The Personal Car
The personal luxury car market segment in the United States was largely defined by the Ford Thunderbird. Joining the Chevrolet Corvette in 1955 as America's only other two-seater, the original "T-bird" was a softly sprung, reasonably powerful auto for its day, available as both a convertible and an open car with removable hardtop. Too large, slow handling, and luxurious to be a sports car, yet lacking the high-performance of a GT, Ford instead coined a new term for the industry to market it, a "personal car."
The model met with reasonable success its first three years. However, since Ford basically defined the "personal luxury" niche, they believed they could also reshape it. As a result of their own surveys, Ford decided the Thunderbird should gain two seats and a permanent hardtop, changes they considered to be refinements of the personal luxury idea even if the car which emerged was considerably less personal than its two-seat forerunner. Only one American car occupied the target marketplace, the Studebaker Golden Hawk, a highly styled two-door performance hardtop in the GT tradition.
The bulkier, four-seat 1958 Thunderbird which emerged, arrayed with comfort features and weighed down with styling gimmicks, nevertheless found tremendous success, outselling any of its predecessors. Its merely above-average performance and mediocre handling proved no daunt: the marketplace had spoken. The Continental Mark II of 1956 and 1957 was also a personal luxury coupe of the time, sold through Lincoln dealers.
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