Even as I start to type this, I realize that I’m about to dive into the deep end of a filthy, unchlorinated public pool of hypocrisy. And then I’m going to swim around a bit. I feel like I’m being hypocritical because one of the Founding Ideals of this site is that anyone and everyone is welcome, no matter how miserable or boring or obscure or perverse their car obsessions are. And I believe this, with every rusty nut in my soul. At the same time, I think it’s okay to express opinions about cars, even negative ones, because, well, that makes life interesting. Hell, I even let our crankiest, most acerbic writer lambast one of my favorite cars ever, and sure, I also wrote a rebuttal, but the point is sometimes it’s just cathartic to lambast a car, especially one with such a huge following. And that’s what I’m going to do right now, as I tell you that if I learned a drunk, hungry wizard appeared and turned every ’57 Chevy into a nice corned beef sandwich, I’d be just fine with that.
The 1957 Chevy – part of the “Tri-Five” series of cars from 1955 to 1957 – is arguably the most iconic “American” car. I have American in quotes there because it’s not really America – it’s the icon of this idealized 1950s America, the source for what people call Americana, and all of the hokey, overplayed, tired miasma that surrounds it. For a classic car pushing 70 years old, there’s still a shocking amount of them around. About 1.5 million of these were made, and to their credit, it feels like most of those are still kicking, taking up way too many spots at classic car shows, surrounded by those creepy upset kid dolls and with open trunks showing old window stickers and newspaper clippings.
It’s not like the ’57 Chevy was such a bad car – it wasn’t – but it wasn’t that great a car, either. Sure, they had the legendary 265 cubic inch V8 that was introduced in 1955, but the overall engineering was about as unimaginative as you can, ironically, imagine. They handled about as well as most 1950s big American cars, which is to say lousy, like moving a couch on a furniture dolly. You could get them in like 19 different body styles and literally hundreds of two-tone and solid color combinations, and while that’s great and all, I can’t fathom why these became the default 1950s car over any number of their contemporaries.
I mean, when you want a Hawaiian shirt with cars on it, for reasons maybe you don’t feel comfortable admitting, chances are you’ll get something like these:
They’re covered in ’57 Chevys (and maybe some ’56s?), Bel Airs, convertibles, the occasional (and more interesting) Nomad, but all still these same cars. Sure, you can find shirts with other cars, but the dominance of the ’57 Chevy can’t be denied. Or justified, as far as I’m concerned.
I just don’t get why this happened? How did this one particular car get to be so dominant, develop such a colossal fanbase, establish such a massive aftermarket industry, and just come to dominate the mainstream classic car community for so damn long? How did this car end up with its iconic status to the point that it’s become essentially synonymous with ’50s America, and almost the expected follow-up any time anyone even says the year 1957?
There’s certainly other cars with rabid followings and strong associations with a particular time and place and culture and representations in art and Hawaiian shirts and all that, of course. The Beetle comes to mind. But the difference there is that when the Beetle grew in popularity and became an automotive icon in the 1960s and 1970s, at that time, it was somewhat unique in the mainstream culture, at least in America. It was foreign, small, weird, technically strange, and an outlier amongst the mainstream cars around at the time. It stood out. It became popular as a reaction against mainstream culture, which sort of makes its eventual climb to fame more understandable.
But the ’57 Chevy? I mean, it was fine, but was it really all that different than its big competitors of the era? Why did this car:
…get so much more fame and notoriety and lasting legendary status over, say, this car:
Ford actually outsold Chevy in 1957, even. And sure, there’s plenty of love for these cars, but it doesn’t quite reach the ethereal status of the Chevrolet. Or what about one of these:
Dodge certainly had the same sort of over-exuberant jet-age styling as the Chevy, and was maybe even more exaggerated. Hell, even the Nash had a similar sort of dual-fuselage jet-type hood ornament as some of the Chevys:
But, of course, none of these cars reached the level of the Chevy. And they’re just not that different. I mean, sure, there’s plenty of differences, but we’re not talking differences like what the Volkswagen was to American cars of the time. There are differences in details and trim and specs, but if you had to describe all of the cars I showed here just now in general terms – big V8 heavily chromed two-tone sedans with Paleolithic chassis designs – it would apply equally well to any of them.
