The 1958 Buick Limited was one of the biggest, gaudiest, grandest cars of a notoriously grand and gaudy era for Detroit. It was an expensive flop that lasted only a single year, but beneath its glittering chrome, the Limited offered some ambitious technology, including excellent finned aluminum brakes, a disastrous self-leveling air suspension, and the most complex of Buick’s torque converter automatic transmissions: the triple-turbine Flight Pitch Dynaflow, an early type of CVT similar in some respects to the planetary e-CVT transmission in a modern Toyota Prius.
A 1958 Buick Limited — Limited Series 700 in the factory specifications — was the tip-top of the Buick line for ’58, reviving a nameplate Buick had used in the late ’30s and early ’40s. The 1958 Limited shared the 127.5-inch wheelbase of the already massive Buick Roadmaster, but had an extra 8 inches of rear overhang, bringing its overall length to a colossal 227.1 inches — “nearly 19 feet of luxury-built car,” said the brochure.
The Limited was available as a two- or four-door hardtop or a convertible, with prices starting at $5,002, around $218 MORE than a 1958 Cadillac Series 62. (Stephen Pellegrino has previously compared the 1958 Limited with the Series 62.) That price got you lots of standard equipment (power steering, power brakes, power windows, a power seat, but curiously not a heater) and as much chrome as GM Styling VP Harley Earl could browbeat his staff into adding.
There’s a well-known story about the design of the 1958 Buick and how it got its abundant bling, which stylist Henry Haga (who was in the Buick studio when the ’58 models were designed) related to Dave Crippen of The Henry Ford Museum in 1986. To envision this scene properly, it’s important to understand that Harley Earl was an enormous man — well over 6 feet fall and built like a linebacker, albeit always perfectly groomed and a very natty dresser — and he had an extremely intimidating physical presence. (Very, very few of his staff would have dared to call him “Harley” within his earshot; if you were not a senior officer of the corporation or a longtime personal friend, he was “Misterl.”) Haga explained:
Haga: The issue here was a new Buick, and it was a ’58. The ’59 was being formed, but you still had to live through the ’58, and you had the old body style, which was rather bulbous and heavy and not sleek like the Chrysler’s. And I remember Harley coming in and saying, “Now, now, guys, I want you to do a sweepspear, and I want you to do some hood scoops, bubble bombs, Dagmars, portholes, and rockers, and chrome wheels. And I want you to do all those, and then I’ll be back, and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do.” And then he left — clip, clop, clip, clop, clip, with his huge wingtips, you know, immaculately dressed. You would always hear his pace — clip, clop, clip, clop — and everybody’d freeze.
Crippen: A slow-measured tread?
Haga: Right. Came back the next day, and he says, “Jesus Christ, fellas, you didn’t hear me — you just got a sweeps[spear]. Where’s all the other paraphernalia?” And, of course, it was hanging on the boards all over. He said, “Now, why don’t you do what I say? Put it all on.” So, we put every kind of chrome piece we could on that side view rendering, and he said, “There, guys, now you’ve got it.” Clip, clop, clip, clop, he walked out, and we all looked at each other. “He’s serious! This is it! This is a go-to-press!” And if you’ll remember, the ’58 Buick, it had everything on it.
The 1958 Buick did indeed have almost everything, including its flashy “Fashion-Aire Dynastar Grille.” The only thing missing, surprisingly, were the signature Buick front fender “ventiports,” somehow lost in the shuffle; they would be back for 1960.
The assumption in those days was that senior models needed extra brightwork in proportion to their higher prices, so the Limited was the flashiest and shiniest of the bunch, punctuated by the fifteen chrome hash marks that adorned each rear fender.
How did this biggest and fanciest Buick drive? “Ponderously” seems to have been the best word for it. Buick in the ’50s was determined to achieve the softest possible ride, handling and back-roads composure be damned. On smooth, straight highways, it was almost magical — Buick called it the Miracle Ride — but if you drove a little too fast on a winding, bumpy road, the big Buick would lurch, bottom, and bounce like a hippo on a trampoline.
Increased size and weight had also taken its toll on Buick straight-line performance. For a while in the mid-’50s, a V-8 Buick could be a pretty hot number, but by 1958, even the smaller, lighter Buick Century gave only average acceleration. Motor Trend‘s 1958 Century needed 11.2 seconds to hit 60 mph and ambled through the quarter mile in 19.0 seconds at 79.7 mph, and even that required starting in L range. I didn’t find any instrumented tests of the 1958 Limited, but since the Limited weighed over 400 lb more than a Century and had no more power, it was undoubtedly even slower. Fuel consumption in stop-and-go traffic was also under 10 mpg, not a great selling point in a recession.
