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If any car deserves to be called the archetypal sixties American automobile, it's the Chevrolet Impala. In 1965, the peak of its popularity, one in every nine new cars sold in the United States was an Impala. If we add the sales of the mechanically identical Biscayne and Bel Air models, full-size Chevrolets accounted for more than 15% of the U.S. market. By comparison, the best-selling car in the U.S. in 2008, the Toyota Camry, accounted for only about 3%. In today's fragmentary market, the sheer ubiquity the big Chevys once enjoyed is difficult to grasp.
Let's take a closer look at this most average of average American cars.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
When we talk about the Chevrolet Impala, we are actually talking about only one subset of what was once considered Chevrolet's "standard" car line. In the late sixties, Chevrolet offered its full-size cars in five series:
- The low-line Biscayne, a sparsely trimmed, minimally equipped price leader aimed primarily at the fleet market
- The mid-level Bel Air, once Chevrolet's top-of-the-line model, now demoted to family-car duty
- The Impala, the moderately trimmed, middle-of-the-road series
- The sporty Impala Super Sport, previously an option group for the Impala, promoted to its own series in 1964
- The luxury Caprice, Chevy's answer to the popular Ford LTD, introduced as a sub-series of the Impala in 1965 and promoted to full-fledged model status in 1966.
While this sounds like a wide range of cars, the only real differences between the different model series were trim, price, and the availability of certain options and body styles. All shared the same body and chassis, the same suspension and brakes, and most of the same powertrains. The main distinction was market position.
Chevrolet's marketing strategy amounted to an elaborate game of musical chairs. From 1950 to 1957, the Bel Air was at the top of the heap. In 1958, Chevrolet added the Impala, initially pitched as the most sporty, luxurious model (although this was strictly a relative term) and offered only in the most glamorous body styles: the convertible and the hardtop Sport Coupe. It was promoted to a full model series in 1959, and subsequently became the mainstay of the Chevy line. The Impala SS, introduced in 1961 as an option package for regular Impalas, supplanted its parent as the top-of-the-line model in 1964, and two years later was in turn supplanted by the luxury-oriented Caprice.
Both the SS and the Caprice were comparatively specialized models, and the Impala continued to account for the lion's share of big-Chevy sales throughout the 1960s. Unlike the Mustang, which was originally targeted at young Baby Boomers just reaching driving age, the Impala was aimed squarely at the middle-American demographic that Richard Nixon later called the silent majority. In a 1971 editorial entitled "America's Two-Dimensional Sweetheart," Car and Driver's Brock Yates described the typical Impala buyer (a married suburbanite with a middle-class income and a high school education) and noted that to such a customer, the Impala represented an ideal. Driving anything more, Yates explained, would seem overly pretentious; anything less was a tacit admission of underachievement.
The big Chevrolet line used the corporate B-body, shared with the Pontiac Catalina, Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight, and Buick LeSabre. In the late sixties, it was a fraction over 213 inches long (5,415 mm) on a 119-inch (3,023-mm) wheelbase, weighing between 3,800 and 4,200 pounds (1,725 and 1,905 kg), depending on engine and equipment. Two-door hardtop Sport Coupes like this one, which started at $2,845, outsold the more prosaic four-door sedans by a significant margin. Although this is a 1967 model, the basic body and chassis were introduced in 1965 and retained with minor facelifts through 1970.
MR. AVERAGE
Conservatism had been the Chevrolet watchword since the 1920s. Former GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan summed up its philosophy in his 1963 autobiography, My Years with General Motors, in which he declared that innovation was not necessary so long as GM offered products at least as good as its competition. The few times Chevy had tried something novel with its mainstream cars, they had gotten their fingers burned. In the late fifties, for example, the division had offered and then withdrawn experiments like air suspension, mechanical fuel injection, and the unusual Turboglide transmission, all of which had proven to be commercial flops. By the mid-sixties, Chevrolet was content to leave the experimental stuff to niche products like the Corvette. The design of the full-size cars would have no surprises.