What’s also surprising is how much the designers of the ’57 Chevy seemed to, well, not like the car. The 1957 model was supposed to be all new, but the new design wasn’t ready, so Chevy’s design team had to tart up the ’56 as best they could to make it feel new and different. The roof and doors and rear deck are carryovers from ’56, but there was a lot of pressure to make the ’57 look different. This Hemmings article notes how the designers felt about the car:
One man who worked on designing the ’57 Chevy is Robert Cumberford, who today lives in France. He distinctly remembers that not a single person who worked on the 1957 car liked the design. He recalls working 84-hour weeks with others in a crash program to design the ’57 model and that Harley Earl wanted the car to look as big as possible. To accomplish that, stylists stretched the fender profile to an extreme length, pushed the headlamps as far apart as possible and took the grille across the entire front end.
You can see how widened everything is, the grille, the lights shoved as far to the edges as possible, all to make the car look as massive as possible. These changes seem sort of bonkers when you look at the ’56, which was already an incredibly wide-looking car:
The designer mentioned above, Robert Cumberford, actually once commented on a Dean’s Garage story, where he found an old sketch he did for the 1957 redesign – which he described as an “emergency re-style”:
He says directly that
“It was a thrash, none of us who worked on it liked the damn ’57, and now it’s the one people revere. Go figure.”
Again, this was one of the people who designed the damn car.
But I have to be honest – I don’t think the car is all that bad, really. And I like the two-door wagon Nomad version, especially.
But that said, I cannot fathom why this particular year and model ended up becoming so wildly dominant in the classic car scene. I remember so many local car shows that seemed to have rows and rows of these things, and I’ve seen them on so much bad art that romanticizes Route 66 and paints in James Dean and Marilyn Monroe in front of ’57 Bel Airs, and I’m just sick of them. I don’t get it! I never have, and I likely never will.
I feel like in recent years the saturation of ’57 Chevys is abating a bit, as the population that really latched onto them is getting older and less likely to take them out. I’m not exactly sure how the market is for these things still – it seems pretty steady, maybe with a slight decline – but I can’t help but think we’re only a few decades out from a time when the last of the people who genuinely give a crap about these cars has died off, and there will be a massive glut in the market of unwanted ’57 Chevys, complete with stacks of Hawaiian shirts and trunks full of award plaques.
Maybe then I’ll get interested, when they’re so cheap and undesired that you can buy one for pimples and cram in the drivetrain from a Nissan Leaf and use it as your electric around-town car, or something. Who knows.
What I do know is that if I never see another ’57 Chevy again, I think I’ll be just fine. I’m happy to hear all the arguments why I’m not just wrong, but wrong and ugly, and deep down I know I have the abuse coming. But I just couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
Top photo and all images: Chevrolet unless otherwise noted
I get how it became popular with the boomer crowd. It has a lot of ’50s flash but the body shape and proportions aren’t particularly far out there. It’s just trendy enough to be from a recognizable decade, but without being so wild that it doesn’t translate to different decades.
You never look weird in a ’57 Chevy.
I used to agree with the 57 Chevy hate, because to me, the obsession with tri-five chevies above all else in the classic car scene caused plenty of other interesting cars from that era to languish while millions of 1955-57 Chevies got all the attention. I still do somewhat feel that way, there are a lot more interesting cars from the 50s than just Chevies, and those are generally more interesting to me because you don’t see them as often.
However… I’ve since made peace with the tri-five Chevy obsessives, because a lovingly restored 50s car is still a great thing to see on the road, even if it’s just another Chevy. And because Chevies had their day in the limelight, there are a ton of them still around, so people DO drive them!
The Chevy obsession also made them one of the most accessible classic cars to get into nowadays. There’s still a massive aftermarket for the things, so you could build a whole Bel Air from scratch if you wanted to. Restored Chevies will still cost a considerable amount, but project tri-fives are surprisingly affordable every time I’ve looked, especially if you’re willing to consider four-door models. It helps that since they’ve been desirable for so long, a large percentage of folks who had a ’57 lying around had enough presence of mind to not scrap it or leave it languishing in the elements too long, figuring it might be worth restoring, selling, or parting out someday.
As a relatively young classic car enthusiasts who wants to see more of my generation getting interested in classic cars, I’m grateful now for any classic car you can find in abundance for reasonable prices with a massive aftermarket and enough pop culture presence that people getting curious about classic cars already know about it.
