(first posted 5/29/2015) Back in October of 2013, I posted “The El Caminos of Los Angeles.” That article included 20 different El Caminos photographed over a two week span, demonstrating that the streets of LA were littered with these American utes. However, the article also noted I didn’t find any of the original Elkys, built in ’59 & ’60. Eighteen months later, I’ve finally found one on the streets of Long Beach, and gathered enough pics to justify a full write up.
Chevy brought out the El Camino in response to Ford’s Ranchero, a model Ford first offered in 1957. In 1959, both Ford and Chevy offered these “pickups” with their full sized station wagons providing the platform. Given the exuberant styling of the time, the utilitarian aspects of these vehicles were overshadowed by the deeply drawn sheet metal panels draped around the pickup box. Thanks to the Chevie’s “batwing” styling, it may be the most impractical pickup body ever built.
In another posting, Paul reviewed the ’59 El Camino using the perspective of his younger self. That may be the best approach to understand these trucks. This Jet Age styling may have made sense to a youth growing up in the sixties, but since it came out two years before I was born, I lack the ability to relate.
I will say this- Sighting down the side of a ’59 El Camino, you’ll never mistake it for any other vehicle. I’m no fan, but at the same time, I’m delighted it exists. The thing is so damn single minded in it’s pursuit of style strictly for the sake of style. Looking at my Miata parked in the Camino’s gun sights, I marvel that the world has room for two vehicles so diverse in design and purpose, yet both are (essentially) a two person transportation device.
In case you haven’t picked up on it, for me the styling overwhelms all other aspects of this truck. The ’59 Chevy was the second year of the X-Frame, quad headlights, and the big block 348, but I see no reason to discuss these details. Whether you take in the ’59’s shape from a distance, or step in close, you’ll find a detail or curve you missed on the initial viewing.
In this shot, I’m fascinated by the crudeness of these tail lights. I’m not talking about the dents in the trim, but rather the way the assembly appears to be slapped up against the sheet metal, and then mounted to the car using exposed screws. I had higher expectations from GM- It seems to me their tail lights of thar era typically interlocked with the sheetmetal, and tucked the mounting hardware into the nooks and crannys of the tail light lenses.
I’m also amazed by this fuel door. The way it tucks under the wing, and curves to match the fender further emphasizes the outrageous styling . When it’s all said and done, nothing about this vehicle fits the phrases “truck” or “utility.”
Our final look at the ’59 takes in all the gingerbread mounted to the front clip. The dual spears mounted to the fender tops, dual grilles flanking the turn signals, and a main grille missing several chrome caps all emphasize the excesses of the time.
Throughout this article, I’ve tried to avoid using the words like “ugly” and “gross,” but perhaps it is time to concede the obvious- There’s no real upside to the ’59 Chevy styling, and turning it into a pickup takes it from absurd to completely gruesome. I’m sure there are those who will disagree with me, but this truck is just fugly.
I also found these shots of an 1960 El Camino in my files, taken by Robert Kim some time ago. He knew I was looking for a first generation El Camino, and was kind enough to share them with me. Overall, I think the 1960 styling is an improvement. Up front, the grille is cleaner, with fewer disparate elements and less useless gingerbread.
The back loses most of the scallop defining the batwing, and better incorporates the tail lights into the back panel. It’s still an impractical body with a relatively useless bed, but it’s moving in the right direction.
I did not intend to cover the history of the El Camino today, but it’s worth noting that these full sized Chevy utes only lasted for two model years. Styling may not be the only factor in their failure (For example, Ford brought out their smaller, Falcon based Ranchero in 1960), but they did not live long in the market. The improved looks in 1960 did not sway the buying public, and sales came in even weaker than in ’59, leading to a brief hiatus of the El Camino nameplate.
Chevy resurrected it in 1964, using the mid size Chevelle platform. The ’64 El Camino arrived with sheet metal better suited to a pickup box, along with a more practical size. While I’m hard pressed to call this similar ’65 beautiful, I would call it well proportioned and practical, phrases you’ll never hear in reference to it’s ancestor from 1959. The public agreed, buying enough trucks to maintain the line for over twenty years.
