Ford’s marketing message, “a new kind of Ford for ’57,” was no idle boast. Ford was an industry innovator that year.

History can be fickle this way. The ’57 Chevy is probably the most celebrated American car of the era, but at the time, most of the big news was coming from Ford. After more than a half-century in operation the company, now under the leadership of Henry Ford II, had gone public for the first time in ’56, and there was a grand new Ford World Headquarters at One American Way in suburban Dearborn. And there was an all-new Ford passenger car line for 1957 that featured an impressive list of industry innovations.

Ford adopted a totally new frame design for 1957, a semi-perimeter configuration that bowed outward at the side rails to allow a lower passenger floor and a sleeker roofline. Known internally as the cowbelly frame, the design was first used on the 1956 Continental Mark II. (General Motors took a different approach in pursuit of the same objective with its X-frame chassis.) To drop the chassis as low as possible, Ford also switched to the latest 14-inch wheels and introduced its now-familiar deep-offset hypoid rear axle. (See our feature on the Ford 9-inch axle here.) The ball-joint front suspension and brakes were were also completely revised.

Ford’s exterior sheet metal was also completely new for 1957, but the most startling development arrived at mid-year when the Skyliner convertible was formally presented to the public. Modestly described as “a mechanical miracle” by the automaker, the innovative feature used seven electric motors, four screw jacks, 10 solenoids and several hundred feet of wiring to raise and lower the all-metal top. While the fiendishly complicated hardware worked surprisingly well, it ate up most of the available trunk space and added nearly $500 in price over a conventional cloth-top convertible (which Ford continued to offer). The Hideaway Hardtop, as Ford named it, remained in production for only three years, 1957-59, but it continues to fascinate car enthusiasts even today.

GM didn’t rush to copy the Skyliner, but it did quickly follow another Ford innovation for 1957, the Ranchero. This clever new Ford body style (similar to Australia’s utes)  combined the comfort and looks of a passenger car with the utility of a traditional pickup truck (some of it, anyway). Chevrolet came out with its own car/truck hybrid in 1959, the El Camino, but give credit where it’s due. Ford did it first in the USA, and it continued to offer the Ranchero through 1979, foreshadowing the civilian pickup market of the ’80s to the present.

One more Ford feature for 1957 worthy of mention was the optional McCulloch VR57 supercharger package for the 312 CID Y-Block V8, rated at 300 hp. Fords more than held their own in NASCAR Grand National competition that year, winning more races than arch-rival Chevrolet, but the Automobile Manufacturers Association racing ban of 1957 put a temporary end to official factory competition.

But the competition in the showrooms continued, naturally, and 1957 is famously remembered as the year that Ford outsold Chevrolet—1,522,406 units to 1,515,117, the record shows. Chevy partisans will dispute these results, of course, as there are numerous ways to interpret the numbers. But on this one point, at least—best selling car in America for 1957—the fickle judgement of history has declared Ford the winner.