How did the Ford Thunderbird stack up against its personal luxury competition in 1968? Ford Division tackled that question in this intriguing 1968 booklet for Ford salespeople, which highlighted the Thunderbird’s advantages over the rival Buick Riviera, Oldsmobile Toronado, and … Buick Electra 225 and Oldsmobile 98? Let’s take a look at Ford’s claims, and how things actually played out in the marketplace.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau / Mecum Auction
Ford had grand ambitions for the fifth-generation Thunderbird, as the full cover of this 1968 booklet reveals:
Brochure scans via the Old Car Manual Project Brochure Collection
Comparing the Thunderbird to the Riviera and Toronado wasn’t unusual, given that both cars were aimed at the T-Bird, and were very close to it in price and market position:
1968 Buick Riviera / Classic & Collector Cars
1968 Oldsmobile Toronado / Mecum Auctions
However, the suggestion that the Thunderbird could also compete with the senior Buick and Oldsmobile sedans was new in this generation, and it said a lot about how Ford now saw the T-Bird.
1968 Buick Electra 225 Custom four-door hardtop / Classic Auto Mall
1968 Oldsmobile 98 Luxury Sedan / CORVAIRWILD via Hemmings
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau / Mecum Auction
The sales figures made clear that the Thunderbird was the dominant player in the personal luxury hardtop segment. 1966 was the last year of the previous-generation Thunderbird (often called Flair Bird), so the fact that a T-Bird in the last year of a three-year design cycle still managed to outsell both the all-new Riviera and the new and interesting FWD Toronado said a lot about the ‘Bird’s appeal.
1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop / H and H Auctions
The sales figures given in the bar graphs are rounded to the nearest 100 units. If you’re curious, actual 1966 production was:
- Ford Thunderbird (all models): 69,176
- Buick Riviera: 45,348
- Oldsmobile Toronado: 40,963
1968 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau / Bring a Trailer
Here’s how sales broke out during the design cycle of the 1967–1969 “Glamour Bird”:
Thunderbird, Toronado, and Riviera Production, 1967–1969
| Model Year | Thunderbird | Toronado | Riviera |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1967 | 77,956 | 21,790 | 42,799 |
| 1968 | 64,925 | 26,454 | 49,284 |
| 1969 | 49,227 | 28,494 | 52,872 |
| Total | 192,108 | 76,738 | 144,955 |
Both the Riviera and Toronado received facelifts for 1968. Modern enthusiasts and collectors mostly aren’t too fond of the restyle, seeing it as a step down from the 1966–1967 cars, but contemporary buyers seemed to like it, and it provided a healthy upswing in sales.
1968 Buick Riviera / Classic & Collector Cars
1968 Oldsmobile Tornado / Mecum Auctions
By contrast, the Thunderbird’s exterior styling changed little during its three-year run, and the declining sales suggest that buyers had grown tired of it by 1969.
Thunderbird Production by Body Style, 1967–1969
| Model Year | Thunderbird Hardtop | 2D Landau | 4D Landau |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1967 | 15,567 | 37,422 | 24,967 |
| 1968 | 9,977 | 33,029 | 21,925 |
| 1969 | 5,913 | 27,664 | 15,650 |
| Total | 31,457 | 98,115 | 62,542 |
Ford’s addition of the four-door Landau for 1967 has always been controversial, but the four-door did pretty well in this generation — much better, in fact, than the base non-Landau two-door hardtop, whose sales fell off so much that I think Ford eventually kept it alive mostly as a price leader.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau / Mecum Auction
Contrary to Ford’s implications, I don’t think the Riviera lost anything by only being available as a two-door hardtop, but the Toronado might have. Contemporary owners surveys suggest that many Toronado buyers lamented not being able to its flat floors and excellent wet-weather traction in a more practical body style.
As most Thunderbird buffs know, bucket seats and a center console had been an important part of the four-seat Thunderbird concept since 1958. To achieve the 1958 Square Bird’s very low overall height with workable headroom, the floor had been sunken enough to make the driveshaft tunnel unusually high, so the interior designers had covered the tunnel with a full-length console.