Gonna disagree right away, I think the first generation El Camino’s are the best looking by far precisely because they are so impractically and outrageously styled, but I daily drive a Ranchero, so I’m clearly biased towards all things ute…
As someone from Australia, The home of the car based ute.
The American automobile doesn’t get much better than this .
Of course it does , but I just love these.
I don’t know what the exact measurements are, but the 59 Chevy always struck me as a half size bigger than the 59 Ford…must be those fenders.
Too bad Ford didn’t keep the Ranchero as a full-sizer for 1960, then there would have been 2 “bat wing” choices. But Ford, ever a step ahead, down sized (right sized?) the Ranchero until they realized Chevy had it right with the intermediate El Camino.
Finally, I don’t care for the 59 AND 60 Chevy, any model, they looked “odd” when new and haven’t improved with time.
I’ll take a 70 or 71 El Camino (preferably with a big block engine) or a 78 with all the options.
At Ford? A 66 or 72 Ranchero with a V8 and buckets….I’m not as picky about my Fords (except for the year).
“it may be the most impractical pickup body ever built.”
I don’t know; I see a perfect place (top of “batwings”) to set your beverage while you load your couple of cubic feet of cargo.
Nice find. I don’t even see these at car shows.
You mean like this? This shot is from my ’59 Elky CC: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-1959-chevrolet-el-camino-i-have-seen-many-strange-and-amazing-things-in-america/
More dissent. I love the 59 El Camino. There’s at least one in town and it looks like something from another world amid the anonymous clutter that is today’s traffic. It’s entirely fit for purpose as light duty pick-up, with its unrivalled style as a bonus. No ugly here at all.
Me too, I think the ’59 El Camino is awesome. It is imposing and it just has that “look” of a car with an attitude!
These are like a gruesome traffic accident. I am repulsed, yet cannot look away. I will say, though, that there is something infinitely fascinating with a highly complex design like this one. So much to look at.
Excellent find! I think I had a Tootsietoy version when I was a little kid, so maybe I built up a little immunity to it’s strangeness. But it has worn off.
And is there no Chevrolet that can escape the ubiquitous Rally wheels?
Nice to see GM USA took up the cudgel after GMH dropped Chev utes from their lineup in the early 50s and concentrated on Holden and Vauxhall utes.
The ’59 El Caminos look awesome. This is not elegant design in the traditional sense, but garish, loud, over-the-top kind – and somehow it works. If anything, the front end design should be even more wild and crazy to match the batwing rear end.
That is precisely why the ’59 is great and the 60′ not so much, it was basically the same but watered down. If you go crazy, go all the way.
I must say though, that this particular ’59 looks rather unattractive with this horrible paint. Yesterday in the article on flat black paint finishes, I opined that flat black looks good on some cars. Well, on some cars it does not and the ’59 El Camino is a good (bad?) example. It’s irrelevant if this is intentional on this particular example or just natural weathering of the paint coat.
These cars look good wih some nice paint (and not black!) gloss finish, and good chrome parts.
There’s a lowridered ’60 in my neighborhood. Has a nice old V8 rumble. Around the other sides of the same block are a ’61 Chev panel truck and a ’69 pickup. Not especially unusual in Spokane.
I’d quibble with the notion that ’59-60 Chev cars were not utilitarian. Even though they handled like deflated blimps, they could pretty much go anywhere and take anything. As an idiot teenager I tried VERY hard to ruin my ’59 Biscayne stripper, and never succeeded.
When it’s all said and done, nothing about this vehicle fits the phrases “truck” or “utility.”
Yes, and everything about the design of the contemporary pick-up truck screams “truck” and “utility” but they have poor aerodynamics, unnecessarily long hoods, beds that require ladder access, and are behemoths that are difficult to park and get in and out of.
Good design requires sense and restraint.
