The T-Bird was for taking your suitably impressed friends to the supper club for steaks after enjoying Mai Tais in the Polynesian-themed rec room of your new rancher. That first taste of the personal-luxury market was juicy, and Ford was hooked, leaving the marginal sports-car market for Chevy to pursue.īut if the Thunderbird really was going to inspire the soaring aspiration of late-’50s suburban optimism, it needed to be a social vehicle–in other words, a four-seater. Nevertheless, it outsold the ‘Vette, and by a huge margin. Its’55-‘57 two-seat incarnation did convey a sporty image, but it was all pretense, and the antecedent to the long line of Mercedes SL soft-roadsters and such. The Thunderbird was born in response to other manufacturers’ sports cars, chiefly the 1953 Corvette. The industry has never been the same think Mustang. These cars, like their respective buyers, are polar opposites–yin/yang, right brain/left brain, thrifty/exuberant, grounded/aspiring–that foreshadowed the complete fragmentation of a modern marketplace once dominated by full-sized cars. Each car carved out a significant new segment in the mainstream market, albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum. If we identified the two most revolutionary vehicles of the fifties, the list would undoubtedly comprise the T-Bird and the VW Beetle.
After it crashed, its wings were tacked onto a blinged-out Torino, and so died a piece of the American dream. Perhaps, like Icarus, it tried to fly too high, or maybe the dream changed, because it soon fell back to Earth. For a dozen or so years the Thunderbird soared, revolutionizing the industry by creating an entirely new genre: The attainable personal-luxury car. If Ol’ Henry could fulfill his once-unattainable dream of putting every American on wheels, then surely Hank II and his Whiz Kids could fit them with wings. Suddenly, luxury and exclusivity were no longer in the realm of a privileged few, but within the grasp of every hard-working dreamer after all, the T-Bird was a Ford. It literally embodied the dream that everyday folks could soar above the humdrum of a dull workaday existence and dowdy sedans. As a kid, I could never tell them apart anyway. I hope such dissonance won’t upset the purists here.īehold the mythical winged dream machine: The 1958 Thunderbird. NB: The car pictured here is a 1959 Thunderbird, but my article is about its near-identical 1958 predecessor due to its historical significance.
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