1967 Ford Thunderbird body / Old Car Manual Project Brochure Collection
The 1967 Thunderbird (above) had switched from full unit construction to a perimeter frame, which also had the benefit of more sophisticated structural engineering; it still had a prominent driveshaft tunnel, but it wasn’t nearly as pronounced as before. So, while the 1967 car had retained the console and front bucket seats even on four-door models, they were no longer strictly necessary.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau with full-width rear bench seat / Mecum Auction
The four-door Landau had already adopted a shorter console and a conventional full-width rear seat (pictured above), so offering a front bench with no console for 1968 was not a huge leap.
1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop with Flight-Bench seat / Bring a Trailer
Looking at the popularity of the bench seat option for the Riviera and the Toronado (which hadn’t even offered bucket seats for 1966), it’s easy to see why Ford made that move, but I find it regrettable. It’s not that bucket seats of this era were more comfortable than bench seats — they often weren’t — but cars like this were about style and effect, and full-width bench seats brought them that much closer to just being regular two-door hardtops (or four-door sedans) with different exterior styling. However, from a sales standpoint, offering the Flight-Bench seems to have been the right move for the Thunderbird:
Thunderbird Bench Seat Installations by Body Style, 1968–1969
| Model Year | 2HT w/Bench | Bench % | 2D Landau w/Bench | Bench % | 4D Landau w/Bench | Bench % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1968 | 4,557 | 45.7% | 13,924 | 42.2% | 17,251 | 78.7% |
| 1969 | 3,552 | 60.1% | 15,239 | 55.1% | 13,689 | 87.5% |
As I said above, the prospect of conquest sales in the upper-middle-class sedan category said much about what Ford was after, which they had explained like this in 1967 dealer literature describing the new Thunderbird:
Heretofore, a buyer of Ford Motor Company cars had no place to go between the Mercury Park Lane and the Lincoln Continental, for four-door motoring luxury. Now, he has Thunderbird. You have a strong sales wedge with the four-door Landau, an entry capable of breaking the Cadillac, Buick Electra and Olds 98 domination of select buying segment. Thunderbird has been grabbing about 45% of the upper medium-price hardtop market against Riviera and Toronado. Market research indicates that 27% of the Grand Prix, Riviera and Starfire owners would prefer a four-door. That’s a lot of people, a most inviting conquest market.
It seems that Ford Division hoped the four-door Landau would more fully establish the Thunderbird as not just a separate model line, but essentially a distinct mid-price sub-brand.
1968 Buick Electra 225 Custom four-door hardtop / Classic Auto Mall
1968 Oldsmobile 98 Luxury Sedan / CORVAIRWILD via Hemmings
While Ford didn’t offer comparative 98 or Electra 225 sales figures, in 1968, Oldsmobile 98 Luxury Sedan sales totaled 40,755, while the Buick Electra 225 Custom four-door sedan sold 10,910 units. (Most Electra 225 Custom buyers actually favored the four-door hardtop pictured above, which sold 50,846 units for 1968.)
I think Ford had a point when it came to interior design. The Glamour Bird interior was maybe an acquired taste, but the Thunderbird still had a far more cohesive interior design theme than the Riviera or Toronado, with many small touches that helped it stand out from other Ford models.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau with bucket seats / Mecum Auction
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau with bucket seats / Mecum Auction
The Riviera and Toronado had interesting dash designs (although they’d been cheapened for 1968 with the deletion of the previous secondary gauges — the Thunderbird still had full instrumentation), but the rest of their cabins lacked a real sense of occasion.
1968 Buick Riviera with Custom interior, Strato-Bucket seats, and center console / Orlando Classic Cars
1968 Oldsmobile Toronado with Strato-Bench seat — the standard bench pictured in the Ford pamphlet seems to have been very rare / Bring a Trailer
Many Riviera and Toronado buyers the Custom Interior option, which was an improvement in plushness, if not necessarily distinction. However, as Ford rightly noted, it cost extra: $168.40 on the Riviera, $173.78 on Toronado.
