Peter Wilding offered a detailed comment about our our post, “The switch to smaller cars began before the first oil embargo in late-1973.” I don’t agree with everything that he says, but he makes some important points that are worth elevating.
Jan Norbye was often quite incisive, looking under the surface to note trends like this. Adding up the total of cars which weren’t ‘standard size’ is quite revealing, and the figure breakdown he gives is quite interesting. 39.3% compact or smaller, and he says you wouldn’t have believed it three years ago. That’s very rapid growth. There could be many reasons behind this.
In 1957 the move toward smaller cars was quite established, with some imports being household names (Volkswagen) and Rambler coming in several sizes. I wonder to what extent increasing urban congestion was guiding people to want smaller cars? Easier to manuever, easier to park.
Then there was the whole handling thing. Not that we were suddenly racing drivers, but you could corner faster and with less lean in most smaller cars, a byproduct of less weight and less overhang. And different design priorities.
Then there was the counterculture / hippie movement causing young people (like me at the time) to question all sorts of things – like “why would I want to drive such a big car?” I don’t care about impressing people, I don’t want my father’s car; I want something different, something distinctly me! Could there been an anti-American feeling due to the unpopularity of the war in Vietnam? There certainly was in Australia, sweeping through high schools at the time.
Then there was the difference in quality between domestics and Japanese imports, which in the early days came standard with many things you’d formerly thought of as luxuries — I remember how taken I was to find radios and heaters standard; often even whitewall tyres. And they didn’t wear out or break down as we were accustomed to. Once experienced, many wouldn’t come back, especially once the Japanese began sending you their larger cars.
It’s often thought that American cars got bigger and bigger through the sixties, but sizes of the Big Three remained reasonably constant aside from Mopar’s ill-considered 1962 debacle. The real upsizing occurred in the late fifties. So the continually-increasing popularity of smaller cars wasn’t just a reaction to size alone.
Doubtless there are more possible explanations behind the effect Norbye noticed. Interesting.
— Peter Wilding
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Peter, good analysis. You’re right that American cars went through a big growth spurt in the late-50s but they saw gradual increases through most of the 1960s and continued to grow even before the advent of 5-mph bumpers in 1973-74. Check out the line graph on the length of standard four-door sedans, 1948-80 here.
Thanks Steve. Wow, I wouldn’t say I ‘sorted out why’ – it’s a bit hard, being Australian, some of my suggestions may be off-base. I was trying to place myself back in that era and think of what could have caused such a rapid jump in popularity as Norbye notes. I guess it’s analogous to the rapid jump in electric cars in our day.
Down here we especially noticed that fifties growth spurt as Ford kept using the ’55-6 body style through ’57 and ’58. The ’59 seemed a huge jump in size, leading to the local nickname of Tank Fairlane for these models. Going by what I saw on the street growing up, the earlier models seemed much more common – but then I’m comparing ’55-8 with ’59-61 (we kept the Tank going for two more years). The others? GM sold the current US model Chevy and Pontiac each year, while Mopar guys got the Chrysler Royal (which looked rather like a ’53-4 Plymouth with ’56 fenders), or the genuine US models fully imported at almost twice the price! We had massive import duties to encourage local manufacture back in those days…
Peter, you underestimate your analytical powers. That was a good summary of a complicated mix of trends. Being an Australian may be an advantage to understanding U.S. auto culture because you have more detachment than the typical American car buff.
The perfect post-W.W.-II low-price level car size, in my opinion, for U.S. highways, were 115-to-116=inch wheelbase. I guess ideal mid-price wheelbase was 120-to-124-inches. Cadillacs, Imperials and Packards: 125-to-127-inches, but even in the 1960s, longer standard-model wheelbases of Cadillacs and Imperials were wastes of resources. Of course, the 1957 Ford Fairlane and Plymouth started the car-size arms race. The ideal size for a low-price American full-size car was the brilliant 1966 Volvo 140-series sedans and wagons. Underpowered for U.S. roads and highways, but think if the 1973 G.M. “A”-bodies had been inspired by the Volvo architecture with Bill Mitchell-led styling !
I believe there is another reason for the slow march towards the smaller car in the post 1955 era. Many new smaller cars were bought by families desiring a second vehicle and realizing they didn’t need 2 large cars, especially when the second car was relegated to local use, while the big car did most of the long-distance driving like vacation trips. As families became used to the advantages of a small car, slowly more & more small cars were sold.
In 1960 my family had 2 cars; a fairly new Olds 98 sedan and a 1955 Buick Century hardtop. As the buick was getting older, dad decided to replace it with another vehicle, and the car he chose was a 1958 Volvo wagon. From that point on, our second cars were always smaller. After the first gas crisis, both our cars were smaller, goodbye to our full-size cars [except for our vintage Packards – dad even bought a 1940 Packard Super 8 limousine in 1975!]