(EXPANDED FROM 12/1/2023)
The introduction of compacts for Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick represented a major change for these General Motors’ premium-priced brands. Did they help sales grow in a changing marketplace? Or did smaller cars merely cannibalize the sales of big cars?
Let’s do a data dive to see if we can find any patterns. We will also analyze which brand might have most logically held off from offering any entries smaller than “full sized.” This story extends past conversations about whether GM engaged in too much product proliferation in the 1960s and 1970s (go here and here).
Y-body helped counteract weak premium-brand sales
For 1961 GM introduced new Y-body Buick Special, Oldsmobile F-85 and Pontiac Tempest. This turned out to be a good year for a second wave of compacts. The U.S. auto industry was in the midst of a recession that brought total domestic production down almost 14 percent. Smaller economy cars tended to do well.
More than 264,000 Y-body compacts were built in the 1961 model year. That was only modestly more than senior Rambler production, but it represented roughly 28 percent of the collective output of Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick.
So even though the Y-body cars didn’t sell all that well in 1961, they still kept GM’s premium brands from falling below the disastrous sales levels of 1958. However, as the 1960s wore on, smaller and halo cars played a key role in pushing output to new heights for Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick.
The graph below shows big-car production by brand. Here you can see the Buick boom in the first half of the 1950s, the collapse of the premium-priced field in the second half of that decade, and Buick’s slow recovery in the 1960s. Oldsmobile and Pontiac were fairly close in output through 1964, when the latter brand had its own boom that petered out by 1969.
The definition of a ‘big’ car dramatically grew in 1950s
The above graph is misleading in one respect — it treats car size in a more consistent fashion than it was in real life. During the 1950s the typical American car ballooned in size. This was especially true in the premium-priced field.
As a case in point, between 1951 and 1959 Buick’s entry-level models grew almost a foot in length and more than 600 pounds. The base engine, in turn, increased from 263 to 364 cubic inches.
Detroit groupthink had assumed that this was what the public wanted. Yet as premium-priced cars bloated out, their share of the domestic market dropped from 42 percent in 1955 to only 27 percent 1959. Buick saw one of the biggest declines; its market share fell from 10.4 percent to only 5.1 percent.
Automakers could have responded by putting their cars on a major diet. Instead, in the early-60s they added compacts and then mid-sized cars (which were awkwardly referred to as “intermediates”).
Y-body compacts were relatively minor players
U.S. auto sales began to bounce back in 1962-63. In the latter year production hit almost 7.4 million, which broke the previous record set in 1955. GM’s three premium brands saw output soar by 63 percent, surpassing 1.5 million units. Y-body output also rose but its proportion of total premium-brand production fell to roughly 26 percent.
In 1963 the Y-bodied Buick Special/Skylark captured the largest share of its brand’s total production — 32.5 percent. This was a product both of the smaller Buick selling the best of GM’s trio while the big Buick straggled behind its corporate siblings.
In contrast, the F-85/Cutlass only garnered 22.3 percent of Olds output because it was the weakest selling Y-body entry while the brand’s big cars did better than Buick’s (but not as well as Pontiac’s).
A-body intermediates saw booming sales
Upsizing the Y-body compacts to A-body intermediates would have a much bigger impact on GM’s premium-priced brands. They were the most important reason why full-sized cars saw their proportion of total output fall from roughly 71 percent in 1963 to under 52 percent in 1968. Of course, by the end of the decade each of these brands also offered personal coupes, but the mid-sized cars were the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room.
Also see ‘General Motors trumped Ford’s 1962 foray into mid-sized cars’
The A-body boom was partly driven by so-called “muscle cars” such as the Pontiac GTO. However, in 1969 Pontiac’s intermediates peaked at over 400,000 units primarily due to the hot-selling Grand Prix, which became a variant of the A-body. This was the beginning of the brougham era, which would bring A-body sales to new heights in the 1970s.