1968 Buick Riviera with Custom interior and cloth and vinyl upholstery / Classic & Collector Cars
1968 Oldsmobile Toronado with Custom interior and vinyl upholstery / Orlando Classic Cars
1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop with coved rear seat / Bring a Trailer
1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop / H and H Auctions
As I’ve previously explained, the Riviera and Toronado had significant structural commonality. They looked quite different in some ways, but their dimensions were similar, and if you compared them side by side, you might note the common roof and glass.
1968 Buick Riviera / Classic & Collector Cars
1968 Oldsmobile Toronado / Mecum Auctions
The Buick Electra 225 and Oldsmobile 98 shared the bigger GM C-body, differing in sheet metal and trim.
1968 Buick Electra 225 Custom four-door hardtop / Classic Auto Mall
1968 Oldsmobile 98 Luxury Sedan / CORVAIRWILD via Hemmings
The irony of the above page, of course, is that while Thunderbird styling was still “shared with no other Ford product” when this booklet was printed, the Thunderbird would soon get a sibling of its own: the pricier Lincoln Continental Mark III, which arrived in April 1968 as an early 1969 model.
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III / Bring a Trailer
To its credit, Ford managed to distinguish the Mark III from the Thunderbird very successfully, but they were platform mates, and they were playing in different parts of the same segment.
Ford scored some definite points when it came to features and equipment. Since both Riviera and Toronado both came only with Turbo Hydra-Matic (TH400 for the Buick, TH425 for the Toronado), chiding them for not having Select-Shift Cruise-O-Matic was silly, and the T-Bird’s sequential turn signals were more gimmick than useful feature. However, Ford deserves credit for standardizing front disc brakes on the Thunderbird from 1965 on; front discs were still a rarely ordered extra on most rivals.
The right-most dial in the Thunderbird instrument panel had a “◄ Fast Slow ►” control for the hydraulic wipers; radio is not original / H and H Auctions
Hydraulic windshield wipers, incidentally, were a Thunderbird feature shared with the Lincoln Continental (and first developed for the Continental Mark II). They were quieter than conventional wipers and offered a continuously variable intermittent feature, which was handy once you got the hang of how it worked.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau with Thunderjet 429 engine and 360 gross hp / Bring a Trailer
The new Thunderjet 429 engine gave the T-Bird better performance than the old 390 or 428, but it was still really just competitive, not outstanding, by the standards of this class.
Thunderbird was very close to the Riviera and Toronado in base price, but it offered more standard features. Ford boasted above, “When Riviera and Toronado two-door hardtops are equipped with standard Thunderbird features, Riviera costs $237 more than Thunderbird; Toronado $383 more!” The Custom Interior package optional on the Buick and Olds accounted for a big chunk of that difference (with the T-Bird’s front discs and AM radio accounting for most of the rest), but I think Ford was correct that the Riviera and Toronado needed the upgraded interior package to approximate the Thunderbird interior ambience.
1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop with Flight-Bench seat / GR Auto Gallery of Indianapolis
The price comparison of the Thunderbird four-door Landau with the Electra 225 and Olds 98 wasn’t quite so favorable:
When equipped with standard Thunderbird features, Buick’s Electra Custom 225 four-door sedan costs only $218 less than Thunderbird, Oldsmobile’s 98 four-door Luxury Sedan only $134 less. But there’s really no comparison—these are conventional sedans, not true personal-luxury cars like Thunderbird!
Still, the comparison makes clear where the Thunderbird stood in terms of price class. It may have carried the Ford name, but it was firmly in the mid-price field, and while it wasn’t a huge player, it held its own in prestige.
