One of the biggest U.S. automotive market trends in the late 1950s was the increased interest in more manageably-sized, economical cars and Motor Trend gave these segments good coverage in the 1959 World Show issue. While the Big Three would loudly respond with American Compacts for the 1960 model year, in 1959 only Rambler and Studebaker had domestically-produced offerings in that category. All the rest of the were imports, and frankly there was an incredible variety of choices, some familiar, but many were very obscure and soon left the U.S. market for good.
It’s funny how similar (and old-fashioned) the DKW (above) and the Morris (below) looked, though the German car was front-wheel-while the Brit was rear-wheel-drive.
Italian design house Pinninfarina was very busy busy at both the high-end and low-end of the market for 1959, delivering both the diminutive Austin A-40 and the massive Cadillac Eldorado Brougham.
Two key Japanese players were dipping their toes in the water of the U.S. market, though these early products from Toyota (above) and Datsun (below) were less than shining successes. However, the Japanese fixation with continuous improvement allowed both companies to revamp their products quickly and return with much more marketable products for American buyers. Within 10 years these two brands would rank among the top-selling imports, while many other European small car brands would falter and disappear.
Has anyone here at CC ever seen a Moretti in person? I haven’t…. The company was based in Turin Italy and actually survived until 1989, primarily as a low-volume builder of modified Fiats.
Look at the page above and the page below to see the wide array of European brands that tried to be viable choices but failed in that mission.
One of the bigger challenges with smaller cars is how to make them visually interesting. Goggomobil tried mid-50’s Buick style sweep-spear two-tone paint, but the effect was less than optimal. The brand name was tough too–buyers would have had a hard time telling people the make of their car without eliciting a chuckle.
What’s a Lloyd Alexander you ask? I wondered the same thing … with that name surely it was from Great Britain. But no, actually this company was Lloyd Motoren Werke from Germany as was part of the Borgward Group. Popular it was not–Lloyd ceased all production in 1963.
Both Fiat and Renault had the potential to be popular offerings for U.S. small car customers, but both were tarnished by reputations for poor quality that would hinder their attempts to gain sales traction in America.
The Volkswagen Beetle was becoming ever more popular in the U.S. market in 1959, which defied conventional wisdom for the chieftains in Detroit. What they failed to see was the superior quality and reliability of the car, which was inexpensive but never felt cheap.
Ford’s European offerings were decent quasi-American little cars, but were fish-out-of-water in U.S. Ford dealerships, where there was better money to be made selling frugal buyers traditional, bigger American Fords in the lower-cost trim levels.
Vauxhall did a brief stint in the U.S. market being sold through Pontiac dealers. But the folks heading to Poncho showrooms were more likely mesmerized by Wide Tracks than economy cars.
AMC deserves a lot of credit for its pioneering role in developing the American-made small car market. With Rambler fielding both the low-priced American and the larger but still pragmatically-sized Rebel, AMC effectively covered the market for buyers seeking more rational products. Too bad the company lost the plot in the 1960s and tried to compete head-to-head with the Big Three, rather than figuring out how to keep its smaller cars desirable.
Both Peugeot and Simca served-up well-executed conventional sedans in the compact segment. More avant-garde French design came in the form of the Dyna Panhard, as well as the Citroen DS.
Smaller cars did not have to be cheap. Both Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar had well-styled and beautifully crafted products that were priced accordingly. This premium approach to Compact cars, common in Europe, would ultimately become popular in the U.S. Too bad the U.S. makers didn’t have the foresight to take advantage of this emerging trend….
In addition to the Economy Segment “English Fords,” FoMoCo also offered both German-built and British-built compacts to U.S. buyers, which no doubt added to marketplace confusion. One thing U.S. buyers would have been clear on was that these little Fords were “foreign,” which wasn’t necessarily seen as positive by the mass market at that time.
While Opel was more successful in the U.S. market than Vauxhall, being sold through Buick dealers was probably more of a hindrance than a help. One of the “woulda, shoulda, coulda” armchair quarterbacking exercises that I enjoy is imagining alternate scenarios where GM would have created a new division and dealers to sell its imports–economy buyers mights have felt more at home, and dealers would have been better equipped to service the metric-based products.
The Lark was another Compact car pioneer from an American maker, and successful as well, at least initially. However, given Studebaker’s significant business challenges, the car ultimately didn’t stand a chance. In contrast, who’d have thought that Volvo, which offered a Scandinavian version of a 1940’s Ford for 1959, would emerge as one of the more successful higher-end U.S. imports within a decade?