I think the dropping of the El Camino after 1960 wasn’t so much due to poor sales as it was the discontinuation of the two-door wagon that it had some commonality with.
Certainly a factor, but the drop in sales was significant:
’59- 22,246
’60- 14.163
I’d also note that the later El Caminos continued on even though Chevy dropped the mid sized two door wagons. Once the body dies are built, the costs have been expended, so that does not enter into the equation. Also, the manufacturer can always change the front clip while carrying forward the rest of the body, as in the ’58 Ford Ranchero (see image).
Well, the ’64 El Camino reappeared in part specifically because it shared much of its body with the ’64 2-door Chevelle wagon, in order to reduce tooling cost. But sales this time were better, and improved steadily, so that by the new 1968, the Elky had no 2-door wagon counterpart anymore, as well as subsequent generations.
True, but the second gen El Camino also carried forward into ’66 and ’67, even though the two door wagon body was dropped, so two door ute production can continue on without any two door wagons in production.
I have never understood why they didn’t try a Nomad SS on the two door wagon body. The only additional cost would have been the Nomad nameplate, they could have just used everything else from the Malibu SS. The two door wagon with that slanting pillar looked kind of like a Nomad and I think Nomads were hip by that point already.
The ’60 El Camino looks like the ’59 Marilyn Monroe model wrapped up in an army blanket.
The 64 in the picture is a 65. Almost the same except for minor details on the front grille/fenders and tail/backup lights.
Still much cleaner than the 59. The 1st gen ElCos never did it for me but I’m biased because my first car was a 64 El Camino.
I can agree about the front end of the 59 being ugly, far worse than the 60, but I have always liked the back of any 59 Chevy. The bat wings are huge and outrageous, yes, but they’re also fairly clean and simple as huge wings go. In a way they’re closer to Ford’s early/mid 60s afterbuner taillights than they are to, say, the fins on a 59 Caddy.
What really blows me away is just how much styling changed in four years from 60 to 64. From rocketship baroque to simple and clean. And there really wan’t a transition period.
Yes. The 1961 models all were squared-off, trim, rectilinear, connected with what we think of as the 1960s, even though they had to have had their designs finalized probably two years before. When the sixties arrived, GM had the cars. (Actually, Ford did a pretty good job at being ready, too. Chrysler? Not so much.) I’m guessing that the ’61 models were the first fully under Bill Mitchell’s control.
It looks like a sculpture on wheels.
IMO the best looking of the type was the 57 Ranchero. That’s probably because I was 14 years old and in farm (pickup) country when it came out.
Growing up, we briefly had a 59 Ranchero, so I paid little attention to El Caminos. I can’t say that I am a fan of the 59 Chevy, but as the author said, I am glad that it exists.
I have only owned one El Camino, a well worn 1970. It was tough and reliable, and with a few faults corrected (broken AC and drum brakes) it would have been damn near perfect.
Just last night I was beside a final generation El Camino and lamenting its passing. I always wanted one of the last ones but it wasn’t in the cards. Like my Astro cargo van, so useful but no longer made. *sigh*
Those weird tail lights also inspired the back end of a bus:
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mZMATnvFfV8/0.jpg
..which CC has covered before:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/the-amazing-maltese-bread-van/
There are so many things that are just so over-the-top about GM’s ’59 models; they all got tamed a bit for 1960. For me, the 1959 Chevy was perhaps the best-looking of the lot, batwing rear fenders and all. That ’59 El Camino is really a breathtaking vision, especially if you ever get to see one with good paint and intact brightwork. Then you don’t notice the exposed screwheads so much. That single chrome spear going all the way from front to rear was an inspired touch, and it was just enough. The batwings? I’ll take them over Cadillac’s outrageous fins that year. Now, that smallish bed could be a drawback if one needs full-sized pickup capacity. But this way one got a car, not a truck, and I’ll bet it didn’t ride or drive like a truck of that time, and some cargo space for things that you wouldn’t want to try to put into a station wagon.
