When I tore into the 1976 Chevelle’s front end yesterday, I joked about how it might have been designed by someone’s kid. But let’s face it; it really does look like someone just slapped on a cheap facsimile of a Mercedes grille on a 1973 Chevelle (while enduring a fifth-grade Math class?). Well, that’s exactly what happened, and history was made. The 1974 Chevelle has the dubious distinction of starting the whole Mercedes Grille Epoch, which infected America like a virus.
Admittedly, the 1973 Chevelle front end wasn’t exactly the most exciting and daring face that ever came out of Bill Mitchell’s studios. But it was honest and unpretentious. The story has been told often: the 1973 A-Bodies were intended to arrive in 1972, which was before the dreaded five-mile battering rams were dictated by law. They were delayed a year, in part because of the massive strike against GM in 1971. What the 1972 Chevelle would have looked like is anyone’s guess, unless someone has some studio clay photos (if so, please share).
Undoubtedly, it would have been better than the final result, which was clearly a bit heavy and dull, compared to the expressive and deeply textured front ends pre-bumper regs.
Quite likely the 1973 Chevelle Laguna with its expensive “Endura” resilient front end was created to give some design pizazz to the rather plain Chevelle front end. Maybe the Laguna suggests what the 1972 Chevelle would/should have looked like? It was a rather odd attempt to take the Chevelle upmarket, but in a sporty, not “Broughamy” way. Which is fitting, given the lines of the Chevelle coupe. The Monte Carlo had the Brougham segment covered quite well, thank you.
The 1972 Mercedes W116 (450 SE/SEL), with its wider version of the traditional radiator shell, arrived at a time when America embraced the three-pointed star as the aspirational vehicle of choice. And as the Great Brougham Era unfolded, its influence became ever-more wide-spread.
The Ford Granada, which arrived in 1974 too in 1975, blatantly tried to pretend that it was somehow indistinguishable from a W116. It’s a sad commentary that anyone might have fallen for that, but the Granada was a big hit. At least the Granada was designed all-over to emulate a Mercedes. But even its grille wasn’t really a blatant Mercedes grille, at least not anywhere near as much so as the 1974 Chevelle’s.
It was no less than Bill Mitchell’s vaunted GM Design Studios that fell so low to really do that properly, right down to all the details: the shape and design of the surround, the horizontal bars emanating from the central vertical bar, the texture of the grille itself, and even the round stand-up ornament. So much for honest and unpretentious. Sad, really; considering the design leadership and creativity that originated from there. And rather surprising, as it just doesn’t fit on the sporty, curvaceous lines of the Chevelle. But the monster had been unleashed, and soon a raft of other blatant Mercedes grilles soon polluted America’s roadways, ending an era of American design originality. But few were as faithfully executed as the Chevelle’s.
Great article.
Ironic, too, in that Mitchell had made snide remarks about Mercedes styling. When asked if the original Seville had copied the Mercedes, Mitchell replied that it had copied the Rolls-Royce, with the accompanying comment that, “If you are going to rob something, rob a bank, not a grocery store.”
He also once asked if Mercedes even employed stylists.
Collectible Automobile did run photos of the styling prototypes for the Colonnade Cutlass Supreme, but since Olds installed a fairly thin bumper on the front of the 1973 Cutlass, the change to accommodate the bumper standards wasn’t very dramatic.
Ohhhh – Mercedes Grille week here at CC. Who would have guessed. Stude GT Hawk and now this. Quick, somebody get us an 84 Reliant!
When the colonnades appeared for 1973, I thought the styling was by far the least inspired of the batch. The Buick, Olds and Pontiac took the basic shell and each went somewhere that was both unique and cohesive. Each one carried a vibe very much in keeping with the spirit of its brand. The Chevy? It was as if the Chevy studio kept being told to get rid of this design element or that because another studio was using it, and they were left with almost a generic colonnade.
