(first posted 6/13/2018) Each of us who contributes to the curbside cornucopia here seems to have a specialty. For example, Jason Shafer finds lots of unusual prewar stuff and Jim Grey finds a better than average sample of pickup trucks. Brendan Saur kills it with 80’s and 90’s sports sedans and Paul Niedermeyer brings us a ton of cars missing their driver’s side interior door panels. Me? I seem to be developing the ability to track and capture classic Pontiac GTOs. I have written up all three that have been featured on these pages (thus far) and have pictures of one or two others in my stash of cars awaiting some time and attention.
After a while you run out of things to say about a given car, even one as iconic as the GTO. We have covered whether one with a column shift and no console was original, gloried in a fabulous all-original GTO Judge and recalled the memories of a childhood that, from a tender age, was awash with GTOs. But there is one bit of unexplored territory that called to me on this example: its brilliant silver paint.
Have we ever done a CC that centered on a car’s paint color? If not, let’s give it a whirl. It is true that silver could be a tough one to start with. Isn’t silver paint on a car the one thing that makes it fade more anonymously into the automotive landscape than anything else? Today, yes – and this has been true for a long time. I, however, have a few gray (silver, even) hairs and remember when this was not so.
Car colors have always caught my attention. I have taken some of those internet tests (the ones that were probably harvesting all of my personal data) and I ranked in a very high percentile for color perception – particularly among men, who often don’t score so well on that metric. Even now I can look at a car that was common from my youth and tell you if it is painted one of the colors originally offered or if someone has strayed from the factory selections in choosing the color for a repaint or restoration.
This car is a perfect example. I saw it while leaving a restaurant with some friends. I was, of course, asked what year it was. I agonized for a second between 1968 and 1969. Someone more up on his GTO ABCs would have let that rear side marker light make the ID, but not me. I let that silver paint break the tie: it had to be a ’69.
Make this a Catalina instead of a Ventura and this brochure illustration pretty much pictured Grandma’s ’69. Other than a terribly unfaithful approximation of the paint color.
The first person I ever knew with a silver car was my Grandma. The first two of her cars that I remember were a pink and white ’55 DeSoto sedan and a beige ’64 Pontiac Catalina – quite the contrast, I know. By 1969 the beige Pontiac needed a little work done, but Grandma had saved her money and was finally ready to buy her first new car all on her own since being widowed a dozen years earlier. It was a 1969 Pontiac Catalina sedan. And it was silver. This exact shade of silver. Palladium Silver I now discover, as I look the color up online at paintref.com.
Silver was not a common automotive color in 1969. It was not even a color you could necessarily expect to find on the color and trim chart when you went car shopping then. Gold was where all the action was in 1969, at least among the precious metal colors. I recall reading that after many years of white being the most popular color for Chevrolets all through the 1960s, gold would bump it out of the top spot for 1970. Every manufacturer had been offering some shade (even multiple shades) of gold since the mid 60s. But silver? It was more like copper, a color that makes an appearance every few years only to disappear again.
Silver had made a minor splash in the late 1950’s and again in the early ’60s but it was never really a big seller. And why would it be when the color charts of the time were a veritable embarrassment of riches. When in any given year you had multiple shades of blue and of green (and of turquoise in case you couldn’t make up your mind), it was clear that you were in a land of plenty.
So Grandma’s not-gold and not-green Catalina was a novelty and I was actually quite fond of it. The black painted roof on her Catalina made it something of a unicorn, as I have never seen another. I found it quite elegant, though I would have probably opted for a vinyl roof over the painted one to go with the car’s black interior. I can remember the way Grandma usually drove away after a visit. The Pontiac had a very sensitive accelerator pedal. Or maybe Grandma had a bit of a lead foot. In either case, the front of the Catalina would rise up as the exhaust note went from “burble” to “roar”. My mother would often chuckle and say “Hi-ho Silver!” as Grandma drove away.