And if that car has a healthy amount of hot-rodding potential with parts from later Chevies, that’s icing on the cake!
That said, I still like a lot of other 50s cars more so would rather restore something other than a Chevy, and if I ever end up buying a tri-five Chevy it’ll be a sedan because the sedans have better proportions than the coupes IMO.
The tri-5 Chevys have a iconic look and to a point I do get the enthusiasm for them, but these cars, more than any other cars, everytime I see them all I can think is Boomer Cruiser
My Hawaiian shirt has a VW surfer van. Feeling so vindicated right now.
Look, I’m not THAT old (I tell myself), but what I remember from the 70’s was enterprising yoots could pick up a working 55-57 Chevy and not break the bank fixing it up. Basic mechanics you could do yourself, and a cabin big enough to have a party.
Never owned one personally, but had a friend whose dad had at least three, maybe more, and it was a fun vehicle with no pretensions to cruise around drinking beer (which we were no old enough to possess), and looking for a place to hang.
And then there were the ones where the engine and tranny were seriously upgraded to literally melt the tires. That was fun to watch and I’m glad those times are gone.
I would not be surprised if this was the inspiration for the 50s era Burnside sedan in BeamNG drive.
The guys who suck the air out of the room are generally the tri-five guys, with the Mopar crowd only barely second. My wife loves classic cars as much as I do, her first car being a ’64 Barracuda when she was in high school at the beginning of the 90s. She’s been a vocal critic of the 55-57 Chebbies for decades now.
While I agree with her, my no-fly zone are Shelby Cobras: can’t stand ’em. The guys who own them are a Venn Diagram overlap of the losers on Harley-Davidsons revving their bikes at every stop light. Bleccch.
Agreed. On the Gilligan scale, the ‘55 was Maryann, the ‘57 was Ginger, the ‘56 was just right. Of the ‘57 GM products, the Pontiacs had better looks.
As a 67yo, I’ll say that nobody gave a crap about them until American Graffiti came out. Between that and Happy Days, we got every Boomer infected with 50s nostalgia in their late teens and early twenties.
And just like folks that stopped listening to new music at 25, those folks had their car tastes petrified with these things.
When these and all that 50s nostalgia junk finally goes away, I won’t mind. I’ve had 50 years of that crap.
TBF almost all music sucked after 1995.
I can just imagine what the groom in the Nash advertisement is thinking to himself.
“Thank goodness it has a bench seat, Honey” is the G-rated version…
As someone who was conditioned to love these from magazines at an early age, and then later understood that the 55 and 56 were much better looking, there are a few objectively good reasons why it has became, and stayed popular, and why there are so many left of them even today.
The main reason is probably one of the reasons you mention for disliking it;
It was an emergency restyle of a car they had already built for two years, because unlike the other two ‘great’ car manufacturers GM decided to give their engineers an extra year to develop their cars.
Chrysler/Mopar and Ford did not.
As awesome as Chryslers ‘suddenly it’s 1960’ lineup looked, it was not ready for production, and the cars ended having lots of issues that would for the most part be ironed out by ’58 or ’59. By then their reputation for building boring high quality cars was ruined for all eternity. (and they would never build a quality car again apparently?)
And a recession was rolling in so the improved cars didn’t sell as much as the already sold lemons.
Ford had similar issues, 57’s are known to rust horribly, and again with the recession, and Fords brilliant idea to try and squeeze in another new brand for ’58 , those years probably cost them a fortune.
The 57 Chevy was still reasonably sized (by US standards), 4-7 inches shorter than the same year Plymouth and Ford.
Being the third year with the same chassis and basically same bodies ment that they had probably decent control on the teething problems, and they had the smallblock V8. And for 1957 that had grown to 283 cubic inches, and could deliver up to 283 horsepower in fuel injected form. And it has started to develop a decent aftermarket following.
As the recession hit, people wanted more compact cheaper to run cars, or used cars. So even Chevrolet would struggle again for 1958 and ’59, before coming up with smaller cheaper cars.
The three big ones (especially Ford and Gm) had also wasted a lot of potential income in the previous years trying to outprice (sadly sucessfully) the smaller manufacturers, so they didn’t have an abundance of cash laying around to turn the ship around quickly enough.