By the end of the 1960s Buick became the least dependent on smaller-car sales. Only 28.3 percent of Buick’s total output in 1969 came from its A-body entries — just one-tenth of a percent higher than in 1961.
In contrast, Oldsmobile’s A-body cars tallied 37.5 percent of total brand output, which was roughly halfway between Pontiac’s and Buick’s. Essentially what happened was that Olds and Buick traded places in the second half of the 1960s. Oldsmobile’s mid-sized cars eclipsed Buick’s while the opposite occurred in the full-sized field. The end result was that Buick turned out to have the most stable proportion of full-sized cars from 1962-71.
Smaller cars did eat into big car sales . . . but so what?
The data shown so far doesn’t fully answer that question of whether smaller cars cannibalized GM’s premium-priced brands, so let’s take a look at one more graph: the percentage of the total domestic market that Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick collectively held from 1950 to 1969.
The peak market share for the GM trio was 26.4 percent in 1955. It took until 1969 to get close to this level again — 24.9 percent. By that point big cars contributed only 13.4 percent. This was about average from 1961-69 and a good three points below 1960.
Some cannibalism clearly occurred. The big question is whether that was necessary to keep each brand viable as smaller cars became increasingly popular in the 1960s. Of the three brands, it made the most sense for Pontiac to offer smaller cars because it was the shortest step up from the low-priced Chevrolet.
What of Oldsmobile and Buick? I have previously suggested that withholding from both of them smaller cars would have been a mistake given the direction of the market. However, such a move could have greatly helped to reduce the over-fragmentation of GM’s lineup. So at the risk of offending the sensibilities of those who dislike counterfactuals, let’s sketch some scenarios.
What if Oldsmobile had pioneered FWD big cars?
With the luxury of hindsight, we might speculate that Oldsmobile was in the best position to eschew offering a Y-body compact. One reason why is its big cars consistently sold better than Buick’s from 1958-66. In addition, the first-generation F-85 never got much traction.
The case against Oldsmobile getting the A-body is a tougher call. To consign the brand to only full-sized cars could very well have made it much harder — if impossible — to get close to generating the 635,000 units it produced in 1969. Even Pontiac’s popular full-sized entries peaked at only 494,000 units in 1965.
That said, Oldsmobile could have also offered variants not available from other GM divisions, such as an entry-level series with a shorter wheelbase and deck. Perhaps most interestingly, Olds could have given its family cars front-wheel drive rather than reserving it for the Toronado.
What if Buick had focused on personal cars?
Withholding compacts from Buick in the early-60s could have been more difficult than with Oldsmobile because the brand’s sales had fallen so catastrophically. However, in light of the wildly popular Ford Thunderbird, might Buick management have been placated by being given a competitor by 1961?
Buick could also been a logical brand to indirectly respond to the downsized 1961 Lincoln Continental by giving its personal coupe a companion four-door model that was shorter than regular Buicks.
With these two steps, Buick might have been able to generate higher sales than the fairly slow-selling Riviera. In 1963 production only reached 40,000 units — well below the T-Bird’s peak of almost 93,000 units in 1960 — and sank to under 35,000 units by 1965.
Of course, personal cars likely would not have generated the volume of its Y-body and A-body entries. The latter peaked in 1973 at almost 299,000 units. This helped Buick break its 1955 record by surpassing 785,000 units.
Yes, but wasn’t downsizing inevitable?
The biggest downside of Oldsmobile and Buick not getting smaller cars in the 1960s would have been that this merely delayed the inevitable. However, if the two brands had been more dependent on big cars, they may have been able to gain higher-level support for “leaning” them before GM finally did in 1977.
In addition, maintaining stronger brand distinctions in the 1960s could have made it easier for GM’s upper management to hold the line in the 1970s. Once Oldsmobile and Buick were given mid-sized entries, then it was a much easier step for divisions to also demand compacts and subcompacts.