The 1968 Ford Thunderbird hardtop was the only 1968 T-Bird model that didn’t come with a vinyl top, although one was optional / H and H Auctions
This was reflected in Thunderbird resale values, which were much better than the Toronado, and very competitive with the 98 and Electra 225. Here are comparative trade-in values for year-old 1968 models from the September/October 1969 Kelley Blue Book:
- Ford Thunderbird, base hardtop: $2,575
- Ford Thunderbird, two-door Landau: $2,675
- Ford Thunderbird, four-door Landau: $2,625
- Oldsmobile Toronado: $2,400
- Oldsmobile 98 Luxury Sedan, four-door sedan: $2,700
- Buick Electra 225 Custom, four-door sedan: $2,625
- Buick Riviera: $2,850
Note that the two-door Thunderbird Landau held its value better than the more expensive four-door, but even the two-door Landau was still worth $175 less than the Buick Riviera. The T-Bird could hold its own in rather upscale company because people saw it as a Thunderbird rather than a Ford, but it seems the Buick Riviera was in a still-loftier class.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 4-Door Landau shows off its simulated landau irons with woodgrain inserts / Mecum Auction
I’m amused by the pamphlet’s concluding imperative:
CASH IN!
Get Every Prospect Into Thunderbird, To Enjoy for Himself Thunderbird’s Unique, Personal-Luxury Atmosphere. Make Certain He Enjoys the Thrill of Thunderbird’s Luxurious Ride, Superlative Handling.
“Superlative” was a stretch, but chassis changes for 1968 and 1969 had moved the Thunderbird closer to “competence” in this area (as Car Life found with their 1969 car), which was an improvement over previous four-seat T-Birds.
1968 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau / Bring a Trailer
I don’t think most of Ford’s Thunderbird ambitions panned out: The four-door Landau did okay, but it doesn’t seem to have opened any new frontiers in ‘Birding, and the way its sales dropped off after 1969 (four-door sales totaled only 8,401 in 1970 and 6,553 in the 1971) suggest that buyers saw it as a novelty rather than a new direction. Both the two-door and four-door were probably hampered by their exterior styling, which had some interesting elements, but suffered from a lack of thematic cohesion and awkward proportions. (Envision if you will a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix with a ’68 Thunderbird front clip …)
1968 Ford Thunderbird 2-Door Landau / Bring a Trailer
Nevertheless, this pamphlet emphasizes many of the reasons why the Thunderbird was still essentially the default choice in this segment: If you wanted a distinctive alternative to a mid-price hardtop, the Thunderbird was a well-known name and a solid value. Whatever else you might say about the styling, it still looked like nothing else, and Ford had worked hard to make the interior feel different and special in design and features in ways rivals really hadn’t. I’d still rather have a 1965 or 1966 Flair Bird, but the T-Bird WAS still No. 1 in its field through 1968, and there were strong reasons for that.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1967 Ford Thunderbird Landau Sedan – Are Four Doors Really Better Than Two? (by Brendan Sauer)
Vintage Car And Driver Comparison: 1967 Ford Thunderbird And Cadillac Eldorado – A New Contender Enters The Personal Luxury Car Wars (by Rich Baron)
Curbside Classic: 1968 Thunderbird – Who Am I? Why Am I Here? (by J P Cavanaugh)
Vintage Car Life Review: 1969 Ford Thunderbird Landau – “It’s Better Than My Living Room” (by me)
Vintage Comparison Test: 1969 Buick Riviera, Ford Thunderbird, Mercury Marauder X-100, Oldsmobile Toronado, Pontiac Grand Prix – The Personal Luxury Wars Heat Up) (by GN)
Vintage Car Life Review: 1968 Buick Riviera – “Lots Of Sound, Well-Styled Automobile” (by me)
Vintage Review: 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado – April 1968 Car and Driver Road Test (by GN)
1966 Buick Riviera Versus 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado – Closely Related, Yet So Different (Part 1) (by me)
1966 Buick Riviera Versus 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado – Closely Related, Yet So Different (Part 2) (by me)
My oldest brother had a ’67 T-Bird hardtop with 390. I always thought it looked good, but he did have some niggling problems with the interior hardware, power locks, things like that. Otherwise it was a good car.
I have been told by a good source that the 4 door Birds were used as mafia lieutenant cars in the Boston area.
I like the Riviera styling, but the Toronado really fell off with this restyle. Nobody would ever cross shop an Electra or 98 with one of these.
Pic 18-Gold-white trim non-original…and hideous!