The author seems to be too young to appreciate what a very big deal space was at the time. You had to be there to understand how Sputnik was a very rude awakening. Then go through a sort of space gap with your rockets blowing up on the launch pad. We finally get our first successful satellite launch in Explorer I in 1958.
These were heady times what with everything in aerospace, the Cold War and nuclear weapons. Eisenhower, Nixon, JFK, Castro and Khrushchev. I remember the duck and cover drills in elementary school. I remember the nights spent outside with binoculars waiting to spot Echo 1 go overhead in the night sky. I remember JFK telling us we are going to the moon.I was into everything that dealt with space and speed.
So living that one can see how the end of the 50’s and start of the 60’s influenced design. Some fear mixed with great possibilities.The same can be said of the end of the 60’s and the start of the 70’s due to Vietnam, Women’s Lib, the beginnings of Earth Day, the oil embargo, with the culmination of Watergate in 74. Exhaustion mixed with some depression and just wanting to get the hell away.
Well put .
Thank you .
After 50 years , I have decided I too loved the over the top styling of the ’59’s , I don’t expect I’ll go buy one but they’re weird & wonderful .
_Sputnik_ ! who else remembers what a HUGE deal that was ? .
-Nate
Even in Australia we were awed by the space race and all things American. The ’59 Chevy was one of the first cars I learnt to recognise – probably because it was the polar opposite of Dad’s series II Morris Oxford!
I’m of the opinion that, if the author was born two years after these cars came out, he is precisely the right age to *not* appreciate them very much. They were always old, clapped-out cars that probably looked extraordinarily dated in an era of constant styling change.
To me, who came along much later when these were already classics, I just *love* the rear styling of the ’59. The wild shaped lamps…the bat wings…the heavily sculptured fenders. It’s just so audacious, yet with a certain grace to the curves. Kind of like a pin-up girl wearing cat eye glasses. The front? Ehh, not so much…the upper grilles always looked a little peculiar. But I could stare at one in rear 3/4 view all day.
I’m not sure my age is a factor- I love the ’58 Impala (coupe) even though it also pegs the outrageous meter.
Who said that bed isn’t practical? A local bar has found a use for one as their buffet.
Probably my favorite El Camino.
I like the “squinting” taillights of the ’59 Chevys. It’s almost they’re mocking you and daring you to follow too closely. That said, I like the wild, cosmic styling of this ’59 Elky, which is the perfect complement to the concurrent, mid-century modern / “Googie” architecture of the era.
I agree vehicles like this have to be viewed in context with the social climate they were created in. I am a big fan of the ’59, especially black with a red interior. +1 Googie reference and the space race.
You could always tell a ’59 Chev was driving towards you at night, the headlights had to be the lowest available.
Biggest improvement to the ’60 imo is the crease from the vestigial batwing being carried forward all the way to the front fender. The ’59’s crease on the front fenders that just kind of ends and different one in back that starts just behind the front doors looks disjointed and all too loudly announces the rushed development and need to use one set of front door skins for all divisions.
Kid in my California high school drove a bright red 59 Elky in the mid 80’s. Loved them ever since, precisely for their extreme styling. So out there I have to love them. Want one bad!
Dinky Toy of a 1960 that I molested with a “schoolboy paintjob” several decades ago. It was originally pale blue. I keep it around because it’s too nasty to sell on Ebay.
I’m thinking 1959 wasn’t the most fortuitous year for Chevy to make a ute: you could get away with all that batwing and Atom Age stuff on a passenger car — preferably the dee-luxe editions with lotsa chrome crapola all over the place. But on a vehicle that’s ostensibly a truck (or at least a “truck”), with the greater expectations of practicality that a truck brings, only emphasizes how fanciful, purposeless, and generally non-utilitarian that model year’s styling really was. It’s a shame the Camino concept couldn’t have struck a few years earlier: a pickup based on a Tri-5 two-door and/or the Nomad wagon, could’ve been totally killer. They might even have sold pretty well.
Turns out a few Tri-5 Camino conversions have been done.