Impalas were available in seven different body styles -- two- and four-door sedans, two- and four-door hardtops, six- and nine-passenger station wagons, and convertibles -- but all shared the same chassis and "B-body" shell, with only minor variations. Although the full-size Chevrolets retained body-on-frame construction, they incorporated GM's latest thinking on chassis design, forgoing the old-style self-supporting frame in favor of a deliberately flexible perimeter frame. The actual body structure was semi-unitary, designed to be as rigid as possible, but there was no metal-on-metal connection between the body and frame; the body was attached at 10 to 14 points (depending on body type) with thick rubber "biscuits." While earlier automotive frames were designed to be as stiff as possible, the Impala's frame incorporated "torque boxes" that allowed the side rails to twist under load. The idea was that the flexing of the frame and the rubber in the body mounts would absorb noise, vibration, and harshness before it could reach the body.
Full-size Chevrolet suspension used coil springs at all four wheels, as had been Chevy practice since 1958. The front suspension was the customary double-wishbone arrangement, with an anti-roll bar of modest diameter. The only novelty was that the lower arms incorporated flexible "drag struts" that could move fore and aft to absorb vertical bumps, a trick Ford introduced in the 1961 Lincoln Continental. The rear end used a live axle, located with three trailing arms and a lateral track rod. All suspension links were connected to the body with soft rubber bushings to soak up ride harshness. The standard springs and shock absorbers were similarly soft, although a moderately stiffer heavy-duty suspension was available for around $30, if you twisted the dealer's arm enough.
The '67 Impala coupes had this sleek, semi-fastback roofline, while the pricier Caprice had a more conventional notchback profile. By 1968, Chevrolet added an Impala Custom coupe, which shared the Caprice's roofline, without its plusher trim. All the big Chevy models were mechanically identical in most respects, differing mainly in styling details, trim, and option availability.
GM was slow to adopt disc brakes for its mass-market cars, so the standard brakes on all full-size Chevys of this period were 11-inch (279-mm) cast-iron drums, with lining area that was none too generous for the cars' heft. Starting in 1967, buyers could opt for front discs, which finally became standard in 1971.
As for the engines, you paid your money and took your choice. Standard fare for most models was the 250 cu. in. (4.1 L) "Turbo-Thrift Six," but around 80% of all big Chevys had a V8. The base V8 was the Turbo-Fire 283 (4.6 L) of 1957 vintage, offering 195 gross horsepower (146 kW). Beyond that, you could order as much power as your wallet and driving record could withstand. A few customers even special-ordered the L72 Corvette engine, a 427 cu. in. (7.0 L) monster with a claimed 425 gross horsepower (317 kW), although it was not a cataloged option.
While many buyers were content with the standard 283, the 327 (5.4 L) V8 was an increasingly popular option in the late sixties, offering 275 gross horsepower (205 kW) for a $92.70 premium. An Impala like this one, with 327 and Powerglide, was capable of 0-60 mph (0-97 kph) in a bit under 10 seconds (about a second quicker than a 283 with the same transmission), with a top speed of close to 110 mph (176 kph). The wire wheel covers and whitewalls were extra-cost options, priced at $55.85 and $35.55, respectively.
Transmission choices were equally extensive. Although nearly 90% of all American buyers ordered automatic transmission, it cost extra on every Chevrolet, even the top-of-the-line Caprice. Most buyers took the somewhat antiquated two-speed Powerglide, which cost $194.35. The newer, far more flexible three-speed Turbo Hydramatic was only $30 more, although perversely, it was not available with the smaller engines, which could have used its added flexibility. A four-speed manual transmission was offered, although few Impala buyers cared to shift for themselves. For reasons understood only to Chevy's marketing department, cars with the biggest engines actually didn't include any transmission as standard equipment. The big-block engines produced more torque than the nominally standard three-speed manual could withstand, so buyers were obliged to pay at least $79 extra for one of the "optional" transmissions. (A possible reason for this odd state of affairs was that the heavy-duty, all-synchro three-speed offered with the big blocks was actually purchased from Ford, a point about which GM was understandably cagy.)