Pic 27-Seeing crank windows on these cars always annoys me a little. I always surmise
that is was ordered by somebody who wanted to impress the neighbors from afar
but couldn’t really afford the car. They were still in the LTD bracket.
Also, I always found it funny that the AM radio was always standard in T-Birds and
regular Continentals but optional in Mark IIIs.
All in all, I like these glamour Birds, maybe because they seen as aspirational when I
was a kid, and symbolized success .
Casual car enthusiasts look down on them because they don’t have the “look” of the pre-1967 models, but truth be told, they did a better job at being a car. The switch to BOF made them lighter, and they were roomier, quieter, quicker and handled somewhat better. These were the same type of improvements big Lincolns got when they switched to BOF in ’70 and ended up looking like big Mercs . Less distinguished, but better function.
My mom had a ’67 Thunderbird 4 door and to this day, she says it’s her favorite car she ever owned. Hers was a 428 car.
I thought the suicide rear doors made up for the fact that it was a 4 door versus a 2 door. Mom told me the back doors wouldn’t open without the front doors being open. To this day, I don’t know if that was a fib to keep a very adventurous 4 year old from opening the doors going down the road (apparently, something I did more than once).
It was a fib.
I’m not sure who Ford was trying to reach with the Thunderbird four-door. They still called it a “personal luxury car”, but what’s personal about a four door sedan with bench seating for six? Previous (and future) PLCs emphasized sleek and short coupe rooflines even at the expense of rear seat headroom and legroom, and of course had only two doors. The T-Bird sedan did offer posh fittings usually only available in cars over a foot longer, like the 98 or Electra, and I wonder if its relative unpopularity helped further convince Cadillac that there wasn’t much of a market for small or even mid-size luxury sedans. Olds, Buick, and Chrysler seemed convinced too, as their mid-sized sedans couldn’t be optioned out with an interior as distinctive or luxurious as the ‘Bird’s.
I get the impression from the dealer literature that Ford saw the Thunderbird as an upper-mid-price brand to (finally) fill the gap between Mercury and Lincoln, and was feeling out the idea of expanding it into a fuller model line in the league. That was where the Thunderbird was in price and prestige, so it probably didn’t sound like a terrible idea.
For the most part, the big deal for personal luxury cars in the Thunderbird/Riviera league was that they were specialty cars, meaning that they had their own body shells rather than being just a different roofline and trim. (The obvious exception was the Grand Prix, but when that lost steam after a couple of years, it was reinvented as a semi-specialty car.) Two-door hardtops were so common by this time that they were no longer all that inherently special — popular, yes, novel, not so much — and Ford had been toying with various four-door specialty car concepts for a while, going back at least to the abortive Continental Mark III Berlina they had planned for 1958. The trick was to still make it “personal,” rather than just a Galaxie sedan with another different roof and some bird emblems.
Whether the Thunderbird 4-Door Landau managed that is debatable, of course (it was, uh, unique, but so cobbled-together-looking), but I don’t think the idea itself was necessarily nonviable. For example, imagine if the 1959–1960 big Lincolns hadn’t been quite such a sales disaster and the originally planned gigantic 1961 Lincoln had gone forward, but with the four-door Continental as an additional model.
I was surprised to see Ford referring to the T-Bird, Riv, and Toro as “personal luxury cars” in their dealer guides – that was still quite a new term in 1968, and in period advertising, car magazine articles, and consumer publications I often saw cars like the Thunderbird, Mustang, and Charger lumped together as “specialty cars”. It would take a few years for the subcategories like muscle cars, pony cars, and personal luxury cars to be given names.
What’s this about a planned gigantic ’61 Lincoln? I’ve never read anything about it and can’t find anything online.
Ford had been calling the Thunderbird a personal car since the beginning, in part because they were trying to shift expectations from the presumption that it should be a sports car like the Corvette. The marketing for the Flair Bird had called it a “personal car of limousine elegance” offering “personalized luxury.” With the arrival of the Riviera and then the Toronado, which were also specialty cars, it was harder for Ford to keep calling the T-Bird “unique in all the world,” its earlier slogan. Ford also called the Mustang was a personal car, so the T-Bird was a personal luxury car. That term shows up in dealer literature for the 1967 model, and while I don’t have any dealer literature for the Flair Bird, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it there as well.