And that to me is the interesting part of this last installment in the Motor Trend 1959 World Show car series: the factors that would ultimately reshape the U.S. market–rational sizing, higher quality, better handling–were already knocking at the door in 1959. Of course boldly-styled big American showboats would continue (as they do to this day, they are just trucks/SUVs now), but the die was cast for the new breed of more logical transportation solutions. A relatively small handful of brands covered in this series were able to capitalize on these trends and remain in the U.S. market today, albeit with varying levels of success.
So what will the next 60 years hold for the automobile business?
Such choices, and such weirdness! You’d have to go pretty hard against the grain to buy a new 2-CV or DKW in 1959 USA.
Here in Canada I saw some of these imports around in the early 1970’s, Hillman Minx and Volvo PV. When I bought my TR-4 I was offered a package deal to include an Austin A-40 for an additional $500. I turned it down, which was a good move since the Triumph alone nearly destroyed my sanity.
I still think that the oddest pairing ever was the sales and service of DKW at Studebaker dealers in around 1961-64. The dealers with the most conservative cars in America being also the place with the weirdest cars in America.
Richard Dreyfuss drove a 2CV in “American Graffiti.”
I had two of those A40 Farinas the first one had a souped up 1100 engine, went really well but the car was rubbish the later one had the liftup rear gate but was on its last legs, you made a better choice Doug D.
I owned three of these cars back in the day: a Hillman Minx; a Ford Consul; and a Volvo PV544. I mostly agree with the testers’ assessments, especially the Volvo’s capacity to function as a sports car. However, the Hillman was less able to toss around in such a manner. In hindsight, all three cars were a lot of fun and quite dependable.
The inaugural NZ saloon car championship in NZ was won by a guy with an early 59 Humber 80, rebadged Minx absolutely nothing could catch him on tracks they are very tossable cars, the guys name was Harold Heasley and the car still exists in race trim, I have a late 59 Minx the restyled next model its fun to drive and goes and handles much better than modern traffic expects.
In addition to buying a Karmann-Ghia in 1958-59, my parents also chose a Ford Anglia, which my father drove in the Detroit area as a sales engineer for a small company that sold Teflon gaskets and seals. My mother loved the Ghia, but always said that the “English Ford” was cheap and tinny. Both of them got traded on a 61 Olds F-85 wagon, thus ending the family’s foray into the land of imports.
And wow, what a selection of imports you could buy at your local Ford dealer. Although I’ll bet the Ford dealer wasn’t pushing them very hard, especially knowing that the Falcon was on the horizon.
It is fascinating to look at what succeeded and what did not. On pure specs and pricing, the Lloyd Alexander should have been a worthy contender against the anachronistic VW. But we all know how that turned out.
And wow, I had never noticed how much the Toyopet resembles a 50 Buick from that angle. Could 1959 have been the era with the most varied choices for a buyer since maybe the 1910s or 20s? We certainly have not seen anything like it since.
The Simca Vedette is a French Ford. Note that it even uses a flathead V-8.
The car had been planned as the “small Ford” in the company’s original postwar product plan was killed for the U.S. after Ernie Breech was placed in charge.
He then ordered work to begin on what became the 1949 Ford. (Meanwhile, what was supposed to be the “big Ford” became the 1949 Mercury.)
The plans for the small Ford were shipped to the company’s French operations, which introduced it as the Ford Vedette. Ford then sold its French subsidiary to Simca during the 1950s.
These cars reflect their home markets and target customers.
These were Europe’s “Model Ts”, first car. For most middle class Europeans, most of their driving was local. If you wanted to go see your cousins 200km away, you took a train. Small buzzboxes are OK for 5-20 km trips–better than the bus, or bus and walk.
As such, it’s easy to see why the vast majority of them were junk for the US market. Among cheap cars, VW succeeded because in addition to fuel economy, their high-build quality and excellent dealer network compensated for the car’s many shortcomings. So much so that they had excellent resale value, and some GIs would sell them after a year or two for what they paid to buy the car (my dad did this in the 50s).
The rest of the cheap cars just did not cut it in America.
I’d venture to guess the reason the Beetle was the go-to foreign car in the States can be summed up in one word: autobahn. Unlike the other foreign makes, anything built in Germany (even cheap cars) had to be able to keep pace on the autobahn. So, even though the horsepower on early Beetles was low, they were built well enough that, given enough distance, they could get up to autobahn speed and stay there in relative safety.
Blasting along on US highways must have been a cakewalk for the Beetle (so long as there weren’t any steep grades), at least compared to every other cheap foreign car.
I drove I-95 between school in Boston and girlfriend in Providence every weekend for a couple of years in my second-hand ’63 VW, and cruised well above 60 mph passing trucks all the time.
