The original Ford Mustang was a major success for the Dearborn automaker, and so was the Mustang’s swanky offspring, the Mercury Cougar. 

When the Mercury Cougar was introduced on September 30, 1966, members of the automotive press reached for a handy trope. This new upmarket pony car, they typed, was “a Mustang in a tuxedo.” Based on the Ford Mustang, the pioneer of the pony car movement, the Cougar boasted a luxury interior, a slightly longer wheelbase, and a more generous list of standard equipment. And in its own way, the Cougar was as successful as its low-priced sibling.

​Ford made no secret of the fact that the Cougar (project name T-7) was, under the skin, essentially the Mustang package with a few critical upgrades. The wheelbase was stretched from 108 inches to 111.2 inches, while the front shock towers were engineered from the start to accommodate the FE series big-block V8.  But in contrast to the Mustang, there was no six-cylinder Cougar; the base engine was a 289 CID V8. The top powerplant choice for the inaugural year was a 390 big-block with a four-barrel Autolite carb and 320 hp, offered as part of the GT performance package. Transmission options included manual three and four-speeds and the trusty Merc-O-Matic, available here with the Select-Shift manual-ish floor shifter.

​With a comfy base-price cushion of nearly $400 over the Mustang ($2,851 vs. $2,461) the Mercury crew was able to build a number of deluxe styling features into the Cougar’s exterior presentation. The upgrades included hidden headlamps, an elegant fine-tooth grille, and elaborate tail lamp assemblies with sequential turn signals, a neat gimmick first seen on the 1965 Thunderbird. Speaking of Thunderbird, more than one observer recognized that the Cougar might be more than simply a pony car. Potentially, it could eat into the T-Bird’s sales at the lower end of the personal luxury category.

​The Cougar’s cabin was equally swank, with premium vinyl fabrics, an upgraded dash, and deep-pile carpeting. And though it wasn’t standard, most were equipped with the snazzy Sports Console between the bucket seats, a $57 extra. Additional extra-cost options included Tilt-Away Steering Wheel ($60.05) and the AM Radio/Stereo-Sonic tape deck setup ($188.50). In mid-’67 the XR-7 package arrived with leather interior trim, an overhead console, and special badging.

With sales of nearly 151,000 units in 1967, the Cougar was not in the same league as the Mustang at more than 472,000 cars produced, but for the Mercury brand it was a smash hit, accounting for nearly half the division’s total volume that year. Motor Trend magazine named the Cougar its 1967 Car of the Year, and other accolades followed. While the first-generation Cougar was discontinued in 1970, Mercury continually rebooted the nameplate over the years, often with products that shared little with the original pony car theme. The final, eighth-generation Cougar of 1999-2002 was a compact three-door coupe with front-wheel drive.

​For fans of Hot Wheels, Speed Racer, and ’60s Chevy’s, David Novelo’s, Bob Huffman-built, 1965 Impala is the equivalent of throwing all your favorite automotive elements in a blender and flipping the switch.

It was holding court indoors at the Grand National Roadster Show and caused quite the commotion.  When I first saw it, I thought it was a 1966 Riviera, but after closer inspection, it was indeed a trusty full-size Chevy. Heavily chopped and re-styled front and rear, it is the realization of a Harry Bradley (of Hot Wheels fame) sketch that Huffman brought to life back in the day. It also has a heavy dose of Mach 5 influence in the front fender peaks as well.

​According to Novelo, “Originally owned by Bob Huffman, the car was re-styled by Tom Chafin, who worked for George Barris at Barris Kustoms in 1967. It was featured in kustom mags beginning in 1969. The car has been lengthened two feet, chopped four inches, and doors “suicided.” Check out the fender flared at the wheelwell to accentuate the body lines. The front grille features a handmade-bar treatment, the rockers have been shaved,  T-tops were added along with rear fender scoops and a frenched-in antenna. The car is still sporting its white Mother of Pearl paintjob from 1979.”

​Like many kustoms, the metamorphosis was ongoing with the car taking many forms and hues. Photo – Kustomrama

The original sketch by Bradley shows how faithful the Huffman and Chafin build was. Photo – Kustomrama

What a treat to see this survivor ’60s kustom and know it’s found a trusted, faithful shepherd in David Novela.  Thanks for showing and sharing this artifact of a long-gone SoCal kustom kulture with the world.

Article courtesy of Rod Authority, written by Dave Cruikshank.

Not all Detroit styling trends are keepers. Here’s one of the shorter-lived design fads in the Motor City, the bustleback period of 1980-87. 

​As styling themes go, the Detroit bustleback look didn’t live long, running less than a decade before it disappeared without a trace. But while it was here, the quirky design swept up all three American luxury brands: Cadillac, Lincoln, and Imperial. Here’s a quick look at each.

​The Detroit bustleback movement has a clear beginning with the 1980 Seville, above. Created by Wayne Kady, chief of the Cadillac styling studio and heavily promoted by General Motors styling vice president Bill Mitchell, the look was inspired by the razor-edge styling of the Hooper-bodied Rolls-Royces of the immediate post-war era. Mitchell made no bones about his regular borrowing from Rolls-Royce. “If you’re going to steal,” he proclaimed, “you rob a bank, not a grocery store.”

