Mitchell's masterpiece
Most problems have more than one solution. For General Motors, the problem of what to do about the emerging personal luxury market was solved differently by each division. When we checked out the Pontiac Grand Prix on page 39, we saw how detail changes and better equipment gave an existing model a special identity. But there was another way, and it began with a clean sheet of paper.
General Motors dealers had been pleading for a car to match the fashionable Thunderbird since 1958. By the end of the 1960 model year, the T-bird was shifting almost 93,000 units annually, in response to which General Motors could offer… nothing at all. In mid-1959 General Motors’ vice-president in charge of styling, Bill Mitchell, gave the job of creating a Thunderbird rival to Ned Nickles in the Special Projects studio. Mitchell liked the results, though tweaked the roof to copy a pre-war British vogue for imitating taut hood fabric, but in metal, and by the