By the early 1960’s the best reasonably modern used car would for the most part be a 1957 Chevy. If you were into hotrodding not many cars could beat a tri five chevy with a smallblock. Most other late 50’s US cars would at best be considered good engine donors because of their weight and size.
Chevy sold more cars in 1955 , but being the first year of a GM product I think it’s safe to assume that there would be more ’57s than ’55s available already by the mid 60’s.
And a legend was born.
(it also helps that it’s still a pretty car even if not as minimalistic and agile as a ’55 or quite as crisp and lithe looking as a ’56)
Mopar L head engines were very reliable. Better than the competing options from Ford or Chevrolet.
But I don’t think they too were free from issues. And this was in the 20s/30s or 40s.
The shoebox Chev gets all the love, but personally I’m partial to the DeSotos of this era. Kind of like how so many consider Marilyn Monroe the great beauty of this era, when it was really Grace Kelly.
1957 Desotos are definitely the best looking late 50’s US car by a long shot. And I’m pretty sure that is only because I saw one passing the bus I rode to school once as a teenager in northern Norway in the mid 90’s.
Red 4 door Fireflite Hardtop with white roof and side accents.
Those 6 tailights on those impossibly long rear fins on a snowy afternoon burned their way into my easily impressionable young mind.
For me it’s the gold ones with gold and bronze trim. And the 3 taillights stacked on each fin are definitely the bomb.
The ’57 is my fave of the tri-five because if you’re going to go for Chrome and Stainless Steel Sex Appeal, then commit to it. Which the ’57 does in spades.
I was never a huge fan myself, but every time I tell my 6yo daughter to pick a hotwheels, she’ll pick a tri-five 10/10 times if available. My wife unearthed her vintage Matchbox, and it was a damn tri-five.
So hopefully the market drops out, cause it seems I’m destined to build one.
It was before my time being the same age as Torch, but I’ve heard from plenty of oldtimers over the years that the ’57 Mopars were beset with quality problems from day one (a familiar story from them now but a huge surprise then, since the company had been known for sound engineering in Walter P’s lifetime) while the ’57 Fords were rustbuckets even by the standards of the day.
That rush-job facelift of a proven third year car turned out to be GM’s first “Good Used Car” just in time for the first wave of Baby Boomers to get their licenses as the ’57s aged into the cheap-first-car price range.
My mom got a used turquoise ’57 Bel Air hardtop coupe in 1959 when she turned eighteen. My dad had a ’56, also used but only a couple of years old when he got it. You are correct about them being nice used cars for baby boomers.
That would make your parents Silent Generation (roughly, anyone born before or during WW2 but too young to have fought in it), Boomers are the generation born after and started getting their licenses in 1962-3.
Mopar cars were of excellent quality before that. The L head in the 30s/40s was very tough compared to the Ford and Chevrolet engines of the day.
Does anyone know how many Mopars, Chevrolets and Fords were produced in the year 57?
I can’t say I dislike the 57, but it’s absolutely, by all means, just another 50s American car. I can tell what it is because it’s the car from all the hawaiian shirts, but otherwise, there’s nothing special about it.
There’s nothing wrong with a classic family car, but I legitimately can’t see any reason for it to be more desirable than any of its contemporaries.
I think two-door, convertible and nomad/handyman versions of the 57 is kinda bleh. Me, Stock for stock: F-code 57 Ford Custom 500 with manual, hands down.
However. I’ve kinda learned to love a sports sedan or 4-door post due to David Carradine’s Thunder and Lightning.
And I kinda wanna get a four door and make a patina’d ’57 four door post sedan in faded US Forestry green using NAPCO 4×4 parts (AI render):
OIG2.R9nuoyvYg7sxzEBvR0fp (1536×1024)
BTW please somebody make a modern adaptation of Xenozoic Tales (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs)
In the ’80s the go-to for something like that was to plop the body onto a squarebody Blazer chassis.
I think the ’55 was a cleaner design that then became progressively fancified in ’56 and ’57. The 1957 Bel Air 2 door screams 1950’s America and probably represents peak tasteful finned car to me.
The big thing though was the SBC V8.