A big part of VW’s success was how persnickety they were about dealers. Freestanding dealerships stocked with enough parts to build a Beetle from scratch were their rule at a time when most competitors were either a sideline of a domestic franchise (either through corporate as with Opel, Vauxhall, Euro Ford, Simca which was affiliated with Chrysler, and DKW) or part of a soup-to-nuts “Foreign Car” dealership that, as a former salesman writing, would rather work on a Rolls-Royce deal for a month than pop out a Morris Minor a day. Tales of waiting weeks for a part to cross the Atlantic by slow boat were common with even some of the less-obscure makes like Fiat and Renault.
Once VW had shown the way with their “nobody’s kid brother” distribution and sales strategy the pattern was followed by the Japanese along with the likes of Volvo and (once they were out of the S-P deal) Mercedes. Because nothing succeeds like success and in ’59 VW outsold all the other imports here *combined*.
Hmmm, what would have happened in the alternate universe version where Ford, GM, Chrysler would have set up separate dealerships for their captive imports? Would they have given middle America a reason to look at smaller cars on separate terms from buying the inferior US compacts before they even got a start? The general consensus is that US dealers treated the captive imports with disdain, preferring to sell and service a decontented US version over the import.
Had sales and service been on or about the same level for the captives, along with the finance arms of those US car companies, it may have really broken any chance of the imports to make their moves that they made in the 60s and 70s. A captive import gave the US buyer a sense that the car was, at heart, a Ford or GM or Chrysler product, just screwed together by those poor rebuilding Europeans, not some former foe. Remember, there were plenty of folks who would not by a German car, or Japanese car, as WWII was still fresh in their memory. Associating with, but keeping them at arms length from the American versions, should have been a success.
It’s interesting just how many entries are still of the first generation of postwar styling, particularly at the high end. Even the brand-new Rover P6 3-Litre (which probably priced out in the same class as the $4280 Mercedes 220S if not the $4543 Jaguar 3.4 it competed directly with at home) looked barely more advanced than the $1835, facelifted 1950 model Rambler American.
Agreed.
60 years later, VW sells huge SUVs, which are now “vital for business”. The current Beetle is dying off.
Who could have predicted this?
The Golf has long been VW’s “Beetle”; the water-cooled Beetles were niche cars, giving up practicality for the sake of retro styling.
I’m surely biased, but it seems like they had more nice things to say about the two Swedish models than every other car combined.
Virtually all these cars appeared on New zealands car market in various degrees of success, some lasted quite well Zephyrs and Zodiacs were sought after years later and more now Big Vauxhalls kept their popularity Victors rusted to nothing a bit quick where I lived, Interesting that Motor trend seperates the Minx from the Rapier yet they are the same car but sold via seperate dealers there was also a Singer version and in NZ a Humber version so those dealers had a small entry level car to sell, I saw a Hansa Kombi yesterday rusted beyond repair but I havent seen one in ages, same guy has a couple of Isabellas hes doing up, Lloyd Allexanders were sold here some still exist and there was a plan to build them in Australia an ex GMH manager tried but it failed. German cars met resistance after six years of war who could be surprised, Japanese cars had the same problem. Im amazed some of these sold in the US though sidevalve Anglias were horribly gutless but go ok with a OHV implant.
I’m surprised Ford didn’t put the ohv 1.5 from the Consul into the lighter Anglia/Prefect, at least Down Under if not for export to America from the UK or even the home market as their answer to the Wolseley 1500/Riley 1.5.
I was pretty young in this period, but I seem to recall that in our town, one of the smaller local “import” dealerships sold the English and German Fords, as well as perhaps the Vauxhall Victor, alongside Citroen and Hillman/Sunbeam, and perhaps even Simca. Could that be correct? Opel was at the Buick dealership, I’m sure. Our neighbor sold … or at least tried to sell … Lloyds out of his house and tiny one car garage, in our strictly residential neighborhood. As I recall, MG, Triumph, Jaguar and Austin Healey had enough “critical mass” that those were all sold together at British specialists.
I have distinct memories of many Volvo’s, Saabs, Peugeots and even a few Borgwards at this time. Ditto Morris Minors (often convertibles) and some Hillmans. Goggomobil, Lancia, Goliath … not so much. Moretti and Skoda, never.