For those too young to remember, that phrase is forever linked to the Lone Ranger and his horse. Mom had undoubtedly grown up listening to William Conrad just killing that line during his days as The Lone Ranger on radio and then later seeing this early version on television.
Silver cars did not really take off right away after GM featured this color in 1969-70. If I had to guess, the one thing that gave silver its first real boost in popularity probably came in the fall of 1971. Private eye Frank Cannon drove a silver Continental Mark III (and later Mark IV) in the television show that starred William Conrad. (Wow, just watch the themes in this piece weave themselves together.) The silver Lincoln was an expensive and prestigious car at the time and the color stood out after several years of earth tones dominating the popularity charts.
Lincoln jumped on this trend when it offered the Silver Luxury Group as a $400 option on top of the already expensive Continental Mark IV in 1973. Suddenly everyone knew when they saw a Mark IV painted in Silver Moondust Metallic that it was no ordinary Mark IV but a special edition to cater to Lincoln’s most wealthy and stylish customers, a marketing tactic that would beget the Designer Editions a few years later.
Photo source: Mercedes-Benz-Blog@blogspot.com
This association between silver paint and expensive cars could surely not have been hurt by rarefied German cars’ use of the color in racing going back to the 1930’s and by the fact that it approximated the color of polished aluminum as used on high-tech air and spacecraft.
A clear, bright silver did not jump to prominence overnight. Both GM and Ford tended to feature a dirty, more pewter-like silver paint in the 1971-74 era and Chrysler tested the market for a darker metallic gray. But by 1975 silver had become the new “it” color on cars in all segments of the American market, and it has rarely been absent from a manufacturer’s color choices ever since.
My own history with silver cars has been a little muddy. After being smitten by Grandma’s Pontiac, I watched silver cars take over the world. In the summer of 1978 I took a part time job working for a business which had a large fleet of silver vehicles. I was suddenly surrounded by silver cars and didn’t really like that it was displacing a lot of more interesting colors.
I also watched the finishes of those silver cars degrade much faster than those of some darker paints. A good friend was learning the trade of paint and body work and explained to me that paints formulas that used a lot of clear were very unprotected against UV rays, which would burrow down into the finish and “cook” the paint from the inside, resulting in microscopic cracks that made for a dull finish.
This was particularly true on GM cars which still used softer lacquer finishes which made them all the more subject to damage from sun and car washes. Even Grandma’s Pontiac, which spent much of its time in the garage, was starting to see some environmental damage to its “Magic Mirror” acrylic lacquer finish by the second half of the 1970’s.
I will admit to becoming a little bit of a “silver snob” over the years. Most silver cars hold no appeal for me. But there have been a few particular shades that have come fairly close to that bright, clear silver with the super-subtle metallic that I first loved on Grandma’s Pontiac. Honda and Chrysler used a similar shade in the late ’90s and early 2000’s and I felt my anti-silver thing start to recede a bit. My daughter’s 1998 Civic is of that era and I am not at all bothered by its particular formulation of the color.
I had not, however, seen a really nice silver GM car from 1969-70 in awhile, though I did remember the color hitting a sweet spot with me when I found and wrote up a ’69 Cadillac convertible some years back. Wow but does my current Samsung phone take better pictures than my old Blackberry did!
But this one – – this one – – was sweet. Although I prefer to find original cars, there is nothing like the paint finish on a high-quality modern paint job and this one was just stunning. This silver paint looked like it was still wet and an inch deep as I photographed this GTO. Although I wished that this one had sported a black interior to better mesh with my personal history with these, the blue goes with the paint quite nicely.
Alright, I realize that there has not been all that much written here about this particular GTO. They really are quite interesting cars and were covered fairly intensely when I wrote up The Judge of the same year. But really, when was the last time you saw a silver GTO?
And so a Palladium Silver ’69 GTO scratched a unique itch in me. I salute the owner in choosing for his restoration this color that is at once so common yet so unusual. Of course, he had no way of knowing that he would also allow me to be ten years old all over again when I saw his car. If only Grandma would have chosen a GTO instead of her garden variety 350-powered Catalina. Then we would really have seen “Hi-ho Silver!”
