Goof-ups and recalls are nothing new—they’re as old as the auto industry. Here’s a classic example, the infamous short-framed 1939 Buick.  

Hey, nobody’s perfect. The engineers and executives of the auto industry make mistakes like everyone else, and they demonstrate it on a regular basis. Recent examples on a large scale include the General Motors ignition switch defect and the monumental Takata airbag recall, which has now claimed more than 37 million vehicles and counting. So in big-picture historical terms, Buick’s bobtail frame blunder of 1939 doesn’t seem nearly as egregious, and fortunately, it didn’t seem to do the brand any lasting damage.

Even a casual glance at the 1939 Buick chassis above will identify something very different about its frame design: It ends abruptly at the rear axle crossmember, without the usual support rails extending to the rear bumper—as if it had been chopped off with a hacksaw. As the story goes, the word came down to Buick from the General Motors Executive Committee, holders of the purse strings, that product cost reductions were in order, and Buick engineers determined that this radical frame redesign was one answer.

Evidently, somehow it was decided that the car’s rear body structure was sufficiently strong and rigid on its own, without supporting frame elements, and extensive pre-production testing seemed to support that conclusion. But once the ’39 models were out in the field, the change proved to be a mistake, as customers began to report collapsing floor pans and buckling rear body panels. Oops. Sam, you made the frame too short.

This original Buick color illustration (above) provides a closer look at the oddball frame design. The pound-foolish cost-cutting move seems especially strange for Buick, a premium General Motors division second only to Cadillac in price and equipment. (Posh features that year included column shift and turn signals.) Once the defect was identified, the Buick home office in Flint rushed out repair kits to the dealers. Each kit included a pair of formed reinforcement rails, stamped from angle stock, that extended from the rear crossmember to the rear bumper mounts and bolted into place.

Meanwhile, approximately halfway through the model run the chassis was again redesigned to include a conventional rear frame section aft of the rear crossmember (like the 1942 Buick chassis show below). Underneath the surviving ’39 Buicks still in existence today, both the repaired and the replacement frames can be found, and both seem to function perfectly fine, reportedly. One owner of a Buick with the bobbed frame says he tows a small travel trailer without any difficulties, which is reassuring to know. As Alexander Pope wrote, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.”