As for the 74 grille, I never really picked up on the Mercedes theme. Instead, it seemed to me that Chevy’s designers were trying to pull out of a mopar-style fuselage nosedive when it became plain that the Ford Brougham Look ™ was a hit with buyers. Whether blessing or curse, the colonnades’ basic shape never lent it self to the full-on formal brougham treatment like the Fords, and at the same time, lacked the Mopar coke-bottle profile that looked dated so quickly. This middle way turned out quite well for the General in the 1970s and was a big reason for the styling of these cars aging more gracefully.
But what is a Mercedes grille if not a rip-off of a Rolls Grille which is nothing more than a stylized version of the traditional radiator grille going back to the dawn of motoring?
You’re joking, right? First of all, the Mercedes grille was never a copy of the RR grille. It was what it was; its own version of the traditional radiator grille/surround, going back to the early years of that company. And almost all cars had them, for functional and design reasons.
The fact that both Mercedes and RR chose to keep “fake” versions of their traditional grilles after the radiator became a separate device was a controversial issue in its own right. There were endless internal battles inside Mercedes (starting in the fifties) as to whether to dump it or not. They finally did.
But the point is that the Mercedes grille had authentic heritage with the brand. The Chevelle’s didn’t. And it happened at a a time when the Mercedes became the aspirational car, and the Caddy wasn’t any longer. Chevy used to ape Caddy design cues, right? It was just what it was: a blatant copy. And within a few more years, folks got over that silly fad, and moved on the the next new thing.
So that somehow makes it a tasteful thing to slap on the front of any car?
> And within a few more years, folks got over that silly fad, and moved on the the next new thing.
*You’re* joking right? Tell that to Hyundai designers who slapped on a not-quite-Mercedes grille on it with a not-quite-Bangle butt to spare.
Aspirational cars are always imitated by lower priced brands, and they *do* appear tasteful to their target market, that’s why they sell. Anyway, we are making a mountain of a molehill. Chevelle only had that grille for a short period in its history.
Sometimes history does repeat itself, sadly.
Not to mention Lexus in 1989
Am I the only one who can’t see any Mercedes influence in the LS400 styling? If anything, the side looks like a 1989 Maxima, while the taillights bring to mind the 1987 (or was it 1988?) Audi 80/90.
Chevy never claimed any resemblence in any ads to M-B as Ford.
Anyway, Collectible Automobile has prototype pics of the “72 Colonnades”, and of course the Chevelle has bumper like the 72 Impalas.
The Laguna flopped with Middle America, too radical, as did the Grand Am. But, they were designed in the “mod-mod world”, 68-70, time of ‘muscle mania’ and ‘sportiness’. However, Personal Luxury won over as we all know.
BTW, Granada was a new for 1975 model, a model year after the 74 Chevelles.
“Chevy never claimed any resemblence (sic) in any ads to M-B as Ford.”
Which tells us where their sense of shame kicked in. Both ripped off the grille. Only Ford was willing to admit to being a copycat and to inflict further damage to itself by suggesting Americans were too stupid to tell their car from a Benz.
Excellent Granada sales would seem to indicate the opposite…
CarCounter: About 8 million cars were sold in the U.S. in 1975. If they sold half a million Granadas, 15 out of 16 Americans weren’t buying it.
And many if not most of those who did lived to regret it. There was enormous long-term damage to Ford’s image by suggesting a warmed-over Maverick (itself a warmed-over Falcon) could be compared to a Benz apart from having four wheels.
Michael: Exactly! That’s why the grille being a MB knock-off on Chevelle is not that serious a mistake. Ford wrote the book on that one. As I said in the earlier Chevelle article, this is nothing compared to the blatant ad-copy of the Granada. Thanks for putting actual figures on the conjecture. Cheers!
My bad about the Granada’s first year; I’ll fix that. Thanks.
There are pics and drawings of the Chevelle/Laguna proposals out there. I think I posted a couple here a while back.
The 75 Charger was more of an offender than the Malibu. Not as bad as the Grenada but close.