Further Reading
1966 Pontiac GTO hardtop – A Goat Or A Mule? (J P Cavanaugh) (In Reef Turquoise)
1966 Pontiac GTO convertible – The Perfect Childhood (J P Cavanaugh) (In Candlelight Cream)
1969 Pontiac GTO The Judge – Here Come Da Judge (J P Cavanaugh) (In Carousel Red)
My memory for colors is also pretty good JPC, but when you asked the question, “…when was the last time you saw a sliver GTO?”, I could’ve sworn it was back in October…. alas, the car I spotted was that silvery blue that was all the rage in the mid-sixties.
I’ve got some good pictures of this car, and wanted to write it up, but I don’t have enough knowledge of the GTO to be sure it’s even an original as opposed to a tribute car. The owner said it was an original and had been in the family since new, so I was inclined to believe her. Spotted October 17, 2017 in the Target parking lot in Nottingham, Maryland, still getting the groceries….
An interior shot… ‘65 I think…
Nice! The 64-65 has eluded me thus far. I particularly like the 65.
Excellent piece James! The topic of automotive paint color preferences and trends is something I always find fascinating. It’s always interesting to pin-point reasons as to why some colors surge in popularity while others bite the dust.
I personally am not much of a silver paint guy, but like you there have been certain shades of silver over the years that on certain cars truly look stunning. Among more recent silvers that strike me are the ones that tend to have blueish undertones to them, such as Acura’s “Forged Silver metallic” and Mercedes’ “Diamond Silver metallic”.
🙂
Yes, I like those too. On the flip side were some of those plodding, leaden silvers that Ford was using in the mid 2000s and which I could not stand.
That being said, I always thought silver suited the first-gen Focus hatchbacks particularly well.
When I think of 1960s silver I think of a color with a greenish tinge to it, not a bright grayish silver. My dad was not a fan of metallic paint when I was a kid…he preferred “solid” colors although my mom’s Meadow Green 69 Delta 88 had some metal flake in it. He didn’t think metallics aged well, even though the family cars were all garaged. Till the day I die I’ll remember him waxing his 68 VW Squareback, trying to keep the single-stage bright red paint from fading to a dull pink.
Automotive paint has come a long way…base/clear finishes have surely minimized the need for constant polishing and waxing.
Ah, back when silver was only a sliver of the market.
Color is one thing we’ve never really talked about in very much depth, so thank you for tackling this. It’s something that can make or break the appearance of a car, can be a rarity we quickly overlook, and is often such a reflection of the times. Fifty years from now, somebody here will be writing about some blue vehicle built in 2017 and how that was almost a novelty amongst the sea of silver and other grays.
Oddly, silver is doing a lot of favors for the featured GTO as well as many of the other cars featured. Today, silver isn’t as friendly despite its prevalence. It’s likely the gold of the 1969 to 1972ish era.
I know, this car looks great in silver. It was my good fortune to catch it near sunset, probably the best possible time of day for capturing the shadows and reflections that make this one look so good.
Indeed, it’s known as the “magic hour” amongst photographers – that short time just before sunset (or sometimes just after sunrise) that somehow makes everything look better.
Personally I prefer colors that ARE! Silver, whether warm or cool, light or dark I now find very UNappealing; despite the fact that my ’18 Accord Sport is “Lunar Silver”!!
Achromatic (white thru grays to black…i.e.: NO color) paints that dominate today’s auto palettes are-IMhO-dreary and boring. The 50s thru 80s had very nice COLOR choices. Come on Color Marketing Group, wake up there is a world of beautiful COLOR out there!!! DFO
Wow, that’s really nice!
I don’t recall ever seeing a silver GTO. Lots of them in that olive drab green years ago – I’m referring to 1968 and later. Lots of orange, red and yellow Judges, too. But silver? Nope.
The paint used back then, especially silver faded or oxidized relatively fast compared to other colors, at least in my observations in the STL area where I lived.
