(Maybe my favorite fins of all time on the 1959 Caddie El Dorado with space-alien brake lights. Nothing says “America will land on the Moon!” better than these).
Detroit’s infatuation with the tailfin is directly attributable to the War. I don’t have to get any more detailed than this- Dad did two renderings of possible futures, long ago.
The first is a strange mono-rail vehicle, with two helmeted riders. I am not sure what sort of piloting the figure on the right was doing to control the car, but you can see the inspiration in the two jets arcing up in the night sky above, and the design features they share:
Dad did another one, too, that is literally all fin. This one is going to be on the trophy awarded to the winner of the American Motors Owners Association show out at the Grissom Air Museum this August:
(Dad’s double rail vehicle- he told both me and my brother Spike that we were the little guy to his right).
The mania about tailfins probably started with Harley Earl over at GM with the 1948 Caddilac. Earl credited the idea to the one species of war machine that was pretty elegant: the fighter aircraft. His favorite is one of mine as well, the famed “Der Gabelschwanz Teufel,” or fork tailed devil, as known to the Luftwaffe pilots who had to fight it: the Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
Harley Earl’s 1948 Caddy design spread rapidly across the golden age of American cruisers. A decade later the tide had surge to produce the fins on the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, which were the largest and most outrageous ever fitted on a production car, before or since.
The tail fin craze peaked between 1957 and 1960, the year JFK was elected to replace Supreme Allied Commander Ike, and the world was about to become a very different place indeed.
Sputnik, the Missile Gap and the Space Race were upon us. JFK walked to the inauguration without a Homburg atop his carefree haircut. It as the end of something, and the beginning of something futuristic and a little edgy. The public was receptive to designs that evoked the sense of the new jet fighters and rockets.
There were those who claimed that the fins were functional, and one of the Big Three even claimed that they served to increase pressure on the rear of the vehicle and improved steering up to 20% in cross winds.
We all know that was BS, but hey, you sell sizzle, not steak, right?
Those fins were too much for many customers, however, and the size and dramatic presence shrank after JFK was elected. Look at the fins on the car in which he was shot: the 1961 Presidential Limo clearly has fins, but they are not the sort of wild excess of the 1959 El Dorado. More dignified, some how, for a world that was in the process of losing its dignity altogether.
By the mid 1960s, the fins were gone on many models, though Vestigial remnants stayed on American cars into the 1980s, including the first generation Lincoln Town Car, a personal favorite. The Town Car was based on the Panther platform. Introduced in late 1978 for the 1979 model year. The panther was updated regularly over the next 33 years of production, and was the absolute apex of rear-wheel drive full-sized sedan, used by taxi companies and cops and cars for hire and suburbanites of a certain age. 2011 marked the end of the traditional body-on-frame rear wheel drive automobile in the United States. Oh well, easy come, easy go.
That is why I plan to hang onto my P-71 Crown Vic Police Cruiser. The Panzer frame was the last of the rear drive sedans, and with its passing, ends a chapter in the history of the American motor car.
But in the meantime, it is fun to look back at the fins. I could run a hundred pictures and probably not get to your favorites, but these are a couple of mine:
(1957 Plymouth Belvedere)
(1959 Buick convertible)
(2014 Prada. Nothing exceeds like excess, I always say, and hey, the Devil wears them, so why not?)
We will be back tomorrow with Mad Men who stuff the biggest engines into the smallest cars.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303 #carpeople