(EXPANDED FROM 1/21/2022)
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).
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.
Also see ‘1965-68 GM big cars: The end of different strokes’
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 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 see 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.
Also see ‘What’s Collectible Automobile’s beef with the 1978-80 Pontiac Grand Prix?’
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?
This brings us back to the question we asked at the beginning of this article: Whether the introduction of smaller cars helped GM’s premium-priced brands or merely cannibalized the sales of big cars.
The data shown so far doesn’t help us much in answering that question, 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.
Also see ‘Lee Iacocca got lucky with the 1964-66 Ford Mustang’
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 suspect that withholding from both of them smaller cars would have been a mistake given the direction of the market. However, keeping one of them narrowly focused on big cars could have helped to reduce the over-fragmentation of GM’s lineup. So which brand?
What if Oldsmobile stuck to 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.
Also see ‘1966 Oldsmobile Toronado: Just another shiny thing from General Motors’
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 — 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.
The biggest downside of Oldsmobile not getting smaller cars in the 1960s would have been that this merely delayed the inevitable. This assumes that the division would not have gained higher-level support for “leaning” its full-sized cars well before GM finally did in 1977.
Of course, GM management could have instead refused to give a Y-body variant to Buick. I suspect that this would not have turned out as well, simply because that brand had grown so weak by the late-50s. Unless sales bounced back dramatically in 1961-62, the pressure to give Buick A-body models in 1964 could have been overwhelming.
I grant you that this article has been quite the nerdfest. But at least we now have some numbers to ground the discussion about whether Sloanism could have kept GM from going overboard with product proliferation in the 1960s and 1970s.
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on Jan. 21, 2022 and expanded on Dec. 1, 2023. 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.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcaradvertising.com: Oldsmobile (1962)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Buick (1955, 1961, 1969); 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 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 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.