Of course, by the early-80s the pressure to dramatically downsize GM’s entire passenger-car fleet could have still resulted in too much product overlap between brands. However, perhaps GM’s problems wouldn’t have been quite so pronounced if each division had maintained more carefully defined niches.
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on Jan. 21, 2022 and expanded on Dec. 1, 2023 and Nov. 25, 2025. Production and market share figures were calculated from data published by the auto editors of Consumer Guide (1993, 2006), Gunnell (2002) and Wikipedia (2013). Product specifications are from the same sources.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 1993, 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International, Lincolnwood, IL.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Wikipedia; 2013. “U.S. Automobile Production Figures.” Accessed July 5 (content no longer online).
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcaradvertising.com: Oldsmobile (1962)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Buick (1955, 1961, 1969); Buick Riviera (1963); Buick Skylark (1962, 1964); Oldsmobile (1961, 1966, 1969); Oldsmobile F-85/442/Vista Cruiser (1962, 1966, 1969); Pontiac (1961, 1969); Pontiac Tempest (1962)
Yet another thought provoking dive into the realm of automotive industry what if’s.
I believe you briefly touched on a factor that played a part in the decline of the sales of the full size cars… they got too big in the late ‘50’s. The blossoms of baroque automotive design became too much for many buyers, and they sought alternatives. With the exception of the Corvette and Thunderbird, the big three’s pre-1960 product offerings were just different trim levels of a single large model. The alternatives were foreign or from AMC or Studebaker. The ‘59 Lark was proof that the public wanted something smaller than what the big three were offering. The introduction of the compacts and intermediates during the first half of the 1960’s was the ultimate litmus test to find the sweet spot of what the majority of American car buyers wanted: intermediates, or essentially pre-1958 sized cars.
The question that burns in my mind is this: what if Ed Cole had managed to get a compact car to market a couple of years before the 1958 recession and coincident enlargement of the primary model line? Would that have set the process of model differentiation in motion sooner and enabled the Americans to better manage the influx of foreign competition?
Good point. I’ve added a few paragraphs and a graph about how market share fell for premium-priced cars as they grew bigger in the 1950s.
Your question on Cole can take the conversation in a number of interesting directions. For example, it strikes me that it would have required a hard-charging contrarian to have had any hope of pushing into production a Big Three compact in the mid-50s. AMC’s George Romney wasn’t taken seriously until the 1958 recession, when Rambler sales finally started to gain traction.
Cole may have been too exotic in his engineering predilections to have come up with a viable early compact. Ford’s McNamara seemed to have a somewhat better grasp of what was needed. And he did hedge his bets on the 1957 Ford redesign by fielding a 10-inch shorter body for the Custom series than for the Fairlane. Even so, the Custom was still around five inches longer and 150 pounds heavier than a 1950 Ford. And in 1959 the shorter Custom body went away. That was a missed opportunity. Even McNamara was captured by the industry groupthink that resulted in the ungainly 1960 Ford redesign.
We see how the typical full-size American car of the 1960s and 70s was a fading species. Detroit hung on to it, though, even in the worst of times and in spite of the immense popularity/profitability of their intermediate class cars.
I blame this on the 1965 Ford LTD.
Ford’s move upmarket with the LTD was problematic and symptomatic. With its luxury for less cache, the LTD became a threat to ALL contemporary medium-priced brand cars of the era, including Mercury, at a time when that division was just getting back on its big car feet. Ford even had the gumption to advertise the LTD as quieter than a Rolls Royce. Where exactly did that leave Lincoln, whose Continental was much closer in concept and class to the Rolls? Second, in Detroit, where imitation has always been the sincerest way to make a quick buck, Chevrolet and Plymouth were forced to ante up with the Caprice and VIP respectively. Anyone with a slide ruler could have figured out that lower echelon full-size Oldsmobiles, Dodges and Mercurys, etc, were doomed with the LTD’s arrival.
