This was something of a bothersome theme for me. Just what is a personal luxury coupe? Some are obvious candidates to include, like this Grand Prix; others less so. Where do we begin? Where do we stop? And as always, not every candidate was made available as a kit, and I don’t have all of those that were. But some I made multiples of, so there’s that. So where to start…..?
I’m on the fence about this one. The ’53 Studebaker Starliner was a longer, lower car than the regular sedans, and a lot of sedan pieces, though visually similar, I’m told do not interchange – so a case could be made to view it as a Personal Luxury Coupe. But there was no ‘regular’ sedan-based coupe for it to be an alternative to, or stand out from, so perhaps we should best consider it as an attractive aberration. And an expensive one for Studebaker. View it as a precursor, perhaps.
Let’s begin with the ’58 Thunderbird. The great success of these early ‘Birds was in combining typical period American design cues with sportier proportions; hood, longer dash to axle distance, and a lower cowl. Sporty proportions, if not sporting pretensions. This is an old Monogram kit dating back to the sixties, but it looks good and is well detailed. As a bonus it even has opening doors.
The next generation of Thunderbird I have is AMT’s ‘62. At the time of writing, I could only find this white convertible, so imagine it with a roof. I’ve got a red coupe here somewhere.
Then Buick entered the fray with the beautiful Riviera. It followed the basic Thunderbird idea of a unique body (coupe only for the Riv) over fairly standard mechanicals, but took the styling in a cleaner, more conservative direction than the overly-fussy Bird. It really was a standout in American design. Though kits were made of the ’63 and ’64, I only have the ’65 – which has been reissued many times.
Here’s the equivalent Thunderbird for comparison, AMT’s ’66.
Meanwhile GM produced this beautiful restatement of the original theme. Less formal, more sporty, but still quite distinct from other Buicks.
But as the sixties went on, cars seemed to become lower, to the point where a lower cowl was not noticeable, if indeed it was technically feasible at all. Ford’s new Thunderbird for ’67 seemed much less distinctive than in past years. It was less sporty, more like a normal formal coupe with a long nose. We’d see more of this happening.
Styling messed up the Riviera, and how! It’s hard to imagine this today, but annual change was expected back then, even when it wasn’t for the better.
Meanwhile over at Oldsmobile, they’d released a front wheel drive tour de force with the 1966 Toronado. A huge FWD fastback with ginormous wheel arch flares? Persistent tinkering with the body panels to give it more of a normal formal look resulted in the Toro looking like this for 1970
Cadillac said “Me too” and got the Eldorado for 1967. Like the Toronado, the first FWD Eldorado had quite a distinctive sporty look, while also having a notchback roofline. Undoubtedly Cadillac, yet it looked quite distinct from the regular coupes. There was less stylistic tinkering during the life of this generation than there was with the Toro. Here’s a 1970 Eldorado.
While all this had been going on, Pontiac had started putting a second, different hardtop roofline on their full-size cars, loading them up with nice trim to come up with the Grand Prix. I don’t have a ’62-4, but here’s a ’65. Personal Luxury by a cheaper route.
Dodge took a different approach. They put a distinct roof on the intermediate Coronet to produce the Charger, but it was a fastback, and slipped in a lovely interior to make it special. Here’s a ’67.
Not to forget American Motors! Fastback roofs were (briefly) in vogue, so they slapped one on the Classic to produce the short-lived and unpopular Marlin, shown here at perhaps its most unflattering angle.
The Charger gained a unique body for 1968. Now a notchback coupe with a flowing tunneled roofline, it was more formal but still sporty. And much more special-looking with distinct sheetmetal. The interior didn’t seem that different from the regular Coronet. Not in the models I’ve built, at least.
Meanwhile Pontiac had jacked up the Grand Prix nameplate and slipped a whole new car under it. Now it was a distinctive intermediate coupe owing nothing to the Tempest/Le Mans. On the longer sedan wheelbase it had that long-nose look, hinting at powerful engines, as near as the options list.
Chevrolet cried Foul! They followed with their own version for 1970, the Monte Carlo. (Did they ever get permission to name the car after the capital of Monaco? Did they need it?) Different yet subtle. Like the Grand Prix, a full reskin, but visually unique. And very popular.
Meanwhile, Mopar dialled back. The Charger went from being a second, distinct intermediate coupe to being the sole one, the regular Coronet hardtops being discontinued. The styling seemed more muscle car than luxury coupe though.
Meanwhile the Thunderbird sprouted an unfortunate beak. (I’d say it was pointless, but….)
…before becoming basically a big formal coupe on big Ford mechanicals. Almost like an alternate Galaxie. Doubtless platform sharing made it cheaper to manufacture, but it seemed much less special to look at.
The big successes of the seventies seemed to be the Chevy Monte Carlo and the Cutlass Supreme from Oldsmobile. The Supreme followed the pattern of a formal roof on a standard intermediate. Strangely this era Supreme has never been kitted, but here’s the regular hardtop. Just imagine a formal roof, with squarer rear fenders.