Nonetheless, the 1958 Limited offered three advanced technological features worthy of note: its new brakes and transmission, which were standard equipment, and the new Air-Poise air suspension, which was optional at extra cost.
First, the brakes, which were all good news. The brake drums on senior 1958 Buicks were the same 12-inch diameter as before, but they were now finned (“air-cooled,” the brochure said), and the front drums were cast aluminum. Effective lining area was up only a little from 1957, so the aluminum brakes wouldn’t stop any shorter, but their superior heat dissipation gave them much greater endurance. Motor Trend found that the number of hard stops Buick brakes could survive before fading completely had almost doubled from ’57. By 1958 standards, these brakes were first rank among American cars. Buick would continue to use the finned aluminum brakes on its full-size cars until front discs belatedly became standard more than a decade later.
Air-Poise suspension, a new option this year, was much more ambitious and far less successful. The air suspension was a GM Engineering Staff development, adopted in different variations by each of the GM automobile divisions for 1958. Air-Poise replaced the standard steel coil springs with air springs, which were charged by a two-cylinder engine-driven compressor at up to 290 psi, with an 820-cid high pressure storage tank.
The system was supposed to automatically pump up or exhaust the springs to maintain a consistent, level ride height regardless of load or road surface, which also gave a variable spring rate. Buick claimed that Air-Poise provided “superior road-holding ability,” a soft boulevard ride, and better composure over rough surfaces than steel springs. There was even a manual override to raise the suspension for extra ground clearance.
Unfortunately, these early GM air suspensions had many reliability problems. They inevitably leaked, for one, and because they were only “semi-closed” (under some conditions, they drew outside air through the engine air cleaner), moisture buildup in humid conditions could cause internal corrosion. Worse, even when it was healthy, the Air-Poise system just didn’t work very well. Motor Trend offered this caustic evaluation of a 1958 Super with Air-Poise suspension:
On glass-smooth roads the ride of the car was as good as it is in a car with coil springs, but on roads with irregular surfaces, such as concrete roads with ridges at a right angle to the direction of travel, the wheels would hop up and down in an uncontrolled manner. The wheels didn’t move far but their movement was enough to set the car’s frame and body to vibrating. The hood and fenders could be seen doing a jig in time with the wheels. On one of the concrete freeways in the Los Angeles area wheel movement became so bad at the limit of 55 miles per hour that the entire car and the legs of its passengers were vibrating. On really rough surfaces, or when holes or filled spots in the road were hit, the wheels would go completely out of control and the hood and front fender assembly of the car would clatter like a tin barrel half full of tin cans rolling down a hill. Some of these bumps would cause the horn ring on the steering wheel to chatter. On turns and corners the car would lean badly, making it uncomfortable for the driver and passengers. The lean was bad even when car speed was reduced to the bare minimum.
Some types of dips at street intersections would cause the rear to bottom with a thud that shook the whole car. This happened only on dips that had the right angle and depth but it didn’t matter whether there was a load in the car or not. Some dips that wouldn’t make the rear end bottom would cause it to bounce unusually high. As it wasn’t possible to tell from looking at a dip whether the car would bottom or bounce, I got to the point where I would just grit my teeth for all of them and take what came.
M/T thought the system might be made to work okay with further development, higher spring rates, and firmer shock damping, but as it was, they called Air-Poise “a most undesirable feature” and “much inferior” to conventional springs.
1958 Limited and Roadmaster buyers wary of Air-Poise could simply not order it, saving themselves about $188 and a lot of future headaches, but the new Flight Pitch Dynaflow transmission was standard equipment on the senior Buicks. (It was optional on lesser models, costing about $75 extra on a Century or Super and a hefty $296 on a Special.)
If you’re a ’50s Chevrolet fan, the workings of Flight Pitch Dynaflow might sound somewhat familiar. As an engineer from Borg-Warner pointed out at the time, Flight Pitch was “essentially an enlarged version of the Chevrolet Turboglide with a different method of controlling the variable pitched stator blades.” Buick had not been copying Chevrolet engineers’ homework — the basic concepts for both these transmissions came from a GM Engineering Staff product study group project, which Buick and Chevrolet both decided to adopt. Chevrolet had just been first out of the gate, introducing Turboglide in 1957.