I guess my mind just doesn’t work that way. I really like the way the ’74 grille looks on the Malibu…it’s one of the few ’74 GM cars that looks better than its ’73 predecessor. .It’s waay too wide for me to think of it as a Mercedes knock-off… of course I am biased because I happen to own a ’74 Malibu Classic… (You guys are going to be sick of hearing me say, “I have one of these cars”).
I’m looking at the pic of the blue Mercedes and the Red ’74 above….and the grille on the ‘bu looks more at home. The bulging Mercedes grille kind of overpowers/interrupts the header area — I find it incredibly ugly.
GM probably spent a lot of money on the tooling for these grilles because they are heavy and hold up very well. The grille on my car has few if any pits in it & look at the rest of the car. (BTW, my car has been stored indoors since I rescued it a few years ago when this bad pic was taken).
The ’73-4 Laguna front end looks so much nicer but I learned through experience that they weigh somewhere around 200 lbs — it’s pretty much impossible for one person to bolt one of these up without inflicting a lot of collateral damage.
The Laguna “nose” was probably closer to 250 if you counted the “bumper” that was still required behind it.
That’s why I went to US Body and got a fiberglass reproduction “nose” for my 73 and built my own “crash bar” to go behind it. By that time though it really wasn’t suitable as a daily driver anymore.
That Malibu had to have been in that spot for a number of years, given the tire sinkage apparent.
I quite liked these cars when they were new, more than any other Colonnade. I saw them as a nice step up from the compact class of Novas being offered.
If you still have this Malibu, it would be nice to see shots of it, if they haven’t been up on CC yet.
End of American design originality? No way. It is rather the end of German car design. The V8 SELs were every bit American cars, right from the engine to transmission to large size, high weight, space, speed, and low fuel efficiency. In other words, completely different from the weak-chested leather-covered penalty boxes offered up as `luxury’ till then. All the Germans could come up with was the ultimate American car. I don’t know how much hand Americans had in this (like Hoffman and BMW), but MB really made those cars to sell in America, and nowhere else. Being well-made is another thing, but the design is completely American. Starting with the Heckflosse, MB cars have become more American over the years, even down to the isolated ride quality. Can’t say I disapprove, though.
Mercedes had a very long tradition of building large and powerful cars. They were just getting back to that, after it was interrupted by WW2. But to say that the S-Class was “every bit American” is a stretch, to put it mildly.
Back then, the S-Class sold quite well in Germany and Europe too, before it acquired its “Russian Mafia” image. It was just a somewhat larger Mercedes, with all of those qualities that defined a Mercedes.
Yes, the larger displacement version of the V8 was obviously a concession to the American market, where smog controls, and air conditioning as well as cheap gas made it increasingly necessary.
You mean large, powerful and antediluvian prewar X-frame cars like the 300 Adenauer series? Or the early Sonderklasse which sold very well in Germany with no air-conditioning, roll-up windows, drum brakes, vinyl(?) interiors, measly 6cyl engines, four speed on the column, and only a 108in wheelbase? Morris Isis had all that in 1955(-ish). I wonder if the German `luxury’ buyers of the period were too poor, too ignorant, too masochistic or simply too cheap, but that surely was the standard of MB’s `luxury’ back in the day. No technical innovation, no creature comforts, nothing. If it hadn’t been for Bosch (via Bendix), they wouldn’t have had fuel injection too. They were well-built, of course, but so is a bathroom appliance.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, much (if not all) of MB’s reputation as a modern legend rests upon Die Grosse 600. That car showed all naysayers what MB engineering was really capable of. Neither it nor its ideological successor S-Class were big sellers in Germany, but the V8 S-Class took USA by storm. After the Mafia got into it, however…:-)
MB: “no technical innovation” I’m not going to waste the time to rebut that, as it obviously would fall on deaf ears, but that statement certainly puts you out of the mainstream of history.
Ahem, sorry for the rather broad brush, so at least you agree that there were no creature comforts or size or power worthy of a `luxury’ tag in the early S-Class? That brings to mind, are there no big Ponton, or even Heckflosse, S-Class in line for a CC? The Ponton are my favourite MB designs, probably of all time. Definitely not luxury or innovative, however. At least the Heckflosse pioneered crumple zones (or was it the Ponton?).
i owned a 55 Morris Isis it had leather seats but hardly luxurious.