The following year, GM unleashed, larger, restyled intermediates that, IMO at least, crushed the redesigned mid-size 1966 Ford and Chrysler offerings. Plus, the Cutlass Supreme was born. The Supreme was offered as a class-exclusive 4-door hardtop, a body style Chrysler never offered on their mid-size platform and which Ford offered only in 1970-71. With that, the circle was now complete. Mid-size cars effectively covered the entire Detroit spectrum… economy to sporty to muscle to luxury and in every possible body style. With such an extensive array of models under 4 different brand names, could GM have effectively begun to downsize its cars a decade earlier? Had that happened, where would that have left the traditional full-size car?
Luxury, Ford decreed back in 1965, was the way to save the big car from dwindling sales and market share. Though you can no longer buy an LTD car you can buy a big, luxurious F-150 4-door truck with an open bed for your Louis Vuitton luggage (trunk lid optional). In 2022, bigger is better remains philosophy-supreme in Detroit. It will surprise no one to see the Mustang car disappear shortly (too small, only 2-doors; strong initial sales of the Mach E tallied 27,000+ units in 2021 vs a dwindling 61,000+ in 2020 for the ‘real’ Mustang https://insideevs.com/news/558927/us-ford-mache-sales-2021/ ); nor should we be surprised to see an all-electric Crown Victoria version of the F-150 (complete with LED light band) arriving soon as the next big luxury Ford of the future. I wouldn’t worry about the Ranger, Maverick or Bronco cannibalizing F-150 sales anytime soon, either.
For that, you can still blame the 1965 LTD.
CJ, it’s funny how I was finishing up a short piece on the LTD just as you were posting this comment. My focus was primarily on advertising, but I gave Ford credit for effectively attacking GM’s hierarchy of brands.
One way we could look at the LTD is as a predictor of today’s automobile market, where there are mass-market brands and luxury brands but not much in the middle. But even if one doesn’t consider that, it strikes me that back in the mid-60s it made a certain amount of sense for the Ford brand to move upmarket given that Dearborn had by far the weakest presence in the premium-priced class. In other words, Ford had more to gain than to lose with the likes of the LTD.
Indeed, it would be interesting to play out a scenario where Mercury was ditched after WWII and the Ford and Lincoln brands were expanded to at least partially fit the gap in between. Might the automaker have been more successful than by adding the Edsel and Continental brands as well as the aggressive expansion of Mercury in the late-50s? That’s an honest question.
You make a great point about whether GM’s A-body lineup could have set the stage for a downsizing of the big car a decade earlier. That could have been a real turning point for the U.S. auto industry if GM management had been more enlightened.
To think the 1965 mid-size Dodge Coronet and Plymouth Belvedere was a reskinned 1962-64 “full-size” Polara/Fury who was available with a 4-door hardtop version is a real mystery unless Chrysler didn’t wanted them steal some potential customers of the 1965 C-bodies Polara/Fury 4-door hardtops.
I concur that Mercury could have been dropped after the Second World War and probably not have affected the corporate bottom line. It still would have made sense, after the company’s colossal failure to go upmarket in the late 1950s, to shutter Mercury at the end of the 1960 model year. Comet could have been introduced as Fairlane for 1960 then easily graduated from senior compact to intermediate for 1962.
The LTD was a more logical expansion upmarket than the performance-oriented Galaxie XL500. As a turning point car, perhaps Ford might have considered introducing an LTD option a year earlier, as Pontiac had done with its Brougham package for the 1964 Bonneville. I would then have pushed for a decontented T-Bird hardtop (and I believe Ford did toy with that idea) or better yet, a “specialty coupe” with unique sheetmetal, built off of the Falcon/Fairlane platform, slotted between Mustang and T-Bird and priced below the Pontiac Grand Prix, as a good bet for exploiting another niche that GM wasn’t covering. Next, split Lincoln off, as was done in 1949, only this time using the same 1961 Continental body for both a base Lincoln and an upscale Continental. This helps to close the gap between Ford’s flagship brand and the XLs/LTDs. Continental could then have been spun off in 1964 on the larger wheelbase, leaving Lincoln on the original ’61 platform. Going a step further, only 2 basic platforms would have been required over the next several years; compacts and intermediates using Falcon architecture, while the big Ford, T-Bird and Lincoln/Continental shared another. I think that is a plan Robert McNamara could have endorsed!