I said in the opening paragraph that Flight Pitch Dynaflow was a continuously variable transmission (CVT). Technically speaking, ANY torque converter could be considered a CVT, but most torque converter automatics use the converter primarily as a clutch for some other type of stepped-gear transmission. Even in transmissions that were intended to rely mostly on the converter, like the early Packard Ultramatic or Buick’s twin-turbine Variable Pitch Dynaflow (which I described in detail in an earlier post), there was a separate manually shifted planetary gearbox for low range and reverse.
Flight Pitch Dynaflow went a few steps beyond that. It had two planetary gearsets in a case behind the converter housing, which at a glance looked sort of like a three-speed automatic. It wasn’t — the planetary gear elements were connected directly to the different converter turbines, as shown in the above schematic, which I’ve color-coded to better illustrate the power flow. The reaction elements (highlighted in fuchsia) were controlled by overrunning clutches.
The planetary gears multiplied the torque from each turbine, but the amount of torque was constantly changing depending on engine and output speeds, so the gearing also served to COMBINE the outputs of the three turbines. As the above graph shows, the first turbine transmitted the most torque at low speeds, with the second and third turbines taking over as speeds increased. At high speeds or when cruising, the third turbine transmitted all the torque, leaving the first and second turbines to freewheel in the stream of moving oil. Because the operating ranges of the turbines overlapped, there was never any noticeable shift, just a smooth flow of power.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the power split device in the e-CVT of a modern Toyota Prius uses planetary gears to combine the power inputs from its internal combustion engine and motor/generators in a broadly similar way. (Director/animator E.A. Hart has created a cool online simulator to show how the different input speeds combine through the planetary gears to produce different output speeds.) The relationships between the speeds of the different elements are fixed, since they’re a function of the number of teeth on the planetary gears, but they can be combined in an infinite number of ways, and the output is completely stepless.
A 1958 Buick wasn’t a hybrid and didn’t have multiple power sources to combine, so what was the point of combining multiple turbines like this? Any torque converter is a compromise: If you could design an ideal converter with 100 percent efficiency, its output curve (output torque versus output speed) would be a nice, smooth parabolic arc, but that’s impossible in the real world. By using the planetary gearing to combine multiple turbines with different blade characteristics, the total output of the Flight Pitch transmission was much closer to the ideal, as shown in the above graph. It was like combining three different torque converters into a single unit.
This had two important real-world benefits. First, the triple-turbine converter produced a much higher “torque ratio” than a conventional three-element converter (or even the Buick twin-turbine converter). A typical automotive torque converter has a torque ratio of around 2 to 1 with the output shaft stalled (not moving); Flight Pitch had a stall ratio of 4.75 to 1 in Drive, which was pretty close to the starting ratio of a conventional three-speed torque converter automatic starting in first. Second, Flight Pitch could continue to multiply torque up to much higher speeds — Buick claimed that with the throttle wide open, there was some torque multiplication up to about 90 mph — which meant better overall acceleration.
As the man from Borg-Warner pointed out, Chevrolet Turboglide had many of these same characteristics, but Buick had a new trick up its sleeve with its variable-pitch stator. A stator is a set of reaction blades that multiply torque by redirecting the fluid flow within the converter; the angle of the blades determines how much leverage they can exert and thus how much torque multiplication the stator can deliver. A few years earlier, Buick had figured out that they could set up the stator to CHANGE the angle of its blades when the driver mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, giving a little extra kick for acceleration. Chevrolet adopted that system for Turboglide in 1957, and a similar “switch-pitch” concept popped up again in the ’60s (on the early Turbo Hydra-Matic and some versions of the Super Turbine 300 two-speed).
Unlike those switch-pitch converters, which changed between one high and one low angle, Flight Pitch Dynaflow had an infinitely variable stator, which could change the angle of its blades to any position through a range of about 55 degrees based on the position of the throttle. The idea was that this would enable the converter to respond almost directly to the accelerator pedal “to select the exact level of performance the driver desires.”
This was important because unlike the twin-turbine Variable Pitch Dynaflow (still fitted to many 1958 Buicks), Flight Pitch Dynaflow didn’t have a separate low range. With other Dynaflow transmissions, you could move the shifter into “L” for better acceleration or downhill engine braking up to about 45 mph. You couldn’t do that with Flight Pitch Dynaflow or Turboglide. Instead, they had a “Grade Range” position for use on step downhill grades. It caused the planetary gears to overdrive the first turbine at 2.86 times the speed of the output shaft, producing massive engine braking.