The 1961 Lincoln Continental, as I assume you know, was originally conceived as an alternative design for the 1961 Thunderbird, and the earliest styling models are two-doors with Thunderbird identification. At that time, the Lincoln-Mercury studio was still working on full-size Lincoln designs for 1961, still having some continuity in style and size with the 1958 Lincoln. Jim and Cheryl Farrell have covered this at length, both in their Lincoln styling book (which I unfortunately don’t) have and in articles for Collectible Automobile, Special Interest Autos, Dean’s Garage, and others. Their Dean’s Garage posts include some Ford Design photos of the full-size models:
https://www.deansgarage.com/design-of-the-1961-lincoln-part-1/
https://www.deansgarage.com/design-of-the-1961-lincoln-part-2/
Those designs didn’t move forward because the 1958–1959 Lincoln was in the process of laying a money-losing egg, and senior management felt that new models along the same lines would be disastrous flops, but there was a lot of work done on their successors, and if the economy had been better, Lincoln might still have gone forward with them. As far as I know, there wasn’t any discussion of producing Engel’s design alongside the big Lincolns, in two- or four-door form, but since the design was conceived for a different product anyway, it’s not a terribly far-fetched idea.
I love that phrase “cobbled-together-looking.” Perfect and what I thought the first time I saw it as a teenager. Dad bought a pristine 1965 Thunderbird in 1967 and I loved its integrated design inside and out. I’ve tried to appreciate the 1967-69 as time has gone on but I still cannot. Thanks for sharing this dealer piece – it makes sense for what they were trying to do with the T-Bird. Dad later bought a new 1978 Mark V Cartier – the Mark did effectively replace the Thunderbird coupe in the marketplace.
I should emphasize that I do think (as I’ve said) that bench seats with room for six came perilously close to losing the plot. However, it seems that what most contemporary buyers ultimately ended up wanting, even in personal cars, was a bench seat with fold-down center armrest, and eventually a split bench (which at least avoided the indignity of a taller front passenger being at the mercy of the shorter driver).
I can see some merit to the concept of the “personal luxury sedan”.
1] Most days, the kids are transported in mom’s Colony Park wagon, but sometimes they do ride with dad. They’re a little too big/old to get in and out of the back of a T-bird coupe.
2] Maybe the couple occasionally go to dinner with another couple. The ladies can easily get in and out of the back seat, while the men sit up front.
(Yeah, these sound weird and dated today, but in the period, neither scenario was terribly uncommon.)
I described the Thunderbird four-door in an earlier CC feature as the automotive equivalent of a spork, the utensil that tries to meld the characteristics of a fork and spoon into a single utensil looking to fulfill both functions. The T-Bird four-door is kind of that, trying to be both a personal-luxury car and a family sedan. The sales figures seem to indicate the concept didn’t work all that well, but enough people liked it to buy some 20,000 or thereabouts each year it was offered. Some people prefer sporks to separate spoons and forks too.
I never liked the Thunderbird by Phillishave, but at least Ford knew you had to stop, I’d take the Buick.
I always found the styling of the 4-Door T-Birds to be “fussy.” It is hard to put into words, but there is something especially goofy-looking about the rear door, the way it fit under the fake landau iron and about the little blackout panel at the rear of the rear door window.
That said, there is certainly an argument to be made for the idea of a 4-door personal luxury car. I’ve heard many people state that they believe that the “4-door coupe” is an expression of that idea. An argument can also be made that any number of 4-door sedans (usually with styling that resulted in limited rear seat headroom) could be considered 4-door coupes.
When sales of the 10th generation T-Bird (1989-97) started to decline there was talk of reviving a 4-door T-Bird but nothing came of the idea. (It was even rumored to be considered as a replacement for the panther platform.) At that time there were also rumors that Buick was considering a 4-door Riviera (that would share its platform with the evolution of the First generation Oldsmobile Aurora platform). There was also the failure of the Continental Mark VI (but that involved both 2 and 4-door models). The Pontiac Grand Prix added a 4-door model which eventually replaced the 2-door model, but the GP evolved (or devolved) into being more of a replacement for the mid-sized Pontiac 6000 and was arguably no longer a personal luxury car.
