All Those Glamorous Hardtops, Appendix: How Common Were Four-Door Hardtops?

 

Paul recently presented a multipart survey of the many four-door hardtop models U.S. automakers offered in the 1950s and 1960s. But, how popular were these models in their day? Data from the American Manufacturers Association (AMA) reveals the answers.

 

In Paul’s earlier posts, different commenters had different recollections of how common (or uncommon) four-door hardtop models were when relatively new. However, memory can be a poor guide to such things, and cars that were ubiquitous in some parts of the country could be rare in others.

 

There’s no question that starting in the 1950s, Americans became mad for pillarless hardtops, first two-door models, then four-doors and even some wagons. The following chart, based on AMA factory sales data, will give a good sense of just how popular they were in their heyday:

Calendar-Year Factory Sales of Hardtop Models, U.S. Automakers, 1955–1974

 

The above chart shows the sales of ALL hardtop models. If we break out the totals by two- and four-door models, they look like this:

Calendar-Year Factory Sales of 2- and 4-Door Hardtop Models, U.S. Automakers, 1955–1974

 

You’ll notice that the above charts start in 1955. While there were a few pre-1955 models that could be considered four-door hardtops, like the Kaiser Virginian pictured below …

 

… it wasn’t until 1955, and the arrival of four-door hardtop models like the red Buick Century Riviera pictured below, that the AMA began to separately track two- and four-door hardtop sales.

 

As the second chart illustrates, the largest chunk of domestic hardtop sales were two-door models, whose market share reached as high as 45 percent in the late 1960s. The number of two-door hardtops available at any given time was always greater. Between the early ’50s and the mid ’70s, nearly every model line eventually offered at least one two-door hardtop, but four-door hardtops tended to be associated with bigger, more luxurious cars, and they weren’t as popular in the intermediate or compact classes even when they were offered.

Still, four-door hardtops accounted for a substantial percentage of domestic passenger car sales in this era — sometimes as many as one in every seven new cars!

Calendar-Year Factory Sales and Market Share of U.S. 4-Door Hardtops, 1955–1974

 

Here’s the data in tabular form:

Calendar Year	2D Hardtop Sales	4D Hardtop Sales	All Hardtop Sales	All Passenger Cars	Hardtop Market Share	2D HT Market Share	4D HT Market Share
1949	N/A	N/A	10,431	5,119,466	0.20%	N/A	N/A
1950	N/A	N/A	266,680	6,665,863	4.00%	N/A	N/A
1951	N/A	N/A	487,261	5,338,435	9.13%	N/A	N/A
1952	N/A	N/A	539,508	4,320,794	12.49%	N/A	N/A
1953	N/A	N/A	841,982	6,116,948	13.76%	N/A	N/A
1954	N/A	N/A	954,519	5,558,897	17.17%	N/A	N/A
1955	1,666,984	501,814	2,168,798	7,920,186	27.38%	21.05%	6.34%
1956	1,060,541	763,057	1,823,598	5,816,109	31.35%	18.23%	13.12%
1957	1,140,131	932,992	2,073,123	6,113,344	33.91%	18.65%	15.26%
1958	657,056	543,397	1,200,453	4,257,812	28.19%	15.43%	12.76%
1959	749,682	709,489	1,459,171	5,591,243	26.10%	13.41%	12.69%
1960	766,249	750,674	1,516,923	6,674,796	22.73%	11.48%	11.25%
1961	705,096	586,413	1,291,509	5,542,707	23.30%	12.72%	10.58%
1962	1,161,215	651,490	1,812,705	6,933,240	26.15%	16.75%	9.40%
1963	1,676,156	753,781	2,429,937	7,637,728	31.81%	21.95%	9.87%
1964	2,205,601	748,455	2,954,056	7,751,822	38.11%	28.45%	9.66%
1965	3,118,615	1,132,351	4,250,966	9,305,561	45.68%	33.51%	12.17%
1966	3,359,060	1,078,669	4,437,729	8,598,326	51.61%	39.07%	12.55%
1967	3,192,896	959,803	4,152,699	7,436,764	55.84%	42.93%	12.91%
1968	3,983,185	1,070,022	5,053,207	8,822,158	57.28%	45.15%	12.13%
1969	3,667,276	1,115,083	4,782,359	8,223,715	58.15%	44.59%	13.56%
1970	2,799,883	795,622	3,595,505	6,546,817	54.92%	42.77%	12.15%
1971	3,358,897	1,243,542	4,602,439	8,584,592	53.61%	39.13%	14.49%
1972	3,423,119	1,109,994	4,533,113	8,823,938	51.37%	38.79%	12.58%
1973	4,036,728	1,014,863	5,051,591	9,657,647	52.31%	41.80%	10.51%
1974	3,278,545	494,093	3,772,638	7,331,256	51.46%	44.72%	6.74%

(Note that these are calendar year factory (wholesale) sales from U.S. factories, not model year production.)

Here are some points of interest about the data:

The all-time peak U.S. market share of four-door hardtops was in 1957.