Rarely have I seen a GTO convertible, which had to be scarce, at least compared to Chevelle convertibles.
Still, that GTO is one gorgeous car! Great find, JP, well done!
PS: C’mon, JP, aren’t you ‘way too young to remember the “Lone Ranger” TV show? I’m certainly not, though “Sky King” was my favorite at the time!
“Hi ho, Silver”, anyway!
A lovely paean to classic silver cars. This GTO is a beauty. And on a related note, I generally loathe vinyl tops but I always liked the look of a ’60s or ’70s American car in silver with a black vinyl top and a red interior. You’ve charted the progression of silver very well… Those Mark IVs are gorgeous, by the way!
Nowadays, silver is in that kind of chicken or egg situation: do dealers stock it because people buy it, or do people buy it because dealers stock it? Does it have better resale because people like it, or do people like it because it has better resale? Etc etc. And as much as I dislike the sea of silver, white, grey and black cars, at least they don’t fall out of fashion. I’ve noticed a lot of light blue BMWs and bright green Audis and Benzes and I think, “Ok, that’s cool now, but what about in 5-10 years?”
Then again, some colours age well. Remember when everything was orange/copper in the early/mid-2000s? Here in Australia, we also went through a bit of a purple phase at the time.
By the way, I wonder what my specialty is!
Obscure and limited editions. And knowing American cars so well despite being half a planet away. ?
One of the oddest color combos I recall from my youth was a 1961 Tbird convertible owned by the owner of a business near my house. Yellow with a red leather interior. Don’t recall the color of the top as he almost always had the top down.
I find silver paint to be sleek and attractive, but I shy away from it because I’ve seen too many times when it was badly repaired. For some reason it must take an unusual amount of skill to match the hue AND the light diffusion from the metals flakes.
My recently departed mother, on the other hand, used to say that silver vehicles “looked like they built the car and forgot to paint it!”
Like everyone else, I miss colors. I especially love it when I come across a car in a more obscure period color. On Pontiacs of this vintage my favorite is Verdoro Green Poly. The first car I remember riding in as a wee lad was my parent’s ’68 LeMans Sport Coupe, in Verdoro Green with parchment vinyl top and interior. A stunning combination that’s seldom seen. The pic attached of a Firebird in the same combo is one of only a few examples I’ve come across over the years.
Dammit. Pic here
Your picture of the Verdoro Green car makes a perfect bookend to this one. One color was hugely popular then and never seen now, the other has been done to death recently but was rare then. I would prefer either of these extreme to the Resale Red that everyone seems to choose at restoration time. And I know that green well – Mrs. Bordner next door chose that for her 68 GTO, but with a black vinyl top and black interior.
If I recall correctly, an ash tray was the inspiration for Verdoro Green, believe it or not. The color was developed from an ash tray that someone brought to the attention of top Pontiac management.
GM gave Pontiac exclusive use of the color for one year, and then the other divisions were allowed to offer it.
Wow, I hadn’t heard that. That particular car had been a hand-me-down in 1970 from my paternal grandparents. They replaced it with a brown LeMans sedan. The “Green Hornet” had been my grandmother’s favorite car, so in ’75 she talked my grandfather into trading in the brown sedan for a new Collonade LeMans coupe, in a very similar “Limefire Green Poly”, with parchment colored vinyl half top and light green interior. That was also a very pretty car, with its Pontiac Rally wheels, bucket seat/console interior, etc., my mother commented that granny must have been going through some late mid-life crisis. It did indeed end up being her last car.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a silver GTO in person.
This one looks as nice as it can to someone who is very tired of seeing mostly white black and silver cars lately. One of the great things about classics is the use of real chrome, which doesn’t pop as well against silver paint.
On this one I’d go either Midnight Green or Carousel Red.
This GTO is interesting for another reason – it does not have the hidden headlights. Those were apparently an option, but based on the 1968-69 GTOs that pop up at car shows around here, one would think that the hidden headlights were standard equipment.