Judging by the window opening, your example was built using 150 or 210 2 door Handyman wagon, rather then the sleeker Nomad wagon.
Makes sense. Values being what they are, no one is going to cut up a Nomad today! So unless it’s a conversion from the 60’s or 70’s, Handyman is going to be the ticket.
I have never been a fan of El Caminos or 59 Chevies, but a 59 Elky… I want one!!
It almost seems that the die makers dared the stylists to come up with a shape they couldn’t stamp. I would love to know how many pieces it took to make the rear end on this model.
It’s worth remembering that the ’59 Ranchero wasn’t the most normal looking automobile, either.
Alongside the Chevy (or Plymouth for that matter), the Ford was a monument to understated good taste!
With apologies to non-batwing fans (I just thought it a cool photo I didn’t remember from childhood days):
One more (this is the ubiquitous fall-1958 debut ad):
Keep ’em coming, Sally!
Okay, Old Pete–one more batwing (Foster & Kleiser Billboard):
What the heck–one last one before the thread goes into hibernation:
Oh no Sally ~
keep ’em coming please ! .
-Nate
Okay, okay–if you haven’t seen it (YouTube), a nice 4-min. montage of ’59 assembly line shots done by LIFE magazine (nary an Elky, however). It’ll give Barko a look at the various stampings coming together:
My Dad bought an old 59 El Camino sometime in the late 60’s The bed was so shallow that when he placed a large unsecured box in the bed it slid to the rear and was launched over the edge into the street. This one had the three speed shift moved to the floor, the first I’d ever driven. Man did that 283 sound sweet through those dual glasspacks.
My take on a ’57 El Camino, bult using the ancient Monogram kit. Too badly proportioned to build it stock so it got kit bashed.
Always loved these. Here’s a model ’59 I built.
The ’59 Chevy is an oddball-looking style that looks like the result of a designer gone loco. However, it can be appreciated as a unique time in American automotive history, which was the case in much of the ’57-’59 model years…fins and chrome galore.
Thanx for sharing the pictures of models ! .
I used to build them too but never saved any .
-Nate
Even in 1959, people were poking fun at the Chevy’s over-the-top design. I especially like this one.
Yeah, Chevy got weird with the 57 and did not return to normal until 61…they almost achieved normalcy in 58 though.
My opinion only. I know lots of my own relatives are diehard chevy lovers of the 56 through 60 vintage and consider the 61 to be a slide into mediocrity…in terms of styling.
Remember that these were the reaction to the 1957 Chrysler vehicles that totally surprised GM’s stylists. Harley Earl was eased into retirement and Bill Mitchell was told to come up with GM’s own “spaceships”. Look at the difference between the 1958 GM cars and the 1959 versions. Ford was caught napping and their 1959 models were rehashes of the 1958 cars. Ford had the last laugh though. The 1959 Ford out sold the 1959 Chevrolet by a substantial amount. By 1960, Ford had it’s own spaceship, and things went back to normal saleswise.
Don’t knock the Falcon Ranchero. I’ve seen it haul away a 5000 lb. Lincoln, almost 500 lbs. in gold bars and whatever Mr. Solo weighed.
Lucinda Williams:
“We used to drive from Lafayette to Baton Rouge,
In a yellow El Camino, listening to Howlin’ Wolf ….”
First time I remember seeing a ’59 ‘Camino was when I was visiting central California. It was parked down the street from where I was staying, on the way to the store. This would be around ’68–’70.
I walked around it in amazement. I couldn’t believe that a “California Custom” could be so detailed, so intricate. I knew that custom vehicles existed, I’d seen Hot Rod magazine. Dear Old Dad had sent me a few.
Only later did I figure out that it wasn’t a “California Custom”. It was a production vehicle.
I’ve had a soft spot in my head for El Caminos ever since. Mine is a ’68.
The second picture gives a great perspective, makes me think that the car would look pretty cool operating in the other direction, with the engine in the rear, cargo area in the front.