Meanwhile GM’s front-drive coupes bulked up, losing all the sporty grace of the originals. Here’s the Eldorado for ’76. Just a big heavy coupe, obviously a Cadillac, but – disappointing somehow.
(76Eldo2)
Here’s the colonnade Monte Carlo: this one’s a ‘77. Just in case you missed the original’s subtle fender lines, this time they did them in Braille.
Since Montes were so popular, here’s another one.
Then downsizing struck. The model companies were in the throes of one of their periodic crises, and the new downsized luxury coupes weren’t popular modelling subjects in the later seventies. Here’s an ’80 Monte Carlo from MPC, which I think might have been the only PLC kitted back then.
Although there were occasional kits of eighties personal luxury coupes, they only did the performance versions – Monte Carlo SS, Pontiac GP 2+2, Olds 442, Buick Grand National, Thunderbird Turbo coupe and Super coupe – which aren’t really the same sort of thing. I’ll put together a post with some of those another time.
That `61 T Bird is in the same colors as the real one I owned some 45 years ago, but it is in much better condition !
Thanks Phil, that’s interesting. That T-bird always draws attention for the blue interior; I’ve had comments like ‘That’s unusual’ or ‘I didn’t expect that’. Good to know it was factory. As for the condition, I know what twenty year old cars can be like!
Bloat is a common theme nice collection.
Thanks. Yes, they do seem a bit bloated to us, but they were all about style. At the time, in that country, size was felt to be a (big) part of that.
Love your models, especially your AMT 1966 T-Bird Town Landau.
1966, my parents bought a new Town Landau, blue with white top. That car was given to me late 1969, when I was a teenager.
I still have a few old AMT 1966 T-Bird kits, un-built. Perhaps someday I will find someone to replicate my blue T-Bird Town Landau.
Thanks. That must have been amazing, having a three year old Thunderbird for a first car!
Nice point about the manufacturers’ self-imposed mandate to push out annual restyles. They’d have a beautiful design and then fuss with it. I remember when I was young, seeing a good-looking car, and dreading what the next model year might bring. Usually a mixed bag. Same time, I took it as a given that this was the way things had to be.
It strikes me that the influx of imported cars helped to change this way of thinking. Civics didn’t get fully re-style every year, that was okay. I know none of this is revelatory for the folks on CC, but it’s the first time I’ve put words to my view. Interesting post, and good-looking cars.
Thanks. Yeah, to me the American annual restyle seemed strange. You don’t replace anything else in your life simply because there’s a new one out, do you? I wouldn’t. Here in Australia, our Big Three came close to an annual cycle in the sixties, but they introduced new models when they were ready, not all at the same time. And model cycles stretched out again in the seventies. But then, we always had a wider range of car sizes and brands on sale here, so the idea that a model might last for five-eight years was nothing unusual. That was expected.
And the older you get, the faster the years seem to go by – it must have seemed that no sooner would you get used to the ‘new model’ than whoops! – it got replaced. I’d guess the pressure was on for the stylists to make enough changes that even Joe Average who wasn’t really a car guy could tell it was the new model. Well, until the Big Three had such a wide range of models and sizes that even they couldn’t afford annual updates for all.
Interesting you should mention Civics: I can think of a couple of changes to grille and tail lights in the first generation, maybe a different hood, and I’m sure they changed some badges around. Often I find with Japanese cars there are changes so subtle that we Westerners miss them. And sometimes they confuse the issue by doing a ‘mix and match’ from various JDM model ranges to come up with something different for export.
American cars typically weren’t completely restyled every year (there were a couple instances of that, but they were unusual because it was very expensive). From the ’50s through the ’70s, there were more usually two- or three-year sheet metal redesign cycles, with less drastic annual changes, like wearing the same three-piece suit a few days in a row, but changing your shirt and tie and maybe sometimes skipping the vest.
Japanese automakers from the mid-’70s into the ’90s locked into four-year major redesign cycles, with a minor change every two. They would often have several different sheet metal variations, but instead of using them for subsequent years of a particular model, they’d spread them out across a number of related “twins and triplets,” like the Toyota X-platform (Mark II/Chaser/Cresta and export Cressida), with the mid-cycle change for each usually being variations that didn’t require sheet metal changes (like bumpers and taillights). In American terms, it’s like if, say, Ford had sold the 1964, 1965, and 1966 Thunderbird simultaneously, with each version having a different name for a different dealer network.
In both cases, the major body tooling expense was actually shared across multiple models in multiple years, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual cars. Not only did this spread the cost around, building so many units meant the lifespan of the shared parts of the tooling wasn’t necessarily that high, just as a car that’s driven 60,000 miles in a year is going to end up feeling clapped-out more quickly.
True, I was perhaps over-generalising in response to F-85’s comment. The 57/’58/’59 Chevy stands out as a singular example. I remember as a kid growing up being quite surprised these designs were sequential, and that the all-new ’58 body was totally replaced for ’59. Now I know why that happened, that it was probably stylistically and commercially essential – but without knowing the back story it seems weird.
