1968 Ford Thunderbird Versus Rivals – How Ford Ranked The T-Bird’s Competition

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.

 

Ford had grand ambitions for the fifth-generation Thunderbird, as the full cover of this 1968 booklet reveals:

 

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:

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

The Buick Electra 225 and Oldsmobile 98 shared the bigger GM C-body, differing in sheet metal and trim.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 …)

 

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)