The options list also included useful accessories like a Positraction limited-slip differential and a special instrument cluster with proper gauges, rather than warning lights (in 1967, the latter even incorporated -- wonder of wonders -- a legible tachometer, mounted in an appropriate spot in the dashboard). You could also select from the usual range of convenience extras, including air conditioning, power seats -- with a choice of bench or "Strato-Buckets" -- center console, power antenna, and a host of "appearance groups." Base prices started at around $2,700, but if you got carried away with options, you could boost the price to well over $5,000, which was enough to buy you a lightly equipped (or slightly used) Cadillac.
Despite that broad selection, most buyers responded the same way they do when offered an abundance of ice cream flavors -- they chose vanilla. The median Impala of this era was a two-door hardtop Sport Coupe, usually white, equipped with the cheapest of the available V8 engines, automatic transmission, power steering and brakes, radio, and whitewall tires. So equipped, it listed for around $3,500, close to the middle of the Impala's vast price spread. In modern dollars, that is about $22,500, which is roughly the cost of a four-cylinder Honda Accord LX or Toyota Camry LE.
What did you get for the money? This average Impala offered adequate but unexceptional performance; a roomy interior (although it was not as cavernous as its exterior dimensions might suggest); a plush, if rather floaty ride; soggy handling; mediocre fuel economy; and excellent resale value. It was as close to reliable as American cars of the sixties ever were, and if it did break down, owners could be assured that nothing under the hood would mystify any sentient mechanic, even in the hinterlands -- not something that could be said of most imported cars of the time. In short, the Impala was in no way an exceptional car, but in every socioeconomic sense, it was the safe choice.
TROUBLE AHEAD, TROUBLE BEHIND
Despite its apparent market dominance and strong sales during this period, all was not well at Chevrolet. According to On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. DeLorean's Look Inside the Automotive Giant, Chevy's market share dropped by more than 20% between 1964 and 1969; in 1970, full-size Chevrolet sales dipped below the one-million mark for the first time since 1948. The division's profit margins were also falling -- Chevrolet's return on investment (ROI) fell from 55.4% in 1964 to 10.3% only five years later -- and GM senior management was very concerned.
The '67's bulging 'hips' and flowing roofline were foreshadowed by the 1965 Chevrolet Concours show car. Note the curvature of the side glass -- added in '65, it enabled the seats to be widened, adding more than three inches of hip and shoulder room compared to the '64 cars. The consequence was that you could not crack open the windows in the rain without getting very wet.
Chevrolet's general manager in the late sixties was E.M. (Pete) Estes, who had come to Chevrolet in 1965. Estes had made a name for himself as the head of Pontiac, which he had elevated to the coveted number-three slot in industry sales, so GM expected great things from him at Chevy. Estes soon discovered, however, that GM's largest division was a very different animal from what he had dealt with at Pontiac. Pontiac's organization was centralized and relatively small, allowing Estes to take a hands-on approach to all aspects of management. By contrast, Chevrolet in those days had nine regional sales offices, 11 assembly plants, and over 130,000 employees. Estes lamented that the division was so big that even keeping track of it was a daunting task.
DeLorean felt that the division's sheer size and and poor internal communications masked a daunting array of organizational problems. Most of Chevrolet's eight departments hadn't met their budgets in years -- Engineering alone averaged overages of $13 million a year. The production system was in chaos. One week, a factory might have its workers putting in 60-hour weeks to meet their quotas; the next, they'd be put on half time because they'd stockpiled more parts than could be used. There was little relationship between the cars the division was building and the models the marketing arm was promoting at any given moment. The sheer range of models, powertrains, and options meant that there were more than 165,000 possible variations, raising production costs and eroding assembly quality. By 1970, the manufacturing cost of an Impala was only $70 less than an Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight, which sold for hundreds of dollars more.
What was worse, DeLorean felt, was that the same conservatism that made Chevrolet shy away from technical innovations was undermining its product development. Ford had beaten Chevrolet to the punch in nearly every new market segment, from personal luxury cars to pony cars, and Chevrolet dealers often had to wait as much as two and a half years before receiving comparable products. When those products finally did appear, they suffered from lackluster marketing and advertising. Even though Chevrolet's annual ad budget was over $50 million, DeLorean claimed that much of it was being squandered on side projects for division management, and that the effectiveness of Chevy's advertising was among the lowest in the U.S. auto industry.