I had an Aurora HO track set as a kid. One of my cars was a blue ’68 or ’69 two door Thunderbird. I was always impressed with the Glamor Birds, especially the suicide 4 door models without the beak nose.
I would imagine they are a headache to support today, but it would find a nice home in my driveway if the right one came my way.
Even though the interior is nice in all its iterations,I could never get over that butt ugly front clip (almost as ugly as a `61 Ambassador) and that ‘mouth organ’ grille. If I was old enough to go ‘personal luxury car’ shopping in `68, I`d opt for the Riviera.
I am a T-Bird nut and think the Glamor Birds have styling merit. If it was 1968, I would buy the Riviera for its body style even though the T-Bird had the better interior design.
The four-door T-Birds were interesting but they never should have been called a T-Bird. The new Mustang Mack E SUV, never should have been called a Mustang.
i called them “E Stangs”, for several months till I discovered my error.
It seems that Ford Division hoped the four-door Landau would more fully establish the Thunderbird as not just a separate model line, but essentially a distinct mid-price sub-brand.
This perhaps is a validation of the Edsel mission statement only with a better name and styling, though ultimately just as damning in the long run, effectively being the beginning of the end of the Thunderbird nameplate’s decent into being “just a Ford”.
This GlamourBird era of Thunderbird fascinates me as much as it overall repels me. I see where the designers were going with it and in spite of its later familiarity with the Lincoln Mark III it really looked absolutely nothing like it unlike it’s successor and the Mark IV (or even the prior bulletbird from the Continental. I strongly think the deadliest sin of this generation was losing the convertible bodystyle even if its sales were on the decline, adding the 4 door as a new bodystyle makes no sense at all in an exchange and the sales data to me don’t seem to reflect it being a smart move.
The four-door Landau sold much, much better than the convertible Flair Bird had, so in that sense, it was a valid move. However, it didn’t expand the Thunderbird’s market the way Ford had hoped it would, and after 1969, whatever novelty value it had had clearly worn thin.
That’s ultimately my criticism, it may have in the short term been logical, but sacrificing a big chunk of the Thunderbird’s identity in convertible aspiration severely killed the spirit of it. I mean the whole look of the hardtop from 58-66 was to resemble the retractable top Fords. Those Thunderbirds even used a similar mechanism to them albeit with a canvas too. Later the Landau came out with its landau bars also simulating classical convertible tops which this generation would carry on as well, yet there was not a single example to validate the aspiration, it’s just a cheesy appendage that would define the 70s era of luxury
The retrac roofline was conceived for the Thunderbird and applied first to the retrac, rather than the other way around, but I take your point.
I don’t know that many people associated the simulated landau irons with convertibles per se — I think the association Ford was going for was more formal limousines (or hearses, oops), where the irons are often decorative. Simulated landau irons weren’t terribly uncommon on prewar fixed-head coupes and even occasionally fixed-head sedans, like this Pierce-Arrow: https://www.autabuy.com/classifieds/85067432-1931-pierce-arrow-model-41
I also think this stuff was cheesy and tacky, and I hate the fake cabriolet look, which continued to drag down the property values of American cars into the ’90s, but it wasn’t without precedent.
I have always liked this model Thunderbird in 2 door hardtop form, probably helped by memories of the Hot Wheels version, but the Riviera makes the Bird look a bit second hand here, no contest for me, its the Buick all the way.
Very interesting article. It does show that the Thunderbird name carried at the time enough “value” to allow a Ford to compete with Olds and Buick, which was otherwise the mission of Mercury.
Yes, it was somewhat cheaper than the Riviera and Toronado, but that moderate difference does not seem to justify the disparity in sales numbers.. but perhaps the avalability of a 4-door does? They account for almost 30% of sales in ’67,’68 and ’69