Most of them were hidden. But not all. Great point.
It’s possible that most GTO headlamps were exposed in both the 1968 and ’69 model years. Are there any production statistics available that would verify whether “most of them were hidden”?
A 1969 window sticker seen online shows that hidden headlamps cost $52.66, not exactly prohibitive (less than the cost of a basic radio or front disc brakes).
Every 1968-69 GTO ad I’ve seen (except for “The Judge” edition) features a car with hidden headlights.
Potential customers visiting their Pontiac dealer would have most likely been disappointed to find a car with exposed headlights, given that the hidden headlights and Endura front bumper were the key styling elements of the car.
I’d be surprised if the dealers ordered many with the exposed headlights.
Images showing optional equipment in ads aren’t a reliable indicator of what was actually offered and sold. I recall seeing magazine ads at the time that featured 1968 and 1969 Caprices or Impalas equipped with optional headlamp doors, but I’ve never seen one in real life. Likewise, the “glamour” models of full-size Fords in 1969-70 and Plymouths in 1970-71 (LTD, Gran Coupe, etc.) were featured in the magazine ads, and although many of those were produced and sold, at least half of actual full-size Ford and Plymouth sales were exposed-headlamp versions that weren’t pictured in the ads.
As for the GTO, I would like to actually learn the proportions of exposed versus hidden, but cursory online research doesn’t reveal this.
By 1968, the GTO was as much of a style leader as a performance car. As Jim Wangers noted, GTOs tended to go out the door with a lot of options – which left an opening for the bargain-basement Plymouth Road Runner. The Road Runner offered performance at a low cost, and was an instant hit.
By 1968, GTO customers were as interested in style as in performance. The hidden headlights and Endura front bumper set the car apart from garden-variety Pontiac intermediates. I would be very surprised if many 1968-69 GTOs (except for the 1969 Judge edition) left the factory without hidden headlights.
Two friends and a cousin had ’68, ’69 and ’70 GTOs. None had hidden headlights and they were all fairly well optioned. Don’t know what the take rate was, but I bet it was well under 50%. Restorations seem to tack these on, so,everyone we now see at a show seems to have them, but that was definitely not the case originally.
The lack of hidden headlights is particularly noteworthy since it’s a rather loaded convertible.
I think the easiest way to identify the difference between a ’68 and ’69 GM intermediate is by the vent windows: 1968 cars have them, while the 1969 cars do not. It’s similar to the difference between 1967 and 1968 GM ponycars except the side marker lights are also a quick indicator on those.
As to the silver paint, it reminds me of late sixties Mopars where it cost extra to get silver because it was ‘specially buffed’. This was prior to 1970 when the famous (and extra cost) ‘High Impact’ colors with their goofy names made their debut.
But, yeah, silver is rare in the sixties, and not without good reason. As mentioned, besides being difficult to match correctly after a repair, silver has a bad tendency to fade over the years. I’d go so far as to suggest the feature GTO has been resprayed and/or had some sort of modern clear-coat applied to maintain a proper, even finish. In fact, this could even be an explanation as to why it doesn’t have hidden headlights; it’s was a change made during a restoration.
Finally, I wonder if anyone knows if those GTO console shifters have a ratchet mechanism. Oldsmobile was still using the Hurst Dual-Gate shifters and I ‘think’ Pontiac had went to an automatic shifter that was mimicked by Chrysler with their infamous ‘Slap-Stick, but I’ve never seen mention of it.
For the longest time I thought that all ’68-’69 GTOs had the hidden headlights as standard equipment..
Not only that, but in 1968 you could get the front end not only with exposed headlights, but get it with the chrome LeMans bumper too, code 674
I had a silver 1971 Gremlin.
To me, this silver Goat is a reminder of The Way Things Once Really Were: Not every Supercar (they weren’t really called Muscle Cars ’til later) was bright red, orange or black.
Road and Track were calling them “Muscle Cars” by mid ’65. I had copy of the article. Many GM cars, some Mopars, but no Fords mentioned.