The short-trunk theme was employed with only minor changes through 1985 on the dour-door Seville, which then shared its basic platform and front wheel-drive powertrain with the two-door Eldorado. While the distinctive look generated plenty of buzz, it didn’t exactly set the showrooms ablaze. Sales languished at 20,000 to 40,000 units annually through the six-year production run.

​Chrysler followed Cadillac into the bustleback craze for 1981 with the ’81-’83 Imperial, based on the J-body Cordoba platform and available only as a two-door coupe (above). A 318 CID V8 with electronic fuel injection was the sole engine on the order form, but a number of appearance packages were offered, including a Frank Sinatra edition. Sales were lackluster at around 17,000 total for all three years.

Ford’s Lincoln division was the third and last to enter the bustleback club in 1982, and it hung on the longest, employing the gimmick on the four-door Lincoln Continental through the 1987 model year. The Lincoln take on the theme included the division’s signature faux spare tire bump, below. Under the crisply folded sheet metal, the seventh-generation Continental was a stretched Thunderbird.

While the Detroit bustleback look was short-lived, it did serve one useful function: The sawed-off decks allowed automakers to shrink the footprints of their aging and bulky luxury platforms. As each of the three Detroit bustlebacks were retired from the market, they were replaced with smaller, transverse-front-drive vehicles.

More than once, Chevrolet designers have toyed with the idea of a four/five-place Corvette. One of them even joined the GM Motorama show car fleet for a time—the 1956 Corvette Impala. 

Work began on the five-place Corvette project, known internally at GM as XP-101, in July of 1955, and the Impala made its first public appearance in the General Motors Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on January 19, 1956. GM stylists Carl Renner and Bob Cadaret included key elements of the two-seater production Corvette in the Impala’s look, including the large, Italianate radiator opening in the front, filled with a chrome grille bar with 13 sparkling teeth. (Production 1953-1957 Corvettes used the same number of teeth, coincidentally.) Discrete badging on the front header panel and rear deck indicated that despite the rear seat, the Impala was indeed a Corvette.

​The body—fiberglass, naturally, with a brushed stainless roof panel—rode on a conventional Chevy sedan chassis with 116.5-inch wheelbase, with short-long arm independent front suspension and a live axle with leaf springs at the rear. A Corvette 265 CID V8 equipped with two-four-barrel carbs, rated at 225 hp, was coupled to a Powerglide two-speed automatic gearbox, with the exhaust pipes snaked through the driveshaft tunnel. It was all fairly standard underneath, although real wire wheels with knock-off hubs supplied some sports car flavor. One area where the Corvette Impala broke new ground was in its innovative styling and interior.

​A folding armrest allowed occasional three-abreast seating in the front, with room for two more passengers in the coupe’s rear seat. The dramatic Interior fabrics included blue vinyl seat covers with a contrasting silver cloth in a heavy crossweave pattern. Instruments and controls were concentrated in a module directly in front of the driver, with an unusual speedometer that featured a horizontal array of sequential lamps that lit up in progressively brighter red as vehicle speed increased.

​Originally finished in metallic turquoise, the Impala was repainted in medium metallic blue for the 1957 Motorama show season, and it made its debut in the new color at the Chicago Auto Show that year. While the Impala was said to be fully roadworthy, unlike many GM show cars, it was reportedly scrapped at some point after the ’57 show season, unfortunately.

As we know, there would never be a production Corvette with a rear seat, though there were a few more experiments. However, two of the show car’s features did find their way into Chevrolet showrooms in 1958: the novel reverse-angle C pillar and the Impala nameplate, which is used on Chevrolet passenger cars to the current day.

​When we think of convertible-top body styles today, we generally think of two-door convertible coupes and roadsters. But in the Classic Era of the American automobile (the years 1925 through 1948, approximately, according to our friends at the Classic Car Club of America) there was another popular style, the convertible sedan—that is, a convertible with four doors.

Costly to manufacture and elegantly detailed, convertible sedans were typically regarded as the top of the line in the Motor City’s sales catalogs. But as times changed and tastes evolved, the body style gradually disappeared and by the 1960s, only Lincoln offered a four-door convertible among U.S. manufacturers. We don’t know this for certain, but we like to think that Bill Mitchell and his staff at the General Motors styling studios were thinking of the classic convertible sedans of days gone by when they conceived the Caribe, a four-door convertible dream car based on the Chevrolet Impala.

​Green-lighted in late 1964 by the corporate brass, the Caribe (internal designation XP-834) was based on an Impala four-door sedan with 396 CID V8 and Turbo-Hydramatic transmission. The roof panel was surgically removed, a convertible windshield and A-pillar assembly were installed, and the cowl, rockers, and door posts were reinforced to stiffen the body structure as required. On paper at least, a folding convertible mechanism was nestled under the form-fitting top boot, but we don’t know if it was installed or functional.

The interior featured color-matched upholstery materials with elaborately filigreed trimming and a hybrid bench-bucket front seat arrangement that would be marketed by Chevrolet as the Strato-back option. At some point, the exterior sheet metal was updated from 1965 to 1966 spec, but reportedly, the Caribe never made it onto the show car circuit as planned and the sole example was scrapped. The name was then recycled for use on the 1968 Camaro Caribe concept, an El Camino-esque roadster pickup.     
Photos courtesy of General Motors, article courtesy of Mac’s Motor City Garage.