Can see the logic in having Lincoln, Continental, T-Bird and Big Ford (Galaxie/LTD?) on the same platform from the early-1960s, what interests me though is how Ford would go about replacing the large platform with something more sophisticated in response to a scenario where GM were actually able to turn the Opel Diplomat into an early Cadillac Seville (if not an earlier version via the mid-60s Diplomat A).
Ford would eventually develop the Panther platform yet that would have been uncompetitive against more sophisticated offerings outside of the US (more so in the case of Lincoln), leaving the question of whether the larger platform could have been replaced with something more along the lines of the De Tomaso Deuville at roughly the same period (De Tomaso already having pre-existing links to Ford)?
Good question, LR. Ford, it seems to me, while always a pragmatic company, has been notorious for letting development stagnate. The Ford Taurus is a good example of that and how they just tossed away that car’s brand equity. IMO, Ford would have had to constantly developed/updated a full-size platform to ensure it was as up-to-date as possible BUT most importantly, not let it bloat out the way their full-size cars did, especially in the 1970s. Large European Fords were developed much differently. I remember reading enthusiastic reviews of the early 70s Opel Diplomat but can’t imagine Cadillac, at the time, having had the guts to build a Seville with anywhere close to the performance characteristics of the Diplomat. The Seville was the right size but when GM forced it on a shared FWD platform it got bigger and less interesting. Neither Ford nor GM would commit to dedicated and sophisticated RWD platforms for their high-end cars (remember the Lincoln-Falcon Versailles?) but Toyota was able to do it with Lexus. AND, a 1990 Lexus LS 400 was smaller than a contemporary S-Class Mercedes. Toyota knew what they were doing and is as good an example as I can think of to suggest the kind of thoughtful planning and development that Ford needed to do in North America for its big cars.
In theory and drawing upon Ford’s plans to import the European Granada, perhaps a locally built European Granada could have served as a basis for an even larger related platform for full-size cars? Basically the Ford version of the 1966 GM V Platform that also form the basis of LWB models like the full-size 1990-2006 Holden Caprice / Statesman and smaller contemporary Holden Commodore, even if it would have likely been replaced by a stretched version of the Ford Scorpio that was already based on the smaller Ford Sierra.
The South Africans managed to fit the European Ford Granada with a V8, while the Aussies were able to slot the Straight-Six into the smaller mk3-mk5 Ford Cortina.
Despite being longer and wider than the European Ford Granada, the wheelbase of the De Tomaso Deuville was actually not too far off of the European Ford Granada or the 4-door Ford Maverick.
I believe the first Cadillac Seville was spun off the revised Chevy Nova platform in 1975. I do not think the Opel Diplomat’s engine bay would accommodate a Chevy 350
V-8.
The Diplomat did offer a Chevy V8.
Correct on the Seville being derived from the Nova platform.
The problem for G.M. corporate (Fred Donner, et.al.), was that while divisional G.M.s were easy to confront and fire, the finance department had no desire to confront the dealers and define what each division’s future product would be. (Much like Lynn Townsend at Chrysler never was able to manage his divisions once DeSoto and Exner were gone.) Of course, if the money was rolling in, even though divisional manufacturing costs were going up, especially after the 1964-1965 and 1970-1971 U.A.W. strikes, why rock the boat ?
In terms of the 1965 Ford, yes, Ford’s big car platform dated from the 1950s, so a chassis / platform revision was in order for the big Ford and the big Mercury. But the real rap against Ford Galaxies vis-a-vis the Chevrolet Impalas was that the Ford’s interior looked cheaper, the Fords rode rougher and were noisier over the road. The 1965 Ford perimeter frame with coils at all four corners changed all that. Still, Ford did not have to escalate the brand model arms race by introducing the L.T.D. simply by continuing with Galaxie 500 L (for luxury) and Galaxie 500/XL. Mercury needed the model rebranding for 1965 and would have done better with the L.T.D. branding and the Marquis.
