Fifty years ago, things were very different for the now-beleaguered Ford Motor Company. Ford’s 1957 lineup was all new for the first time in five years. The 21 models included a restyled Thunderbird sports car, a new generation of F-100 pickups, the car-based Ranchero pickup and the Fairlane 500 Skyliner — the first American convertible with a retractable hardtop. Sales were way up — so much that Ford outsold Chevrolet for the first time since 1935.
Together, Ford and Chevrolet accounted for fully half of American car production.
The public viewed the Chevys and their General Motors siblings as somewhat dowdy compared with competing 1957 cars. Critics derided the G.M. designs as passé because they were essentially makeovers of the 1955-56 models, with high rooflines, voluptuous fenders, short wheelbases and stubby overall lengths — the shoebox look favored by G.M.’s styling czar, Harley J. Earl.
The future had already arrived at Chrysler. “Suddenly it’s 1960!” declared ads for Plymouth, which displaced Buick as America’s third-best-selling line of cars. New models advertised in Chrysler’s Forward Look campaign that were designed by Virgil Exner, the automaker’s chief designer, were trumpeted as “three years ahead of their time.” They essentially were.
Chrysler’s president, Tex Colbert, was smarting from poor sales of the company’s 1956 lineup when he came across the futuristic advance designs for 1959 and ’60 models that Exner was working on. Eager for a fresh start, Colbert reportedly told Exner, “Let’s build those” for 1957. The ’57 models that had been in the works were scrapped.
The 1957 Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto and Chrysler models trumped everything else on the market. For starters, they were five inches lower than the previous year’s models. They were also wider. Advertising claims (“longer, lower, wider”) notwithstanding, they weren’t really longer than the ’56s, but the sleek models looked as if they were. Credit the fins. Exner’s ’57 designs featured massive steel wings that seemed ready to propel these two-ton creations into the stratosphere. But of greater importance were landmark mechanical innovations like torsion-bar front suspensions, highly reliable three-speed Torqueflite automatic transmissions and Hemi V-8 engines that were power-rich yet fairly economical.
“But the real feature of Chrysler’s ’57 cars was that these cars embodied the future, an optimistic, Eisenhower-prosperity future where people wanted to go, and go quickly,” Jeffrey I. Godshall, a Chrysler designer, author and automotive historian, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Forward Look cars indeed looked forward to a futuristic Jetsons’ world of high technology and increased leisure time. The perfect world Americans felt entitled to.”
And what was speeding them to that idyllic Tomorrowland? Vehicles like the Chrysler 300C, with its 375-horsepower, 392-cubic-inch Hemi, the industry’s most powerful engine at the time. (Horsepower was calculated more liberally back then.)
By comparison, Ford’s 312-cubic-inch V-8 made only 245 horsepower, although an optional supercharged version produced 300. The small-block Chevrolet V-8 had its displacement increased to 283 cubic inches, but base horsepower was just 185. However, for the first time on an American production car, fuel injection was offered. That helped to raise horsepower to 283 — the first time an American manufacturer had been able to achieve one horsepower for each cubic inch of displacement, the company said.
But the fuel injection system was touchy, and dealers didn’t know how to work on it. Many dealers replaced the system with a carburetor. The supercharged Ford 312 was gone after just one year.