Shifting to “G” would slow the car so dramatically that it could actually chirp the rear tires, like dropping a manual gearbox into first while on the move. Buick warned not to attempt this if you were going more than 45 mph, and it obviously didn’t help acceleration.
On paper, the continuously variable Flight Pitch Dynaflow seemed like an almost ideal automatic transmission. In the real world, it was not so hot. Flight Pitch did okay in full-throttle acceleration, once you got used to the fact that engine speed increased a lot faster than forward progress. It was in moderate part-throttle acceleration where it started to seem like Buick might have outsmarted itself. Testing a 1958 Buick Super with Flight Pitch Dynaflow, Motor Trend complained:
Acceleration to pass another car was out of the question without shoving the throttle to the floor. Any throttle position that didn’t bring the [stator] low pitch into action was inadequate to change the car’s rate of speed quickly enough to pass with any degree of safety. This is ridiculous in a car that has an engine rated at 300 horsepower. With the throttle on the floor, car speed would pick up well enough for passing but until the foot was pulled out of the carburetor the engine would over-rev badly in relation to the speed of the car. The over-revving didn’t seem to hurt the engine, but it didn’t contribute to comfortable driving. … With the throttle on the floor the car accelerated well for a heavy car but the commotion in the engine compartment was embarrassing if there were other cars nearby. Once up to speed, the throttle could be backed off and the car would maintain speed without any fuss.
In side-by-side comparisons, M/T found that response with the less-complicated, theoretically less-efficient twin-turbine Variable Pitch Dynaflow was “so much better than with the Flight Pitch that the cars could have been made by different companies.”
As with the Air-Poise suspension, Flight Pitch Dynaflow suffered more than its share of reliability woes. It had taken Buick a lot of work and a horrifying amount of money to get the transmission even close to ready — this was the division’s first real experience with complex aluminum castings — and it had many bugs. Since the cheaper Variable Pitch Dynaflow was just as smooth and easier to drive, all that effort seemed like a waste.
Overall, the 1958 Buick was just the wrong car at the wrong time. A sour economy in 1957–1958 led many Americans to decide they were tired of grandiose size and extravagant glitz, and even the cheapest Buick Special offered far too much of both. Buick sales had been down for 1957, but they tumbled a FURTHER 40 percent for 1958. The Limited suffered the worse, selling just 7,508 units. Unsurprisingly, it would not return for 1959, although Buick reused the name again later. Flight Pitch did return for 1959, renamed Triple Turbine and somewhat improved, but it was no longer standard even on senior models, and it lasted only one more year. Buick air suspension was limited to the rear springs for 1959, now acting mostly as a self-leveling system. It too disappeared for 1960.
Air suspensions and continuously variable transmissions both returned later, and CVTs are now quite common, although it’s taken an awfully long time for the real-world benefits of both technologies to come close to the advantages they seem to have on paper. Some people would argue that they’re still not quite there yet, more than 65 years after these glittering and ambitious land yachts came and went.
Related Reading
Curbside Comparison: 1958 Buick Limited vs 1958 Cadillac Series 62 – Chrome Plated GM Luxury (by Stephen Pellegrino)
CC Tech: Inside Buick’s Turbine Drive (Twin Turbine) Automatic Transmission (by me)
Full-Size Buicks Of The 1960s: How Buick Reinvented Its Lineup Between 1959 And 1970 (by me)
1959 Buick Electra 225 Convertible: As Bat-Winged As The Batmobile (by me)
It would be frustrating to have a car with a Flight Pitch Dynaflow today; I recently sold a few sets of used NOS clutches to a guy overseas, and he seemed very happy to find them. I can’t remember if I read it here or at the AACA forums, but by 1965, Buick stopped carrying remanufactured transmissions for older cars, and the implication in the document was that a lot of Flight Pitch (or Triple Turbine) cars were converted to the Twin Turbine Dynaflow fairly early on.
Oops…they weren’t used. They were unused NOS.
Given GM’s great success with its pioneering air suspension on its buses and trucks, it always seemed odd that they failed so spectacularly with cars. I assume it was a combination of not enough development time as well as perhaps some cost-cutting? It seems like it shouldn’t have been that hard.
Just like the diesel engines that they put in trucks but could not successfully develop for cars. There must have been great hostility between the truck and automobile division. Unfortunate that few in the automobile industry chose to write about their experiences.
I seem to remember the major problem with Air-Poise was condensation in the lines freezing in cold weather and causing corrosion. If true it would make some sense as the air suspension system in buses and trucks used air supplied from the brake system. Air brake systems use a ‘wet’ tank to collect condensation and oil residue, and in the old days the wet tank would be drained at least once a day. The drain valve was spring-loaded and often had a laynard to a convenient location. Modern trucks and buses have desiccant air driers and/or automatic purge valves.