Pontiac deliberately moved into Oldsmobile territory by introducing the Bonneville Brougham, even though Pontiac interiors in the Ventura and Bonneville lines were uniquely both sporty and luxurious. Did Oldsmobile need the Omega and did Buick need the Apollo (and for that matter the Starfire and the Skyhawk, respectively)? Then came the “J” and “N” bodies. As Jack Trout and Alan Ries wrote in “Positioning” in 1979, brand extension ultimately dilutes the power of a brand (the identity in the mind’s eye of the consumer). Today, G.M.’s brands have diminished impact, while the Ford Mustang and the F-150 still create a powerful brand image for consumers !
I would have to disagree with the assertion that the current Mustang and F-150 are big brand identifiers.
More importantly the Ford F-150 is woefully outdated in appearance with that tired old ski slope doorline – while its featureless flat sides are the opposite of anything attractive. Parking a Silverado/ Sierra next to a Ford the Gm’ers come off as highway art. The GM midsizers Colorado – similarly distinguish themselves.
The Mustang is a laughable curiousity chasing a long dead constituency.
I doubt seriously the Ford is the truck sales leader despite the numbers the company presents to its stockholders.
Ford’s malaise is not limited to its truck line. After the cancellation of the Mercury Ford never did get their divisional house in order. And dont bring up the ”Platinum” ploy. IT would appear that GM’s 4 or 5 divisions are the strongest and most well defined it its history.
I wonder if GM erred in the long run in moving all its cars to the B/C platform in 1959. Perhaps GM would have been better off in the long run had Chevrolet and Pontiac stuck with the A body, B/C would have been exclusive to Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac, and Chevrolet and Pontiac’s small cars were based on the X body, while Buick and Oldsmobile had senior compacts, smaller than the A body but larger than the X body. Of course, the Chevrolet and Pontiac B bodies were very successful and profitable during the 1960’s. I read Richard Stout’s “Make ‘Em Shout Hooray” about how the 1959 B/C platform was cheapened from its predecessors.
With the exception of the 1963 Corvette, the 1963 Buick Riviera and the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, the most significant and versatile platforms of the 1960s were the 1964 G.M. “A”-bodies. Yes, the 1962 Plymouths and Darts were true “intermediates”, but their origin was Bill Newberg’s overhearing a mistaken conversation about Chevy adding a more conventional car to take on the Falcon. The Y-bodies were limited (112-inch wheelbase unit body) in what they could do in terms of sales and flexibility, so the “A”-body was born to start with a 115-inch wheelbase. Interestingly, the downsized G.M. standards for 1977 were based upon the perimeter-framed “A”-bodies.
I think the 64-72 GM midsize cars were the perfect size. I would have loved to have seen a version of each made to the level of “luxury” that the full size cars had with the same level of quietness. The full size cars were just too big and bloated.
I agree that the 1964 GM mid-sized cars were a good size. As the story discusses, that was roughly the size of American cars in the first half of the 1950s — and it’s too bad they didn’t stay roughly that size. One limitation of automotive historians who came out of the postwar era is their tendeny to assume that cars would inevitably get as big as they did, e.g., because that’s what the public wanted. My sense is that, at the very least, the truth is much more complex than that.
I recall one of the major automotive magazines (probably Car Life or Motor Trend, the two I regularly read) declaring that the 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle was, in terms of size, a reissue of the full size 1955 Chevrolet. They showed an image of the new Chevelle overlaid on a ‘55 Chevy and the match in dimensions was uncanny. Fast forward a year when my dad had to replace his rusted-out ‘55 Chevy 210 and his choice was a 1965 Chey Impala based Canadian Pontiac. My Mom protested once she took a look at our neighbor’s ‘64 Malibu S/S. She felt that the Malibu was big enough, lower priced, and more stylish and youthful. My Dad argued that he had always bought (and apparently needed) a big car and refused the consider a “downgrade”. The Chevelle was “full sized” by 1955 standards but marketing it as a mid-size or intermediate backfield on my family. As a teenager in the mid-sixties I wanted the Malibu S/S too!!!!