These problems would have daunted any executive -- even Pete Estes, who had performed brilliantly at Pontiac. He was an intelligent man with a superb memory, but his hands-on approach to leadership, which had been so successful at Pontiac, proved counterproductive. Estes ended up micromanaging things he should have delegated, while the larger strategic problems continued to spiral out of control.
ENTER JOHN Z.
By the end of 1968, DeLorean said, GM's senior management was losing confidence in Estes, and on February 1, 1969, executive vice president Roger Kye appointed John DeLorean to replace him. DeLorean had been Pontiac's chief engineer during Estes' tenure, and he had succeeded Estes as head of Pontiac. Now, he was being asked to fix the problems at Chevy that Estes had failed to solve.
The B-body was as wide as it could be without triggering state laws requiring truck-style side marker lights -- a hair less than 80 inches (2,030 mm) wide. The big Chevrolet's W-shaped nose is heavily influenced by the styling of 1965-66 Buicks, a kind of styling "trickle-down" that GM had practiced since the heyday of Harley Earl in the 1930s. This 1967 model still lacks the hidden headlights so beloved of contemporary stylists; they would become an option in 1968.
DeLorean said it didn't take long to grasp the nature and extent of the problems, but fixing them was another matter. DeLorean's management style and ego had always been at odds with GM's deeply conservative corporate culture. When DeLorean took over Pontiac back in 1965, he was the youngest person ever to head a GM division. By Detroit standards, he was practically a sex symbol -- handsome, athletic, with a rakish sense of personal style that was very uncommon at GM, at least outside the senior styling staff. Popular magazines dubbed DeLorean a "swinger," much to his annoyance. Nonetheless, he lived up to the image; after divorcing his first wife in 1968, he dated actresses like Ursula Andress and Candice Bergen, and finally married 20-year-old model Kelly Harmon, a move that scandalized conservative Detroit.
DeLorean was remarkably successful in boosting Chevrolet's sales -- the division posted its first three-million-unit year in 1971 -- but his political position was becoming shaky. For a while, DeLorean had enjoyed an unusual amount of latitude, he said, because GM management feared he would defect to Ford along with his former boss, Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen. After Henry Ford II fired Knudsen in September 1969, GM senior staff became less tolerant of DeLorean's eccentricities. DeLorean had often clashed with GM president Ed Cole, and with Roger Kye, his immediate boss; his challenges to the power structure at Chevrolet made him a host of new enemies.
In the summer of 1972, DeLorean was named group executive in charge of domestic car and truck operations. Although it was nominally a promotion, he felt that it served mainly to cut him off at the knees. Thwarted and frustrated, DeLorean resigned on April 1 of the following year.
With DeLorean gone, Chevrolet returned to business as usual. In his memoir, DeLorean lamented that the problems he had tried to address were never fixed, that they continued to spread through the division (and, indeed, the corporation) like a wasting disease.
The pillarless hardtop, so popular in the fifties and sixties, faded away in the mid-1970s, in the face of the same proposed (but never enacted) federal rollover legislation that did away with convertibles. The last year for the Impala Sport Coupe was 1975, when it accounted for just 21,333 sales.
VALEDICTORY
Chevrolet's dealer body, reputation, and sheer inertia kept it in the number-one sales slot until the mid-eighties, but it continued to fall behind in technology and product development. By then, Chevrolet had to contend not only with Ford and Chrysler, but also Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, and Honda. The Vega, Chevrolet's first subcompact, had sold well, but it had been a notorious disaster. Its first front-drive compact, the X-body Citation, didn't appear until almost five years after the launch of the Volkswagen Rabbit and Honda Accord, and its reputation was no better than the Vega's. After Ford launched the advanced, aerodynamic Taurus sedan in 1986, Chevrolet didn't field a real rival until 1990, and even then, the best they could manage was the lackluster Lumina.