Good article, and my way of picking a ’68 from a ’69 is that the ’69s lack front quarter windows- at least in hardtop and convertible form on the GM A bodies.
Automakers seemed keen on supercar back then, as you find it said in a lot of brochures and dealer promo videos. I personally refer to factory produced models like the GTO as supercars, I feel muscle car casts a much broader net, essentially as a substitute for hot rod for souped up cars produced in a certain era.
Muscle car is kind of like “heavy metal”, the song Born to be Wild was the first utterance of it in one verse, and some magazine referred to Black Sabbath as it early on as well, but you ask those various harder sounding late 60s bands that pioneered the genre what kind of music they were playing and they’ll say rock/hard rock/heavy rock. It took another 10 years for rock bands to embrace that label, and “muscle car” the term seemed to follow a similar trajectory for cars.
I’m not a fan of silver at all, but Lexus’ Atomic Silver is the best out there.
My folks had a ’75 Buick Regal Sedan in silver complete with a silver vinyl roof, I don’t think it was a common color they in our area. Said silver was perfect for hiding road salt, resulting in a car that was rarely washed in the winter. After 2-3 years, it was already rusting pretty good. We had the rust fixed, the vinyl roof stripped, and painted the car dark blue to eliminate the problem!
My 2005 Focus is in silver (I bought it used so I had no say in the color) & it does look good in it.
I would rather have a GTO than a BMW.
One other way to tell ’68 vs. ’69 LeMans/GTO is rear styling.
68’s had taillights completely in the bumper, while the ’69 has them between bumper and trunk lid.
Another is ’68 A body hardtops/ragtops had vent windows, and were gone for ’69. However, the ‘post coupe’ A bodies kept “wind wings” ’til ’72.
But only in ’72 was there a GTO post coupe since it reverted to option package, on LeMans base and Sport 2 doors.
If you see one from the front it has two easy tells as well, the 68s had wraparound side markers, while the 69s had flat rectangular “gunsight” style markers, and the 69 also has a horizontal grille divider compared to the solid 68.
The thing with silver is it works well on shapes with sharp points, think swords and daggers, but on rounder (let’s say modern aerodynamic car) shapes it tends to look like a ball of solder.
The other thing is this silver GTO isn’t lacking color, just look at that blue interior. Is there a better color contrast than this? And it extends beyond that, it would look just as stunning with silver/red silver/green, silver/brown, etc. The only dull combination you can get is silver on…black/grey, and with few exceptions, that’s about all you can get with silver in anything made in my lifetime.
I hated silver growing up, but the first time I saw a car from this era like this GTO I instantly got why it became popular, the chiseled lines are natural for it and the wonderful color contrast with the interior. People weren’t wrong in choosing it in droves, but at some point it went from “silver is stunning” to “silver hides dirt, I don’t have to wash it ever”.
Also, one of my favorite stripe executions was also a GTO, but the 70 Judge model with the tri-color stripe bands on silver like this one. Once again proving silver works great as long as there is color with it
This is one of those cars that smacks me on the head. I don’t think Pontiac offered a gray like this. Palladium Silver was the only gray in 1970, just like in 1969. So this is either a case where the mixer did the best he could to replicate an old formula with modern pigments and it came out like this, or the guy just liked a darker gunmetal-type of gray and here we are.
I like it, but I don’t think it gets any points for authenticity.
Yeah I agree, I thought it maybe was just my screen or the lighting but it does seem unnaturally dark, I just looked primarily for a high res enough pic to fully show the array of stripe colors. This one looks more correct
Despite how differently the two cars look, I’m going to say it’s the same color and an example of how differently the same pigment will look between different lighting and cameras. I just can’t feature someone going to the lengths of a 100% restoration on the darker car (it looks otherwise original) and not using an exact reproduction of the correct paint tint.
Further evidence is how the second, lighter colored 1970 Goat is even lighter than the feature car, which seems to fall somewhere in between the two 1970 cars.