You did! Do you have more information on that car, possibly any pictures? A full CC would be excellent, given the general dearth of British cars here. There is very little stuff on this car online, and I haven’t seen any in the flesh (unlike Ponton MBs). I thought it was a Canada-only model, and we didn’t get it too. What luxury comforts was this car (or any other six-cylinder upscale car under the Morris/Austin/Van den Plaas/whatever was the nom-du-jour) missing that the S-Class had? The glaring leaf-sprung rear comes to mind. But given Oxfords are really comfy at the rear, I can’t be too sure. Of course the MBs were well-built cars, but so were the Morris cars. I live in a dry area, so can’t comment on rust! Even a Buick straight-8 Roadmaster has no rust here. But I digress… Really looking forward to an Isis CC, if possible. Thanks.
These cars have virtually disappeared around here, so I was surprised this morning to drive by a repair shop with a 1973 coupe parked, nose-first, at the garage entrance. The best part about the 1973 Chevelle/Malibu/Laguna is the BACK, with the round twin- taillights on each side that recall the contemporary Camaro and Corvette. Unfortunately, Chevrolet got rid of those taillights for 1974, and really messed up the taillights for 1976.
Heyyyy!!!! 😉 The ’73 tailights were interesting…it makes me wonder if GM did that to visually associate the new body style with the departing ’72 bodystyle which had similar taillights. “This car is still a Chevelle”.
I hit the local recycling yard as often as possible & sadly someone had hauled a true ’73 Super Sport across the scale earlier this week. It was stripped & filled with scrap metal….that stuff gets to me sometimes. I did get the cowl tag off of it after it got crushed — it was blue with black bench seat interior, column shift automatic, 350 car.
The ’73 tail end with the round recessed tail lights was the only bright design spot on the entire run of Colonnade Chevelles!
The first Mercedes knock-off grille Chevy did was on the 1970 Monte Carlo
Not quite blatant enough, just a warm up exercise for the real thing.
That is not a Mercedes knock-off grille.
Judging by the sheer number of comments you have posted on this piece as well as others here at CC It seems that you have much to say. Why don’t you start your own blog, then you can always be right.
One could just as easily make the case that Chevy was just aping the Monte Carlo their most recent bit hit.
But … weren’t the first U.S. Mercedes ripoff grilles those sported by the early 60s Studebakers, including the Gran Turisimo Hawk, the Lark facelift, etc? Yes, “justified” in that case because they were sharing distribution and showrooms in the U.S. at the time, but still …
The distribution deal with Mercedes didn’t happen until 1958, after the Hawk appeared. I don’t consider the Hawk’s grille a “blatant rip-off”. Classical grille openings never completely went away. The Valiant used one too, as did the 1957 Chrysler 300. But they didn’t have the explicit MBZdetails like the Chevelle’s: the two horizontal bars, the exact same grille inset texture, the shape and details of the grille surround. There’s no doubt that the Chevelle was aping the Mercedes; that can’t be said about the Studebakers or Chryslers.
Well said!
I wasn’t thinking of the original Hawk — I was thinking very specifically of the later Hawk facelift from 62 on, as well as the Larks from around that time. IIRC the grilles even had Mercedes-style cross-hatching, such as on this ’64 Hawk shown on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Studebaker_GT_1964.jpg
But, I would totally agree that there was an integrity and classic nature to the Stude offerings that was completely different from Chevy’s rhinoplasty!
I agree, the cars of the Studes of the early ’60s were definitely borrowing from MB.
The entire 1963 Lark facelift was very Benzlike. The car looks basically like a Fintail Benz without the fins.
Darn Mr. Niedermeyer, you just ruined my day…I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that the grille divisions themselves were so similar to the Mercedes but I concede that they are. I’m so in love with what GM used-to-build that I didn’t see the forest through the trees. My mind doesn’t capture (or refuses to capture) the similarities between the vastly superior old GM cars and the foreign stuff.
