Look at how much trunk is still sticking out behind the end of the roofline.īuick took the 1968 A-Body coupes a bit further towards a true fastback, but it’s still far from what the Charger and Marlin were trying to do.
like this Buick Wildcat, have a long, flowing roof, and are often called “fastbacks”, but they’re not, really. How? By not trying to turn such a long car into a true fastback. Not surprisingly, Bill Mitchell’s GM studios handled the problem much more deftly than the rest. And of course, they were much lower too, exacerbating the challenge of turning them into fastbacks. Trunks were now as long as the hoods, if not more so. The classic long-hood, setback passenger compartment and short trunk was tossed aside. The trunks of cars in the sixties and seventies were absurdly long, and it changed the whole relationship of the passenger compartment to the overall car. And therein lies the problem with the second big fastback revival of the mid sixties: the cars’ basic shape just didn’t lend themselves to fastbacks.
It was a fad, essentially, harking back to the golden streamliner era of the thirties and the Tatras that ushered it in.īut the whole direction of car shape was changing: lower, longer, and most of all, much longer trunks. GM embraced fastbacks in a big way during the 1941 – 1951 period, but they soon gave way to the more popular trunked sedans and coupes. The 1950 is the successor to the 1948 Buick Special we examined a while back. Let’s savor this Buick and compare it to a few other big fastbacks to determine what works and what doesn’t, and why. And what pops up at the CC Cohort this morning, but one of my favorite fastbacks ever, a 1950 Buick, shot by Charkle the 2nd (I should know who that is in CC-speak by now). ( first posted ) Perfect timing: I was just about to write a piece on the challenges of the full-sized fastback, and how certain later ones in the sixties just didn’t work, like the ’66-’67 Dodge Charger and the Rambler Marlin.
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