From the Famous Last Words Department, here’s what Buick said about this problem in January 1958:
Swanky Town and Country magazine showing all the fancy new 1958 models in prestige locations. Internet says Mr. Dezendorf was a General Motors VP & General Manager of Electro-Motive Division:
BTW, thanks for all the details about the transmission—-I think I **finally** get how it worked, and what made the design so distinctive.
. . .or how it doesn’t work.
These transmissions were trouble. Our Ford dealer took in a 10 year old low mileage model on trade. It was in beautiful condition having been only lightly used by an older couple that traded for a new Mercury Park Lane.
The car looked like a real cream puff despite the age. A few days after Buick hit the lot, it came into the shop for the normal used car oil change and check-out. The mechanic – thankfully not me – doing the initial test drive came back to the shop reporting the transmission suddenly malfunctioned after climbing the steep hill just outside the dealership. Our wrecker was sent out to recover the Buick.
Once in the garage, the service manager canvassed our two most experience transmission guys. Neither one felt comfortable tearing into it. Keep in mind that Buicks of this era still used a torque tube drive. That complicated any type of transmission work and was a feature Ford mechanics rarely worked on.
The service manager contacted our towns Buick-Olds dealer. Their service manager said they never tore into one either. They just replaced. The used car manager went apoplectic at the estimate. I’d never seen a face so red as when he confronted our service manager. We thought me might stroke out right there on the shop floor.
End result – that otherwise beautiful car was scrapped.
The previous owners traded the car at just the right time, even if by dumb luck.
Fabulous essay aa now I realize what all that glitters is not gold. But they are pissers (pardon me).
In metallurgy class, I learned that 1958 was the peak year for chromed zinc die castings.
The Flight-Pitch Dynafow was probably more efficient than most early automatics, but you have to wonder if the efficiency was justified but the complexity. It must have been a real chore to manufacture. The ‘Switch-Pitch’ stator type torque convertor was used in some early Turbo 400’s (maybe Buick and Olds only?).
It is surprising that Air-Poise was not reliable, given GM’s extensive experience with air suspension in buses (both intercity and transit) and heavy trucks.
Bruce McCall lampooned the styling excesses of this era frequently (see: “Zany Afternoons”). I tried my own hand at a McCall-styled interpretation when I was in the industrial design program at Ga Tech back in the 1980s (attached).
I occasionally read through all of the Popular Science Monthly “Model Garage” articles that ran from 1925-1970, and recalled one from November, 1940 I recently read that mentioned the Olds Hydra-Matic transmission, I presume which was ancestor to the Dynaflow.
“‘Right!’ Gus said. ‘In other words, the power would be transmitted from the driven fan to the free fan through the air. Well, that’s the principle of the fluid clutch. But it’s worked out in the form of a liquid coupling in which oil takes the place of air. Two rotors are placed in a case filled with oil. One of them is driven by the engine. It transmits the power through the oil to the other rotor, which drives the car’s wheels. In the Hydra-Matic drive the liquid coupling is used in connection with an automatic-transmission assembly. There’s no clutch pedal, and no gearshift. Instead there’s an automatic control just below the steering wheel. It has four positions — neutral for parking, high for normal driving, low for steep hills and heavy going, and reverse for backing. After you flip the lever into high you don’t have to move it for normal driving — you step on the gas pedal when you want to go, and step on the brake pedal when you want to stop.'”
Hydra-Matic and Dynaflow were developed independently, Hydra-Matic by Oldsmobile and Dynaflow by Buick. They worked entirely differently. Neither was the ancestor of the other; they were cousins.
The fluid clutch predated Hydra-Matic or Dynaflow by many years: It was invented in 1903 by Hermann Föttinger, and its first major automotive application was the Daimler (UK) Fluid Flyhweel in the early 1930s. Dynaflow used a type of fluid coupling called a torque converter, which adds reaction blades to multiply torque. Hydra-Matic didn’t have these reaction blades, so its fluid coupling could transmit torque, but with no multiplication; it used planetary gears for that. Torque converters were used in some bus transmissions starting in the 1930s, and then on armored fighting vehicles during WW2.
Many, many automatic transmissions have used torque converters since the 1940s, although most were not nearly so complicated as this one.
