The T-Bird’s unusually low height and long-hood, short-deck proportions would eventually be widely copied by both American and foreign automakers. T-Bird unleashes massive product-proliferation spreeĪ key reason the Thunderbird was able to develop an exceptional level of cachet was because it was given a unique body that had more sporting proportions than a typical premium-priced car.
The T-Bird challenged GM’s hierarchy of brands by competing price-wise against the automaker’s top-end premium-priced cars even though the personal coupe was sold through plebeian Ford dealers. The success of the 1958-60 T-Bird showed that being different was a better strategy ( Old Car Advertisements). In the 1950s Ford spent a fortune vainly trying to better compete against GM’s highly successful five-brand pricing hierarchy. Each of these brands offered distinctive styling and mechanical features, but by the late-50s they shared a common platform. This approach was most highly developed at GM, where a car buyer could show they were moving up in the world by switching from the low-priced Chevrolet to a higher-priced Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and - at the pinnacle - Cadillac. For one thing, 1958-60 T-Bird was the first Big Three postwar car to undercut the “hierarchy of brands” strategy that then dominated the US auto industry. The early four-seaters were remarkably subversive on a number of levels. 2 automaker could better compete against mighty General Motors if it pioneered new markets rather than trying to directly compete model for model.
The four-seater Thunderbird was a surprisingly pivotal car for the Ford Motor Company.
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