A quite unusual GTO indeed! It’s pretty much the antithesis of how one imagines a ’69 GTO. And an excellent treatise on silver.
Convertible muscle cars are a curious breed, as undoubtedly they were more about cruising at reasonable speeds than stop light racing and such. I couldn’t quite make sense of them at the time. But I suspect the original buyer was probably a bit older than average, and wanted an alternative to a full size convertible or something a bit more flamboyant than a LeMans.
I think that convertible muscle cars are proof for your theory that most people don’t buy cars because of the mechanical specs. They buy cars because they are cool cars to be seen in. Like my next door neighbor’s mother. Mrs. Bordner would no more have gone stoplight racing than she would have run naked down our street. She was an attorneys wife and wanted to drive something hip and cool – which was a series of three successive GTOs (66, 68 and 71). But she did not choose convertibles, she was much too practical for that. 🙂
Similar story here. I had a well-to-do college friend whose father had a Cadillac and mother a ’68 GTO convertible. She knew nothing of the mechanicals, but knew it was a cool car, which was all that mattered. Loaded with automatic, A/C, power windows etc. Her next car was a ’71 Grand Prix, that years cool car du jour.
Agree, a lot of GTO’s were bought by trendy Boomers of the time* for fashion sense, that were not car enthusiasts. Hence the “GTO cologne” offered at clothing stores. As if the car was a “fad”, like Hula Hoops.
And, in true fashion, they moved on to Personal Lux coupes, then Euro Sedans, now SUV’s/Pickups.
*Same generation now buys the ubiquitous red ’69 Camaro resto-mod [that was not red from factory].
A best friend in 1969 had a new GTO coupe in Limelight Green with a dark green or black vinyl top. He definitely was not an “enthusiast.” The car was automatic, PS/PB, and air conditioned. A gentleman’s GTO, as someone said. It had the hidden headlights. Most of these cars that I recall from back in the day had them, but a small percent did not and they were around. I do not recall ever seeing a 69 in that silver color. And GTO convertibles were rare in the Midwest. Good friends had a 64 Thunderbird coupe in silver, rare color for the time. Four of my last five cars have been variations of silver, a favorite color of mine that became way too popular.
For me, the only negative aspect of the ’69 GTO (other than the missing vent windows) is the dashboard, especially the big blank space above the ventilation controls in cars without air conditioning, like this one. Both the ’68 (which still had some exposed metal along the bottom) and the ’70-’72 had more attractive dashboards.
I will say that I found the interior of my Grandma’s 69 Catalina a huge letdown from that in her 64 Catalina. At the time I thought it was just a change in style, but now I can see that there was a lot of cost cutting going on there too.
Nice to see a ’69 Goat in a color other than the orange associated with “The Judge”. This paint job is fantastic, but silver and its different shades have become as commonplace as white these days. Kinda boring TBH.
“This association between silver paint and expensive cars could surely not have been hurt by rarefied German cars’ use of the color in racing going back to the 1930’s…” Do you know the story of why Mercedes racing cars are silver? From a Mercedes site:
It was a simple idea in 1934 that made silver the colour of racing success – success that persists through today. It all began on the eve of the Eifel race at the weighing station on the Nürburgring. The regulations allowed no vehicle to weigh more than 750 kilograms. The brand new W 25 weighed one kilogram too much however. Alfred Neubauer, manager of the Mercedes-Benz racing team, had the white paint ground off, leaving a purely aluminium body that sparkled in silver. The next morning Manfred von Brauchitsch took his seat at the wheel of the lightened, 750 kg car and won the race with a commanding performance. Later he was to tell the press: “To drive a Silver Arrow is an honour.”
Kinda like silver, pewter or metallic grey however you describe it, and thats a very nice GTO, A friend in Aussie has a 67 Impala resprayed in its original silver four door pillarless claimed to be the only one in the country it looks great, My current car is silver or roadgrime grey as I prefer to call it, the dirt doesnt show up, I might paint the alloy wheels black as they are the only give away it never gets washed.