Seems that my neighborhood was loaded with imports back in the late 50’s – early 60’s. In addition to the Skoda and Triumph Estate Wagon recently mentioned, there was an Opel Rekord Kombi owned by a man who used it in his property surveying business who lived 2 doors up the street. My best friend’s father, who lived 5 houses beyond that bought a new powder blue ’61 Anglia replacing a ’49 Plymouth. The Anglia was sold in my city by a dealer who not only owned a funeral parlor, but, handled the entire “English Ford Line” separate from the U.S. Ford Dealer in our city. My kindergarten teacher bought a new Vauxhall Victor from our local Pontiac store that she kept for many years. I think she had been his teacher too. Often saw a Taunus, just like in the article one block south of her house. Our grade school music teacher owned a dark blue Fiat, I think an 1100 and the principal owned a Hillman Minx. We moved 3 blocks away in 1962 and a yellow and white DKW junior would be parked directly across the street. I’ll never forget that one! Could smell it everyday. My jr. high school vice-principal had a Simca Aronde that he liked and told me that he bought while on vacation in France. Later on, my brother and I owned a 1959 Renault Dauphine that we used as a parts car for the ’60 that we were fixing up in ’66-’67. In 1968 I recall occasionally driving my boss’s ’59 VW beetle. He usually took that one home. Mostly I used his 1960 F-100 when at work at the service station.
Forgot about my father’s friend from his school days owning a Peugeot 403. I think he kept it for about 15 years after buying it new and I remember him showing my brother and I a rather extensive stash of parts that he had purchased new from the dealer. He had offered it and the 403 to us very cheap as a friend of the family. He really loved that car and it showed. He also owned one of the last Lancia’s sold in the U.S. Just before the emissions regulations came into force in the late 1960’s, as I recall.
The breadth of the European import offering in 1959 amazes me, as I’m too young to remember seeing most of these cars on U.S. roads. I knew there had been a surge of interest in imports in the late 1950s (enough to provoke a reaction from the Big Three resulting in the introduction of the Corvair, Falcon, and Valiant) but I was unaware of just how vast and various a range of vehicles actually made it to these shores. Surely most of these models were imported in small numbers, after accounting for VW, the British sports cars and the captives, as well as the one-year wonders such as the Renault Dauphine.
GN, your last comment about trucks and SUVs being the modern-day American showboat really strikes a chord. The current generation of imported sedans and CUVs are far better-suited to American driving conditions than their 1950s antecedents, and yet it seems the Big Three are once again backed into a corner of their own making by failing to offer competitive products in an admittedly shrinking but still sizable sedan market. Not everyone wants or needs a truck or big SUV, yet Detroit seems unable to offer compelling products to those who want something a little cheaper and/or manageable.
And this is not a complete listing. There were more. Just about every European brand had a distributor in the US who hoped to make some coin by selling their cars. It was so easy to do back then, as the hurdles were very low, just a matter of lighting and the speedometer being in mph. No smog or safety regs to meet. One could import anything, actually.
I had no idea there was such a selection of European autos to choose from back then. This was enlightening…
Interesting to see the little Datsun had a solid axle front end. Anyone know what would have been the last car sold without IFS?
Reading the blurb about the Renault Dauphine triggered bad memories of a Cub Scout trip up to Mt. Baldy in SoCal. The queasy backseat ride in that little bastard was the pits, seemed like it would never end.
Great series, way before my time. I suppose with 1959 gas prices, mileage was not a big concern, so why settle for something small. Especially with the real or perceived thoughts about safety in a larger vehicle which persists to this day with SUV sales.
My parents, in Canada owned a Volvo Amazon from new which, as a result of a brake failure, was written off. After that it was the legendary Pontiac Acadian, which was stolen, and then a 1971 Lemans which did them until the 90s.
One wonders if there had been an increase in tariffs which killed off so many imports (suppose I could Google it) or perhaps a weakened US dollar.
I was a foreign mechanic in the late 1960’s and a lot of these were still around. Parts were, as a rule not had to get. We worked on very few French cars. Jaguar had a very strong parts net work. Dealerships were usually small, and parts inventory might depend on the liquidity of the owner. In 1958 Mercedes approached Studebaker dealers and ask the to take on Mercedes. My Friend’s Father was a Studebaker dealer and he became Mercedes.
Just before i was drafted in 1968, I bought a 1959 Taunus 17M with a bad fuel pump for $50. When I bought the rebuilt kit at our usual supplier, they asked why I would work on one of those, and were amused when they found it was mine.
By 1968 most of these cars had very little value, and often weren’t fixed but were junked.
These cars were the normal cars in Europe in the 50s and in the 60s. Compared to any american car at the time it was a noisy, uncomfortable, slow, unreliable and small car. I wonder why on earth any american car buyer would want any of them, compared to even the cheapest Chevrolet at the time.
You’ve been asking that same question here over and over for years now. Given your strong opinion on the subject, you obviously don’t really want to know why, and you’re certainly never going to understand why. So maybe stop asking?
Had no idea the Toyopet Crown weighed 2700 lbs, and even the tiny Datsun was 2519 dry! They both looked so delicate, but they both had boxed frames and the Datsun had a solid front axle as well. Really stout and overbuilt, apparently. And taxing their small engines to the max.
What an array of imports were available in ’59, the US compacts on the horizon were well timed, not hard to see why they sold so well when they were introduced.