I’d answer the “so what?” question in two ways:
First: the smaller the car, the less surface area the designers had to differentiate styling among the brands. So the premium brands made themselves vulnerable to the “Oldsmobuick” joke.
Second: although there was always some pricing overlap within the Sloan ladder, it suddenly became pronounced and thereby eroded brand cachet. A 1965 Buick Special had an MSRP about 10% lower than a Chevrolet Impala.
I would agree that ultimately there was a market for smaller premium and luxury cars, but to sustain its brand structure successfully GM would have needed to exploit that market in a different way. It would have needed to change the way basic bodies were shared among the divisions (perhaps along the lines of the GM10 platform where they stopped sharing greenhouse designs) and it would have needed to increase the overall price of the more senior makes to avoid as much pricing overlap.
Right. GM arguably took the path of least resistance instead . . . which turned out to be an evolutionary wrong turn that would cause them no end of trouble in the decades ahead. Long-term thinking as never been a particularly strong suit for American automakers.
From what I recall the first and second generation GM midsizes maintained enough sheet metal difference to easily tell them apart and keep a solid styling continuum with theiur full size cousins. The same with the first generation GM compacts, where each was also given a unique powertrain feature. The early 70s badge engineered Novas and what followed where a chevy was just an interior upgrade package away from an Olds arrived. The dealers got the expanded product line, they got it good and hard. From 1971 on it was inevitable.
The problem here is the dealer body.
As long as each division has a dedicated dealer body, those dealers will want a broad line-up of vehicles to sell.
If Buick and Oldsmobile had only been given high-end, well-equipped versions of the A-body to sell, the first question from the dealers at the new-model preview would have been, “And where are the less expensive price versions?” Those dealers wanted a broad range of A-bodies to sell.
The 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon was exactly the type of vehicle that some have advocated here – a well-equipped sedan that featured a floor-shifter, premium interior (with very nice curdoroy upholstered bucket seats) and specially tuned suspension.
It also had a sticker price that was very close to that of the 1973 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. If Oldsmobile dealers had been told that the Salon was to be their ONLY A-body four-door sedan offering for 1973, they would have stormed Lansing and demanded cheaper versions to boost volume.
To meet this challenge, GM would have had to reorganize its dealer body to carry the offerings of every division.
Dealers would prove to be increasingly powerful, but upper management did have agency. Their political wiggle room tended to be determined by a string of decisions rather than a single one. So of course dealers would have had more leverage to mount a successful revolt if GM had initially given Oldsmobile and Buick broad lineups of A-body models but later tried to force their mid-sized offerings upmarket.
Another X factor is the quality of the execution. The 1963 Riviera could get away with being priced at the top of Buick’s line even though it was a smaller car than the Electra because it was viewed as having special qualities, such as sportier styling. That price point also became easier to justify because Ford had already shown with the Thunderbird that people would be willing to pay so much for a smaller car.
All that said, I agree that one of the best ways of better rationalizing GM’s sprawling lineup of brands would have been to take at least some half steps toward reorganizing dealers. If I recall correctly, GM consolidated some dealer networks during the depth of the Great Depression, so there was a precedent for going in that direction.
It would be nice to have each make stand for something like back in the day. I know in rural areas the dealers were rationalized, from what I remember Chevy/Olds and Buick/Pontiac/GMC. That works out fine there, but how do you rationalize in a urban area where Al’s Chevrolet is next door to Fred’s Pontiac and Oldman’s Oldsmobile is across the street. I’d love to know how those small town multi brand dealers managed back then when each brand had its own drivetrain from radiator to differential how they managed parts.