Ignorance
iswas bliss.I know the people involved with the Lark said that Lancia was a bigger influence on its styling than Mercedes, to which it’s often compared.
Come on we should do a series on Rolls Royce rip off grilles. 80s Town Car anyone?
Sorry, but a certain person doesn’t like British makes as much as German. 😉
You’re off by a decade. Lincoln was in full-on Rolls grille mode starting in the mid-70s.
Yeah but it was somehow cheesier and broughamier in the 80s. 😛
That Granada ad is 34 years old, and I still want to fire whomever came up with it.
I see what Paul is talking about with the grille, but it never would’ve occurred to me to call the Chevelle an MB rip-off. To me, the defining feature of the Chevelle nose is those Lancia Florida II headlights, while the MBs of the era had moved on to the more modern idiom of flattened headlight hoods (not sure if that’s what you’d call it…?) Though IIRC, that type of headlight treatment was first seen on 1950’s GM cars.
I guess you are one that fell for the Granada ad then. If you really think they were that serious. They were absolutely perfect for what they were intended to do, poke fun of the rich people who would spend half what the average house cost for a car for snob appeal. They were also meant to get people to spend the extra money for a “luxury” compact. They saw the writing on the wall and it was just the early 60’s playing out all over again. The external force, in this case the energy crisis and stagflation caused the knee jerk reaction of people buying sub-compact cars. Cars that people bought to be thrifty, not cars that people bought because they were what the really desired. They knew that peoples memories would start to fade slowly but still wanted a useable family car and wanted to portray both an image of being thrifty but not cheap. So they aped a few styling cues from an expensive car the color keyed wheelcovers with the cooling vents, the ribbed taillights, and the roof line and added features that were not the norm in the compacts of the day. A few dollars more on the extra thick carpet, padding and sound insulation and they suddenly had a high margin compact car a new concept at the time. Which of course payed off handsomely with the Granada selling for much more than the Maverick it shared it’s platform and basic size with and became a top ten seller in it’s first year. How high you consider it to have ranked depends on whether you consider the Bel-Air, Impala, and Caprice the same car or not. Depending on your take on that it was either #2 or #3. GM considered them separate models as they had traditionally or at least they allowed Olds to so they could claim the Cutlass the best selling car of 1975.
I’ve been quite familiar with these cars since they first came out, and honestly never noticed the MB influence of the grille. Maybe because it’s so much wider than the MB. Now that you’ve pointed it out, I definitely see it though.
A family member came to visit in spring of ’73 with a brand new ’73 Luxury LeMans with the triangular quarter windows, Pontiac rally wheels, and those little half fender skirts. It was a very pleasant light-medium green with white interior. I was smitten. To me that was the most beautiful Collonade. Red paint without the vinyl roof would have made it even better.
Oddly, that LuxLM had a straight six, 3-on-the-tree, and no A/C. I was crushed. Cheap bastards! Of course today, I’d love to have one — I’d add the A/C though. When it’s 90F and 90% humidity you can’t live without it. In fact, around here either you have ice cold A/C or you have scrap metal.
I never really thought they looked MB-ish either, and for the same reason, they were way too wide to truly mimic MB. Somehow the general managed to borrow every detail of the MB grill and end up with something that looked absolutely nothing like a MB.
One of the best Car And Driver subtitles ever, for their road test of the Ford Granada ESS: “Ford aims for Europe and hits Kokomo, Indiana” (Hopefully, none of the Hoosiers among the CC commenters will take offense).
The Granada actually does have a resemblance, albeit a slight one, to a Mercedes. Why it was compared to the 280 SE is beyond me, but the roofline does have some similarity to the W114/W115 series 280.
I hadn’t remembered that the Granada was compared to the W116; I had always thought that the target was the W123, which to me would have made more sense.
(And who among the not-legally-blind would get any of the answers wrong in Ford’s little quiz?)
The joke was on C&D because in fact Ford was aiming a Kokomo and ended up with a direct hit.