Sales of full-size Chevrolets, meanwhile, nosedived in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, dropping to just under 350,000 units in 1975. The specter of CAFE requirements compelled Chevrolet to downsize the big cars for 1977, a gutsy move that bolstered sales for a while. By the mid-eighties, though, the B-body was increasingly a niche product, selling in ever-smaller numbers to traditionalist buyers. The Impala name was dropped after 1985, although the Impala Super Sport made a brief comeback from 1994-96. In 1996, with big-Chevy sales hovering around 100,000 units, GM finally pulled the plug on the B-body line.
In the conclusion of his 1971 Car and Driver editorial, Brock Yates wrote that when the Impala and its archetypal middle-class buyer were finally gone, GM would probably "sit around and wonder why a good thing didn't last forever." Indeed, Chevrolet's mourning has been extremely protracted, and GM seems reluctant to accept that most of the customers who once bought Impala after Impala are long gone. The demographic that the Impala once dominated still exists, of course, but those buyers now choose Camrys and Accords, for basically the same reasons they once bought Chevys: perceived quality, comfort, and resale value. Indeed, Toyota's U.S. market share now exceeds that of Chevrolet in most market segments.
The question now is not whether Chevrolet will regain its former dominance -- we think it's probably too late -- but whether Toyota will make the same mistakes. Its rapid growth has caused some visible signs of cultural strain, including a worrying slide in its traditional quality and reliability, as well as a dangerous conservatism in product design. It hasn't yet harmed Toyota's reputation or resale value, but if it continues unchecked, as it did at Chevrolet, it eventually will.
As always, those who fail to learn the lessons of history will take it on the chin.
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NOTES ON SOURCES
Our account of Chevrolet's late-sixties woes comes primarily from from John DeLorean and J. Patrick Wright, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. DeLorean's Look Inside the Automotive Giant (Chicago, IL: Avon Books, 1979) and Brock Yates's editorial "America's Two-Dimensional Sweetheart" from the March 1971 issue of Car and Driver, reprinted in R.M. Clarke, ed., Impala and SS 1958-1972 Musclecar Portfolio (The Brooklands Muscle Car Portfolio Series) (Cobham, Surrey: Brooklands Books Ltd., 1996). Alfred P. Sloan's oft-quoted remark about innovation comes from his memoir, My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1963). Basic information on the 1967-1970 Impala came from B.T. Van Kirk, "1967-70 Chevrolet: The Last 'Regular' American Cars," Collectible Automobile, December 2000 (Vol. 17, No. 4), pp. 8-21. Additional information came from "Chevrolet Impala SS" (author unknown, Car Life, March 1965); Tom McCahill's "Tom McCahill Tests the World's Most Popular Car" ( Mechanix Illustrated, February 1965); "Impala 427: Is a Chevrolet Worth $5000? Ask a Swinging Family!" (author unknown, Car Life, May 1967); and "Chevrolet Impala" (author unknown, Car and Driver, October 1970), all of which are reprinted in R.M. Clarke, ed., Impala and SS 1958-1972 Musclecar Portfolio (The Brooklands Muscle Car Portfolio Series) (Cobham, Surrey: Brooklands Books Ltd., 1996). The July 1966 Road Test article "Chevrolet Caprice: where does this top of the line car stand?" also provided useful observations on buying a new Chevy of this vintage; that article is reprinted in R.M. Clarke, ed., Chevrolet Muscle Cars, 1966-1971 (Brooklands Road Tests) (Cobham, Surrey: Brooklands Books Ltd., 1981), pp. 15-19. John DeLorean's infamous profile in For Men Only (Robert Flowers, June 1969, pp. 32-33, 67-69) is reprinted, along with a host of other articles on DeLorean's career, on Tamir Ardon's comprehensive DeLorean site (posting date unknown, Tamir's DeLorean Site, http://www.entermyworld.com/articles/various-articles/, accessed 17 January 2009).
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Your comment about the Camry being the new Impala is dead-on.
The increasing conservatism of Toyota since the 80s is disappointing, and matches GM's refusal to truly innovate. I doubt the Camry will successfully outlive its current generation of buyers.