BUICK RIVIERA

Acar of the Riviera kind had been on General Motors’ agenda for a long time, but the need became urgent once Ford’s Thunderbird created demand for the 'personal car.’ Bill Mitchell, GM’s styling guru who had created the Chevrolet Corvette and `king-fin’ Cadillacs, envisaged his company’s T-Bird rival as an entry-level Cadillac, but instead it became a Buick.

Mitchell’s initial sketches all showed a car with concealed headlights – a throwback perhaps to Buick’s pre-WW2 `Y Job’ concept car – and when the Riviera appeared in September 1962 the vertical cages meant to cover the lights were there. So were four horizontally-paired