There seems to have been a period in the late Fifties where Motor Trend was sometimes very critical of Detroit iron, much in contrast to their later practice. I wonder if an advertising backlash cured them of that.
Probably their Car of the Year thing, which they started awarding to individual models in ’58. When I worked with publishing companies in the 70s, it was an open secret the award was for sale.
Sounds like the 58 Buick was a bomb!
I recall a film of Tom McCahill testing several medium priced American cars. Judging from his enthusiasm for them, the project might have been underwritten by Chrysler. The part I remember most was the horrible performance of the Buick air suspension following a suspension test on a bumpy road.
Other than the Hydra Matic, Powerglide and the earlier Dynaflow, GM was truly in automatic transmission purgatory from this time until the THM in the mid 1960s.
Try as I might, I have never been able to appreciate any of the 1958 cars from GM. They were all so over the top, and not in a good way. Slathering chrome on what was really a dowdy design only makes it look worse. It seems buyers in the era felt the same as the cars didn’t sell well.
58 was a bad year for the auto industry in general. The Ford Thunderbird, newly expanded to a 4-seater, was the only midprice car to gain sales, otherwise the only winners were Rambler and the economy imports. Flint’s loss was Kenosha and Wolfsburg’s gain.
Along with its awkward styling, I always thought the Oldsmobile was equally as bad in its overuse of chrome do-dads.
I saw the subject 4-door in person at the Boonton restoration shop. It’s a stunningly beautiful car. Would love to get to drive one of these to see what the “Miracle Ride” (air or coil) and Dynaflow (Variable or Flight-Pitch) are really like.
According to BringATrailer, $62,000 was spent on restoration. However, they STILL couldn’t correctly straighten the bent front bumper. I guess some things can’t be fixed. When you’re spending that much dough on a high-value car, it seems installing a new bumper shouldn’t be that big a sacrifice. Nevertheless, this Limited did sell for a lofty $32,000 (meaning the owner still lost money on it).
In life, the most beautiful ones are often the most fragile. My former ’58 Cadillac is shown to the right of the Buick.
I have to say though I’m a very mechanically inclined person, and have rebuilt a few manual and conventional automatic transmissions through the years, these oddball ones really take a lot of reading and rereading and some more to understand the logic behind their operation. I think I got the basic idea down from this article but what a headache inducer for a piece of obsolete technology I’m nonetheless fascinated by!
I don’t find these 58 Buicks quite as repulsive in their excesses as many. The ire is well deserved of course, but for the GM 58s I find them more cohesive than Oldsmobiles efforts, more memorable than Pontiac’s efforts and notably more premium looking than Chevy’s efforts. Cadillac did 58 the best IMO but I kind of like these Buicks at the very least as an interesting failure.
The problem with American design at that time: The more expensive version (with the same body as the cheaper one) should have had more chrome “patches”. This often spoiled the purity of the originally developed design, which was given to cheaper modifications. This particular Limited is lucky with the color – the silver visually “dissolves” the chrome elements. In body colors contrasting with chrome, it begins to look like a barbarian leader hung with spent cartridges and beads. The slanting stripes on the rear wings do not fit in with the overall silhouette at all, and so on.
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P.S. Even later, in Bill Mitchell’s time, when GM’s design concept shifted more towards the language of an overall silhouette rather than pretentious accents, the curse of “upscale design” was actual. True, there it be more noticeable, not within one division, but between divisions using the same body. Having the same wheelbase, designers often tried to suggest that an Old or Buick was more prestigious (and larger) than a Chevrolet, due to overhangs. Because of this, cars often turn out to be interesting in local city-based solutions, but with the general silhouette of a clumsy barge. Therefore, Chevrolet, received the largest number of clean and proportional designs.
Chiming in after some time as the ’58 Buick has always fascinated me because it is so over the top, so this in depth look by Aaron at the top line model was a great read.
I may have some content on a 58 Buick at some point in the future because my acquaintance CJ (who owns the white 52 Cadillac convertible I wrote about has just wrapped up a 15 YEAR restoration of a Century sedan, the only one in the country and perhaps the region as well, and I’ve been asking to do a feature on it, hopefully soon.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to his restoration album on facebook.
https://web.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150239235090590&type=3
I think the 58s (including Buicks) look great. I think I prefer the Chevy though. I also think the 58 Olds is more.. “over the top” than the Buick. I still like IT as well.
The Red interior dashboard pic that reads ” Shift pattern of the Flight Pitch Dynaflow was P R N D G — there was no L range”, is IMACCULATE. I can’t believe it was that clean and shiny even when new. Love the era.