Design Madness: The Hardtop Ad Library of the 60s | Daily Drive | Consumer Guide® The Daily Drive

newsofmax03/18/2022

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Design Madness: The Hardtop Ad Library of the 60s | Daily Drive | Consumer Guide® The Daily Drive

1964 Mercury Marauder

Say the word “hardtop” and any classic car enthusiast knows what you’re referring to: a sedan with a pillarless roofline (i.e. no doorposts to break the line). flow of style). While there were earlier examples of the basic concept, General Motors kicked off the hardtop as we know it by introducing a pillarless coupe body style in its Buick, Cadillac and Oldsmobile lineups. mid-1949 model year.

Styling charm was preserved almost immediately, and competitors rushed to launch their own hardtop models. American automakers continued to innovate and expand on this concept as the 50s progressed. GM introduced the four-door hardtop in 1955, and American Motors introduced the first hardtop scooter: the Nash (and Hudson) Rambler Custom Cross Country, introduced in 1956.

With no doorposts to compete with, car stylists were given the freedom to create sleeker, more stylish roof lines — and those rooflines became especially striking in the late ’50s, when the The front and rear roof pillars are smaller and the glazing area of the vertices is larger. Aside from the stylish look, the hardtop offers the all-weather safety and solidity of a sedan combined with at least some of the airy, open feel of a convertible when the windows are open. side is lowered.

In the ’60s, hardtops were a fundamental part of new-style planning in Detroit, and many European manufacturers offered them as well. By the early seventies, however, the end of the traditional hardtop was looming, largely due to the specter of new federal safety regulations and, perhaps, an increasingly transpersonal society. dispute. With their inherently weaker roof design, roofless cars without pillars cannot provide the same level of protection in rollovers and side collisions as other models – even when equipped with Reinforced structure to the chassis adds weight and reduces fuel economy. Automakers began to remove hardtops from their respective lineups as the Sevens continued to wear them, and by the end of the decade the genre was essentially extinct in the US (for the US). occasional imported hardtop coupes with smaller openings and thick roof pillars).

Collected here are about a dozen print ads for the hardtop Sixties — arguably the style’s heyday. If you’ve spent some time with one of these hardtops (or any other), let us know about it. The place to leave a comment is below.

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