No offense taken, and you actually had me laughing through my coffee. And they did sell a lot of Granadas in Indiana.
Y’know, if you think that front end is awful – I don’t think so – than what would you say about the overly-plastic-covered Laguna front end? Now that was hideous!
I don’t know Zachman.. I changed a lot of minds with mine. Though the taillights were about all most people ever saw unless it was parked. 😀
I remember that those round taillights on 73s would start developing rustout holes around them as the cars aged in my area. I had seen a lot of cars rust, but never around the taillights like that.
I got lucky with the tails. The rest of the body was a different story. Anything that bolted on was replaced with fiberglass replicas..
Some of the GMs from that era liked to rust in strange areas for sure though..
I liked your comment, Sean! Obviously, your car wasn’t stock, as the factory edition wasn’t fast at all, like all others in that era.
After looking at the photos at length, I studied that Laguna for quite some time. When I first saw one of these on a showroom floor at a Sacramento Chevy dealer in summer 1973, shortly before I left the air force, I was appaled at what happened to “my” car company with the 1973 models which has been discussed at length in past articles.
In retrospect, compared to what constitutes “style” these days, these no longer look half bad! I’ll take one, please, Syke-approved fixed-windows-and-all!
I actually like the Laguna front end. It looks like a formal, scaled-up version of the ’71 Camaro front end, which is what I imagine Chevy’s stylists were going for before the 5 mph bumper requirement landed.
That’s a good point. At one point the Malibu and Camaro would have been in development at the same time. The original proposal for the ‘Guna was much closer to a 70 Camaro than what it wound up being.
If you look at the rear quarter panel of the 73 and 74 Malibu you’ll see the same compound curves that caused Fisher so much consternation with the 70 Camaro. Lesson learned.
Another MB copycat grill, the 85-86 Cougar…
Ahh, remember the days when you could tell a 73 from a 74,75,76…. I liked the taillights on the 73 as well. Had a 75 Malibu Classic. Put a ton of miles on it. Blue with white roof (not vinyl). 350. Mostly trouble-free miles. Transmission finally went on it. It developed a problem where you would put it in Drive and it would take a bit for the car to move. One morning it didn’t move at all. Got a used transmission and had it swapped in.
75 tail lights were unique just like 73 and 74. They had little “Bow Ties” molded in to them.
75 signaled the end though with the “filler” panels so year to year changes would be easier.
Ugh.. The “Stacked Quad” headlights were coming.
Didn’t Chrysler came also with a grille more or less inspired from the Mercedes grille for its Newport and New Yorker for 1974?
Interesting… I’ve always had a completely different opinion of these Malibus, but I was also born a decade after they were introduced, so I’m looking at it from a much different perspective. Never noticed the similarity to a Mercedes-Benz grille either, but I can definitely see it now that it’s been pointed out.
My impression of these cars has always been that of simple, utilitarian transportation. The styling seems neither “good” or “bad” to me, but could be more accurately critiqued as the exact midway point between those two extremes. Generic? Maybe – although the swoopy hind-quarters set it somewhat apart from it’s contemporaries. I never saw them as pretentious, but like I said – I didn’t view them as new cars, by the time I knew them they were battered and beaten survivors from a bygone era.
What’s most surprising to me about this post is the picture of a ’73-’74 Laguna – never knew these existed! The only Lagunas I was aware of were the later ones with the sloping grille. The earlier models are a dead ringer for the Mustang II (or is it the other way around?) – the resemblance is uncanny.
Anyway, let me take this opportunity to share an absolutely pristine ’75 Malibu Coupe I spotted a few weeks ago parked along 5th Avenue in Manhattan. It looked like an original, unrestored car that had received a new paintjob recently. Probably lives in a temperature controlled parking garage somewhere under the city and may still be driven by it’s original owner… there are lots of cars like this roaming around New York, although usually they’re W114 or W116 Mercedes-Benzes.
Sorry for the crummy pictures – they were taken from my antiquated cell phone as I was trying to not-get-flattened crossing the street!
…and one more