Now the crazy thing is you can probably build one of these brand new in your driveway in 7 months. (-;
I like the two tone patterns on the ’56 but the ’57 had those anodized fins.
If – IF – I wanted an iconic 1950s automobile, I would look no further than the Edsel. Just for the LOLs.
Its interesting how many popped up on CarTube in time with the prevalence at the shows
Blasphemi was around for years on roadkill/etc but they weren’t that common (or at least people didn’t comment like they were ubiquitous). A lot more started cropping up a few years ago though and then it seems more channels saw the popularity and clamoured to get on the algorithm recommendations, and that just fed back into the underlying popularity and now they’re in a market bubble to boot.
It’s the player character car in 1950’s America. But yeah I assume the fact the tri-fives introduced the small block and the ‘57 being the “best” tri-5 in people’s brains is a big part of what made it so popular. But idk, it’s way outside my realm.
I’m with you, Torch. Never understood why they’re so popular.
I’m going contrarian and agreeing with the author. The ’57 is stylish for the time, but it’s not of my generation and was archaic by the time I was a kid. It was part of a generation in which almost every one smoked, which even as a small child I found disgusting, stupid and a waste of money.
They are not bad, and are iconic for their time, but we have come a very, very long way since then, and their image has been overexploited as a symbol of the good old days when very elderly people were young.
I was born long past their time and I don’t really get it, but I do think that they’re more “essential” with regards to 50s styling. They have the the fins, the little chrome rocket things on the hood, but they don’t go overboard and they’re not dominated by any particular styling gimmick. Add that to their good, modern engine, popularity and Chevy parts compatibly, and you’ve got a recipe for something you see for years after release and still looks good.
With that said, I think we can let them cede their place to B-swapped Civics at the car show.
I absolutely agree with you. I’m not a fan of ’50s cars from a design perspective, and let’s be honest, while all classic cars are death traps, these feel like the pinnacle of “please god let me not die”.
I’m also not a fan of 1950s nostalgia either. There are some who romanticize a decade which was great for a few people but terrible for many others. One of the other commenters said the same thing for the 80s, and I agree (I definitely remember the 80s). Now I like 80s import cars, but I’d never want to go back and live in that decade again.
Yeah, I’m 32, so young-ish, and I have always hated hearing people my age say they were born in the wrong decade. Almost wistfully. Like, sure the cars looked bitchin’ in the 50s. And in the 50s, I would have been institutionalized (or worse) because of my mental illness and sexual orientation. Things aren’t perfect now but I’ll take this over the 50s. No matter how cool the cars were.
The ’57 didn’t start becoming an icon of Americana until the 1970s. Before then you know what the “American Car” was? The 1949 Buick Super and then the 1958 Ford Thunderbird. But the 1970s were such a shock to the U.S. that people had a strong nostalgia for the immediate post-war era when they perceived everything to be rocketing (in some cases literally) into a prosperous future. The 1957 Chevrolet 150 was one of the strongest selling cars in 1956. It was slathered in the Populuxe stylings that represented an affluent middle class.
In the 1970s we had latched onto Neo-Colonialism and Neo-Baroque because we wanted to feel more affluent and independent than we really were, and so we aped the appearance of things much more expensive than what the middle class could afford. It wasn’t the middle class content with their wealth, it was the middle class yearning for the same level of prosperity as the late 1950s.
If you don’t believe me go look at T-shirt designs and flyers of local car shows through the decades. The ’57 150 starts showing up on shirts and promotional material en-masse in about 1975 to represent the hot rod era.
This I suspect is also the reason why there’s so much 1980s nostalgia. People too young to know feel like that was the last great affluence period for America.
Yes. This and a cartoony face that is easily identified (and this is vital) to non-gearheads, even in low-resolution images, such as Hawaiian t shirts, pulp printing, and 70s tv- Which sets it up for exactly the cultural turn you describe.
The 55s had a gorgeous grill. The 58 was easily better looking. It’s my favorite car in American Graffiti. I don’t hate the 57s, they just never made my beans sprout.
Will there ever be a time more mis-remembered than the 1950s? Probably not. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. But it comes for most of us.
I too have never been a fan, but I find most of this era to be overwrought and tacky, where there are plenty of cars from the 60s that I find to be gorgeous. I agree with many other here though, if I’m going to chose one, I’ll take the ’56.