America’s automobile market boomed during the Fifties. The occasional Corvette, Nash-Healey, Kaiser Darrin, and Thunderbird notwithstanding, full-size cars ruled the new car market. Volkswagen’s Beetle, and a few other imports, were novel, too, but they were still mere blips on the radar. “One size fits all” could have been the mantra of domestic manufacturers, but things began to change with the back-to-back introductions of the compact 1958 Rambler American (technically a reintroduction) and 1959 Studebaker Lark.
Though compacts were hardly new, the Lark and Rambler American were met with unexpected enthusiasm. Hence the “Big Three” introduced new compacts for 1960: the Ford Falcon, Chevrolet Corvair, and Chrysler Corp’s new Valiant line. In March the same year, Mercury offered the upmarket Falcon-based Comet, followed by GM’s so-called “senior” compacts in 1961: the Buick Skylark, Oldsmobile F-85, and Pontiac Tempest. A year later, Chevrolet added the more conventional front-engine Chevy II. There was a consequence, however, in that a size and price gap was exposed between the compact and full-size models.
Ford was the first to provide a solution with its 1962
