Enter the muscle car-sleeker, more powerful cars that weren’t here to be efficient or practical, but to show off their specs. Rather than compete on their adversaries’ terms, the Big Three decided to play up the contrast. The Volkswagen Beetle, a cute little bubble of a car, stood in stark contrast to the bulky and angular domestics of the 1950s. Europe and Japan found a niche-people who wanted smaller cars with better fuel economy-and exploited it.
Whereas cars of the ’50s were about maximalist flourishes, the ’60s took a new tack thanks to foreign automakers who didn’t share America’s gas-guzzling thirst back home. The Big Three continued to thrive into the 1960s, but as imports began to pose a threat to domestic automakers, Detroit stayed innovative. Of the classic cars of the ’50s, perhaps no model is more iconic than the Ford Thunderbird, with its smooth and streamlined angles and lines, its flaring tailfins, and, like many of its fellow models, exteriors that were anything but Henry Ford’s dictate of “any color you like, as long as it’s black.” Pastels, from bubblegum pink to mint green to electric blue, brought bursts of color to what we imagine today to have been a black-and-white world. Chrome accents, long bodies, and big tailfins all defined the cars of the ‘50s with everyman luxury and Space Age ambition. With no fuel shortages to agonize over as there were in World War II, American cars were petroleum spendthrifts, with heavy constructions requiring a lot of horsepower to move them. This was the rise of car culture-and what beautiful cars they were. Historically, this was an extravagance-and the cars of the 1950s represented every bit of it. The 1950s marked the rise of communities designed not around the railroad, but around the car. While “streetcar suburbs” and “bedroom communities” had long existed on the peripheries, these towns were built along the commuter railroads that fed New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. It was the 1950s when the suburbs truly sprung forth in earnest. Newly cash-flush households took advantage of an economy that encouraged rapid growth and made their way out of the cramped cities of the industrialized Northeast and Great Lakes.
#Space age cars 1950s ameirca full
The Baby Boom went into full swing, and millions of upstart families started very new lives in this brave new world. As the United States reveled in their victory over fascism and the benefits of the GI Bill percolated through society, the American middle class began to enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Postwar America: what a time to be alive. The 1950s: the Golden Age of American Cars By looking at how car designs have changed throughout the decades, we not only see the triumphs and mistakes of the auto industry-we see American history. The designs of automobiles have certainly evolved through the years.
If American history is a tree, its cars are its rings. You can tell a lot about the life of a tree by looking at its rings-where it grew, what the weather was like, and more.
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