But as I’ve grown older I’ve noticed changes which weren’t immediately obvious, which even I as a car nut didn’t notice at the time. Uncle Ted had a ’66 Bel Air, not a common car in my country. For years I couldn’t tell the ’65 and ’66 apart except for taillights, but there are a lot more changes around the front as well, some of which aren’t obvious at first.
I’ve always been amused at the differences in cars the Japanese send to different countries. Your picking Toyota is a good example: US market Toyotas back in the seventies and eighties would often differ from what they sent down here, and we might get the ‘US’ hood and grille treatment a few years later. And what was sold in European countries might be different again. Mix and match.
I’m normally a GM guy, but today the second gen Charger looks extra nice to me! And of course the first gen Riviera.
Thanks. I’ve built several of those Chargers, but that would be my favourite. Likewise, that’s my favourite Riv.
All of these models are beautiful, and I like your assortment, Peter. I’ve read perhaps in another CC article that some consider the Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk (based on the ’53) to be the first personal luxury coupe under widely accepted PLC criteria. I do like your logic behind consideration of the ’53.
What I liked about the ’65 Riviera was the hidden headlights. By the same token, the taillights in the bumper, while in vogue, were retrograde for me.
I like your inclusion of the ’66 Dodge Charger. The original Marlin wasn’t my favorite looking AMC, but I like the looks of the restyled and enlarged ’67 just fine.
Great pics, models, and ideas, as usual!
Joseph, I’d have loved to have included a Gran Turismo Hawk, or even a ’56 Hawk, but I didn’t have one. Since they’re based off the ’53 body, which is so different from the ’53 2 door sedan, I kind of stretched the point to include it.
As an aside, I’d love to read more on just how come Studebaker came to produce the two different bodies, the shorter, higher sedan and the longer, lower coupe. It seems a strange business decision. I guess the business decision was made back in the glory years of the Bullet-nose popularity, and management felt they could do no wrong.
The Charger is a strange car; it seems as though its focus altered with each generation. Being a fastback in the first generation it stood out as special and different, even if the lower sheetmetal looked pure Coronet. The second-gen looked more distinct, more ‘tailored’ and elegant. The third was pure muscle to the point of looking awkward when in full luxury dress, like it was almost trying to cover too broad a market.
And I’m with you on the Marlin; somehow the ’67 despite being larger (which I generally don’t like) seems better-proportinoed.
Great assortment.
On the 68 Charger, you’re right about the interior. Especially disappointing was that they lost the console between the seats, as far as I know, from the 66-67 model. But your build looks great. That R/T emblem on the rear looks a bit large proportionally. Not unusual for some of these kits.
Thanks Lee. Yes, that badge is out of scale, but I wanted to build a stripe-delete R/T car. Now I’m almost wondering if I would have been better leaving it off altogether.
As always, I really enjoy looking at your completed kits! I remember building several of these when I was a kid – The 53 Stude, the 58 and 66 Thunderbirds and the 70 Toronado. I think I also built the 70 Monte Carlo and Thunderbird.
Speaking of the Studebaker coupe, there actually was another “coupe” (though actually 2 door sedan) that the “Loewy Coupe” contrasted with. The standard car looks awful in the comparison, and suffered from a vestigial rear panel that welded into the place where a rear door went on the sedans. A real bodge job, and we can be pretty certain that no model kids were ever offered of this one!
Thanks JPC. Ah, yes. I deliberately didn’t mention that body!
The early fifties must have been a pecuilar time for bodies. We really saw an increasing blurring of the line between coupes and two-door sedans. I’m thinking of what Ford and Chevy were doing in particular. For ’49-51 the bodies were distinct (Ford especially so), but then hardtops eventually took over from the old coupe style and wound up pretty much supplanting the two door sedan as well.
And then there was Studebaker. Stude’s two door sedan looked um, unfortunate, in so many ways. It practially screamed “Done on the cheap!” Yes there was that odd side panel, but also the shape of the rear side window with its overly-thick and oddly shaped B-pillar. Was it perhaps a last minute addition to the range? But then they also had a pillared version of the longer lower hardtop style – why? Maybe they needed fewer body variations and more time taken to design and build them right….
Excellent article! I have my own PLC in 1:1 and 1:25. We wanted to see how our idea for two tone paint would look so eBay provided a promo that could be painted. 65 Thunderbird. The top is so much lighter than the 66 special landau with it’s windowless C pillars. This gem of Thunderbird really is the last of the special cars in that name plate. But the other brands had nice cars at one time it another as well. Thanks again.
WordPress strikes again – let’s give it a tweak and… there!
Thanks Randall. Great idea to use an old promo for a paint trial. It looks much nicer than the special landau top; if I was building it again I’d convert it to the regular top.
Very nice collection
Thank you, Juan.
No Chrysler 300 ? Those started as a ‘Personal Luxury Coupe in ‘55.
Awesome line up of old models beautifully done I love the grand prix
Peter, can you tell me the source of the gold ‘64 Ford Galaxie model in the background of the picture of the second-generation Charger? My first new car was a Prairie Bronze Metallic ‘64 Galaxie like that and I’ve never been able to find anybody making a model of the ‘64 Galaxie.