In 1957, four-door hardtops accounted for 15.26 percent of all domestic factory sales. This year was also the ’50s sales peak, with four-door hardtop sales reaching 932,992 units. Not all four-door hardtop models sold well this year, but there were a lot of them. Here are a couple of less-common examples:

In the 1960s, four-door hardtop sales peaked in 1965 …

Factory sales of four-door hardtops like the 1965 Sedan de Ville totaled a whopping 1,132,351 cars this year.

… but the greatest ’60s market share for four-door hardtops was in 1967.

That year, more than one in eight new U.S. cars — 12.91 percent — were four-door hardtops, many of them from General Motors. However, 1967 was a weak year for the domestic industry, so four-door hardtop sales totaled “only” 959,803 cars, little better than the ’50s peak a decade earlier.

 

The all-time sales peak for U.S. four-door hardtops was 1971.

That year, four-door hardtops accounted for 14.49 percent of all domestic passenger car sales — a whopping 1,243,542 cars, like this Olds 98 Holiday Sedan, which eventually ended up in New South Wales, Australia:

 

They were so popular it’s almost hard to fathom how quickly they would become extinct.

 

U.S. four-door hardtop sales dropped off rapidly after 1973.

Although four-door hardtops sold 1.1 million units in 1972 and 1.1 million in 1973, the bottom fell out of the market almost immediately afterward. Four-door hardtops remained fairly popular for bigger luxury cars, but by the 1973 model year, some lines, like the new GM Colonnade intermediates, had dropped their hardtop models entirely, or, like Ford, replaced them with “pillared hardtop” sedans like the LTD pictured below:

 

With a downturn in big-car sales following the OPEC oil embargo (which took place during the 1974 model year), more four-door hardtops soon disappeared. Most of the full-size GM models hung on through 1976, but Plymouth and Dodge dropped theirs after 1975.

 

The downsizing trend seems to have been the last straw.

Four-door hardtops had often sacrificed some rear-seat room, and the need to reinforce the structure to compensate for their inherently lower rigidity had made them heavier than pillared models. As automakers sought to improve packaging efficiency to provide comparable space in smaller cars, those penalties became less and less acceptable. More stringent federal crash safety regulations probably contributed to the decline, but enough pillarless models remained on sale after the effective dates of those regulations to suggest that that wasn’t the primary cause.

 

To my frustration, the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association (as the AMA became in 1972) stopped reporting factory sales by body style after 1974. (Maybe they didn’t want to argue about whether pillared models should count if they were marketed as hardtops, I don’t know.) However, I was able to chart the decline based on model year production:

Model Year Production and Market Share of U.S. 4-Door Hardtops, 1974–1978

 

Here’s the data as a table:

Model Year	4D Hardtops	All Passenger Cars	4D Hardtop Market Share
1974	501,315	8,444,894	5.94%
1975	442,442	6,791,909	6.51%
1976	493,787	8,395,728	5.88%
1977	60,060	9,472,492	0.63%
1978	50,962	9,244,790	0.55%

(Note that unlike the table above, these numbers are production totals by model year, not wholesale sales by calendar year.)

The last holdout in the U.S. was Chrysler, which continued to offer pillarless four-door hardtop models in the Chrysler C-body line through the 1978 model year. By 1979, however, even those would be gone. While there were still some four-door models marketed as pillared hardtops for a few years afterwards, the true four-door hardtop was extinct, at least in North America.

Even after four-door hardtops were extinct in the U.S., they remained big in Japan.

Nissan introduced the first Japanese-market four-door hardtops, in the 230 Cedric/Gloria line, in 1972. Four-door hardtops became very popular in the pricier realms of the Japanese domestic market even as they were fading away in the States.

 

Japanese automakers offered both pillarless and pillared four-door hardtop models into the 1990s. We got some of the pillared models in the U.S. (although they weren’t generally called hardtops here), but the pillarless models were mostly reserved for domestic sales — some remained on sale in Japan through about 1993.

 

The survival rate for U.S. four-door hardtops appears to be poor.

This is more an anecdotal observation than a statistical one, but both Paul and I had enormous difficulty finding presentable survivors of even some quite popular four-door models, like the Cadillac Sedan de Ville hardtop or early Ford LTD. Convertibles have almost always been collectible, so it’s not surprising that they’re more likely to be preserved, but while two-door hardtops remain popular with modern collectors, four-door hardtops, even high-end ones, don’t seem to be regarded any more highly than four-door sedans. I wonder how many ended up in junkyards, or cannibalized to fix more popular two-doors.

 

Four-door hardtops were always first and foremost about fashion, and fashion is a fickle thing: Some popular styles become perennials, while others go in and out, but some just end up in the dumpster or the remainder bin, the detritus of our short collective memory and changing tastes.

Related Reading

All Those Glamorous Four-Door Hardtops, Part 1: The 1950s
All Those Glamorous Four-Door Hardtops, Part 2: 1960–1964
All Those Glamorous Four-Door Hardtops, Part 3: 1965-1969 – Now Available In Sizes S, M, L & XL
Pillarless Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Four-Door Hardtops (at Ate Up With Motor)