsetting the Edsel disaster.
I’ve wondered why it took GM a whole five years before they could come up with a legitimate competitor (the 1962 Grand Prix was really just a trim job on a Catalina). I guess the personal luxury market really caught GM management totally by surprise. OTOH, they did get it right when the iconic Riviera finally arrived.
The 1958 Lincoln and Continental. Ford built the Wixom plant specifically for these two new unibody car lines, which did share quite a bit under the skin. And they continued to, until both went back to BOF construction.
They shared the basic unit body construction concept unlike everything else and maybe some front suspension and other bits, but the huge difference in size and height had to mean that they didn’t really share a lot if any major body parts. Lincolns downsized in 1961 while T Birds got bigger but they still didn’t share anything of even the cowl structure for example. The 1961 Lincoln has parallel wipers – which they really effed up and had them going the wrong way like it was a British car with right hand drive – but the T Bird has opposing wipers. The T Bird has a less nightmarish heater system.
Little known fact except to actual owners or mechanics: the 1961-3 Lincolns with AC have three fans, two for heat/def and one for AC. The AC is built into the dash but is not integrated and works just like a hang-on unit. And the whole thing including temperature is vacuum controlled, by twirling the eff out of one knob. About fifty miles of vacuum hoses. I think they probably fixed all this stuff with the (crappy) 1964 facelift with three more inches of wheelbase.
The backwards windshield wipers on the 1961 Lincoln are hydraulic, run off the power steering pump. Not sure if the T Bird is as absurd in that area.
I’m actually astonished to learn that 1958-69 Lincolns were unibody cars, particularly since big Fords remained BoF. It’s hard to get past the idea that a big Lincoln Continental convertible, with suicide doors yet, had a unibody chassis.
T-bird also had the hydraulic wipers that ran off the return lines of the power steering pump. So long as they didn’t develop leaks, these were good units offering the infinite speed variability of vacuum systems without the disadvantages of speed variation tied to manifold vacuum.
Our Ford garage had few leak reports when the units were new, but then we didn’t sell many T-birds and rarely saw a Lincoln. I quit working in the Ford garage when the oldest systems would have been about 12 years old.
Not sure how aging beyond that point affected reliability.
Fugliest of all Tbirds. I loved them as a kid.
Elvira’s ride.
El
I was wondering when someone would bring up Elvira’s ‘Bird.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, these (no longer in use) cars dotted the rural landscape around where I grew up. There was a pair of them out on a farm where we used to go to pick up straw every year. I had the same feelings about them as a kid, especially the taillights – that’s the stuff of childhood nightmares right there.
When I was a kid and these were new this was my late father’s dream car. At the time we couldn’t afford one. Later on he had some fine cars but the square Birds were always his favorite.
Within context, most late-50’s American cars were fascinatinly overstyled and grotesque. The T bird was mid-pack in this regard and not unusual.
It looks bad compared to its beautiful predecessor, but the entire industry was on the wrong track. The bullet Bird was a dramatic and needed improvement.
Mid-pack seems about right. It wasn’t the best, but certainly not the worst, either. More importantly, it defined a new market segment. The Squarebird is often overlooked as a game-changer, mostly due to its lackluster appearance, but it really was. Unibody construction was still viewed with suspicion, particularly when Chrysler’s quality was so bad and they were a huge proponent of the construction technique. When Ford used it for the Thunderbird, it really legitimized unibody construction into the mainstream.
Frankly, I wonder if it was the market direction Studebaker was hoping to take the Starliner when it evolved into the Hawk which, in turn, might have caught the eye of the more astute Ford product planners. If only Studebaker management hadn’t been so inept…
In case you aren’t car nerdy enough to know, Chrysler unibodies came along two years later in 1960, except the Imperial. And they didn’t have any particular quality problems related to the unibody, just the same quality problems in general they already had. A proud tradition carried on today all these decades later by Fiat Chrysler.
Thanks for the refresher on Chrysler’s wholesale move to unibody construction in 1960. For some reason, I thought it was earlier, before the Thunderbird, maybe even 1955, but certainly no later than the new Forward Look 1957 cars. It might have been due to how quickly the rear suspensions began to sag on the ’57 cars.
In that respect, it makes the Thunderbird’s unibody construction even more revolutionary.
Still probably my third least favorite generation of T-bird (above the “big bird” of the early 70’s and the shrunken “formal bird” of the early 80’s, but they definitely were revolutionary in construction. That whole scene does have sort of a fever dream vibe…
“Bad dreams car”
Perfect. I love it! The phrase that is, not the car. Spot on.
Yeah, there is nothing to love about the ’58-’60 Square birds – either technically or aesthetically, yet I am (and always have been) oddly captivated by them.
Everything I know and love about the square birds started at the age of 14 with the original (first video only) opening of the TV show 77 Sunset Strip.
Love Kookie’s sweeping arm swing as the white T-Bird convertible glides out of the driveway.
I think Paul Drake on Perry Mason usually drove a new Thunderbird, beginning with a ’57, Squares (which is what I most remember), Bullets and, finally, Flairs (the show ended in 1966).
Evidently Kookie was a magician. That arm sweep motion caused the T-Bird to tun into a ’58 Ford as it entered the street.
The styling of these Squarebirds is certainly polarizing, but I personally have always loved them. The hooded headlights and rear finlets do give its styling an avian flavor, living up to its name.
I’ll take mine with an aluminum-head FE punched out to 454 cubic inches ( possible with a repro 427 block and 428 crank ) fed by an aftermarket TBI setup, spinning an AOD transmission. And the whole thing hiding under stock sheetmetal and plain steel rims.
Well that would certainly be a lot better than the boat anchor MEL 430 that some of these came with.