Or, knock off the luxury levels of the bottom rungs. The 58 Impala could be had with an impressive Vi, power seats, power windows, a beautiful interior in all the colors of the rainbow, beautiuful sculpted sides, and a grille as close to the Cadillacs as you can get without copyright infringement. They sold about 161,000 of them for 1958. That’s moving easily 1/2 billion dollars in a recession year.
I obviously grew up in the “Father Knows Best” era!!!!
Dan, it’s interesting how our upbringing can influence our basic biases as adults. For example, I was raised in southern California and my parents almost always owned smaller cars. Viewing a mid-sized car or even a compact as a “family car” seemed normal to me.
Why didn’t saner minds prevail in the 1970s ? The most brilliant minds in the engineering world were in the ranks of G.M., Ford, Chrysler and A.M.C. Yet it was the late 1960s that the Mercedes-Benz W-series sedans, the B.M.W. 5-series and the Volvo 140-240-260-series that were the superior sedans and station wagons. The cars were safe, frugal and of high quality. All of the “Big Three” after 1971 overbuilt their full-size cars for the U.S. mainstream marketplace. Yes, wheelbases over 127-inches were throwbacks to coach-built custom bodies. The days of the Fleetwood limos and senior Packards were long past. The 1970-1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes were the ideal platform in my opinion for the future of the American sedan. The modifications for disc brakes and radial-tuned suspensions (1973) were precursors to the eventual adoption of independent rear suspensions. If I had been the product planner chief of Oldsmobile, I would have phased out the Olds name in favor of a range of front-wheel-drive Cutlasses and a luxury 98-replacement Toronado coupe and hardtop sedan. Buick and Cadillac can have a B/C body for Le Sabres, Electras and DeVilles with maybe a front-drive Seville based off of the Cutlass. Chevrolet should have gone into Nova and Malibus and an Impala coupe-sedan-wagon based off a Le Sabre platform for fleet /
police service. Pontiac could still be the performance division (like Dodge) with Tempest / Le Mans / Grand Prix / Bonneville spun from the Cutlass platform. Ford by 1973 had three good platforms for the L.T.D.-Lincoln, a Thunderbird-Torino and a Mustang-Falcon. Mercury could be a performance Lincoln only. Chrysler only needed a Valiant and Belvidere, a Coronet-Dart-Charger-Cordoba and a Newport-New Yorker-Fifth Avenue (Imperial). For A.M.C, that leaves American or Hornet, the Rambler / Ambassador and the Jeeps. Best of all, no Steve Rattner !
I have old issues of Consumer Reports from the late 1960s and 1970s. The high-end imported sedans had some advantages over the domestic models, but they were not decisive at that point. Their quality control and reliability were not necessarily superior to that of the better domestic models.
It wasn’t just Detroit that needed to adopt the Toyota Lean Production Systems.
I am thinking that there are some big picture points that are relevant to this discussion.
– Of course the intermediate would siphon off sales from the low end full size market. Why buy the low end big car when for the same money one could get a high end mid size? A better argument was that the low end full size model should have only been kept for Chevrolet, and maybe Pontiac.
– I do believe that by the late 1960s and early 1970s the idea of desired family size had gone down. Society had changed and the need for comfortable 3 across front seats and rear seats was far less of a consideration. For those that needed the extra kid capacity there was always the station wagon. As the kids grew up they were getting their own car and not necessarily traveling with their parents.
– The one car family household had ceased to exist. In most cases the second car was going to be some form of smaller car.
– Left out of all the above volume numbers is what the full size Chevrolets were doing. If their numbers were big then there was no reasonable way to kill that end of their product line. One can look forward to the 1977 downsized GM to see how the full size line-up remained significant for all the GM brands.
– I recommend the book “Designing Dreams” by Dick Ruzzin to detail the inner workings and thinking inside GM by someone that was there. He also does a section on the TASCA program and how it came to be and what they were trying to accomplish.