“Convertible muscle cars are a curious breed…”
OTOH, most, if not all, classic era 2 seater sports cars were convertibles.
*Roadsters
Those sports cars weren’t carrying 400lbs of electric retractable top, glass side windows and chassis reinforcement like a Convertible does.
That’s the nicest-looking GTO convertible I’ve ever laid eyes on!
I like silver cars, my silver Chevys
It’s no secret I’m into car colors, and I really enjoyed this post. Silver was indeed pretty rare in the late 1960s, and I imagine it was toward the bottom of Pontiac’s color popularity list. One tidbit I found really interesting when I was writing up the post on the ’69 Cadillac was how many colors represented 3% to 5% of production. Seems that the top, popular colors of the time (golds, greens) accounted for around 30% to 40% of the mix, and rest were distributed all across the color spectrum. It sure made for some interesting variety.
The first silver car in my family was Pop’s ’78 Caprice Classic, and the car looked great. I think Bill Mitchell’s “sheer look” wore silver really well. Plus, at the time Silver was still pretty fresh and new, rather than being on every other car on the road….
I think I am most disappointed in the color choices on luxury cars today. For products that should be the most expressive, interesting and individual, they are almost always black, or some nondescript shade of dark gray. Just. So. Boring.
My father bought a Palladium Silver ’69 Convertible off the showroom floor…mom picked it out because she loved the color
Great picture! As someone who grew up with one, did you ever see another silver one?
Great piece, and no, I cannot recall seeing a silver GTO of this era.
Another fairly reliable tip on a 1968 vs 1969 identification… 1969 was the first year for required head restraints.
I ended up with a silver car because I was buying used during the Pandemic. At first, I didn’t care for it that much, but it is such a clean bright silver. Ingot silver with a contrasting Midnight black top, with factory tinted windows. Maybe the glossy black 20 inches don’t hurt. At least nobody has asked me if I’m a Raider fan. I’m not.
Silver cars can be so elegant or so boring depending on the shade / tint of silver. Silver can be warm, cool, or tarnished, metallic or pearl. My dream silver color combination is a warm pearl silver with red interior. Interesting to read about issues with silver paints back in the 1960-70s and how they faded. Same for popular metallic colors.
Back to the 1950s Dad would not buy a red car because they faded too quickly. Read a comprehensive article about how difficult it was to produce white car paint going back to the 1930s.
At my urging (age 13), Dad bought a new 1963 T-Bird, Heritage Burgundy metallic with Pearl Beige interior. On my 16th birthday I passed my drivers test and Dad gave me the 1963 T-Bird. Months later I was at a drive-in where Dad told me not to go. Of course a drunk GI drove into my passenger door. Minor damage but police were called plus military police because my T-Bird had officer military tags. Dad was called to show up at the drive-in I was not suppose to be at. So Dad talked to police and MP’s so the young GI was not charged. My T-Bird went to the Ford dealer body shop, fixed and repainted the door. Dad picked up my Bird at the Ford dealership and on the drive home got rear ended resulting in a re-paint of the trunk and left rear fender. Within a year the right side door, left fender & trunk, all faded. This 1963 Bird was my baby and I compounded, polished, but never could get the repainted panels corrected. It got worst. I took my Bird back to a Ford dealership for a tune-up. A day in and out. Three days later where is my car? Turned out dealership left keys in the cars, vandal’s jumped the fence, drove demolition derby with customers autos. Left front fender and door quickly repainted like I would not know the paint did not match.
All the panels repainted on my 1963 Bird faded differently.
I did not buy another Ford car until I bought a 1966 T-Bird conv. ten years ago.
We had a ’76 98 for awhile, silver with silver roof, looked very elegant.
In 1975, the first 2,000 production Sevilles were triple silver, partly to help with quality control.
I have mixed feelings about ’69 GTO convertibles, as on a road trip, I got the sunburn on my thigh that 6 years later developed a melanoma in ’91.