In the Motor City’s great styling push of the 1950s for longer, lower, and wider cars,  Ford created the distinctive cow belly chassis.

By far the major styling trend of the 1950s was the quest for lower and lower profiles, and this required some engineering changes. For example, one of the easier steps was the Detroit three’s switch to 14-inch wheels in 1957. General Motors adopted the controversial X-frame chassis that year (see our feature here), while Chrysler adopted torsion bar suspension, as its reduced stack height enabled a lower hood profile. At Ford, engineers took a different approach with an innovation that became known as the cow belly frame.

For the sake of comparison, the 1952 Lincoln chassis above represents standard practice for Motor City design in the early ’50s. Here was a double-drop ladder frame, often with a heavy X-member in the center to increase torsional rigidity on convertibles, hardtops, and heavier cars. The design was sturdy enough and inexpensive to manufacture, but it required a relatively high floor, which in turn required a tall roofline to provide sufficient headroom. It didn’t accommodate the low silhouette the styling studios demanded.

This was a special problem at Ford’s Special Products Division, where the 1956 Continental Mark II was then being developed. With a proposed height of just 56 inches, the Mark II was more than six inches lower than a production 1953 Lincoln. Chief engineer Harley Copp’s inventive solution was a new frame with the main rails bowed outward and downward and the crossmembers slung underneath, triggering the obvious nickname “cow belly.”

Special Products, soon to become the Continental Division, sold the prototype chassis (above) to Ford Styling for a reported $17,000, to be shipped off to Ghia in Italy for use on the 1955 Lincoln Futura dream car. The Futura, of course, was later customized by George Barris, Hollywood’s King of the Kustomizers, to become TV’s original Batmobile. And evidently, that chassis is still under Batmobile no. 1 to this day.

Two more cow belly chassis were sent to Hess & Eisenhardt of Cinncinnatti, a leading coachbuilder of the time, for the construction of two Continental prototypes under the direction of Continental body engineer Gordon Buehrig. These cars, a coupe and a convertible, used 1953 Lincoln bodies sectioned lengthwise by H&E to test the packaging. Known as the “cobbled cars” (in reality they were anything but), these prototypes demonstrated that with the cow belly frame, overall height could be reduced four inches without a significant reduction in passenger comfort.

Sent into production, the cow belly chassis was successfully used on the 1956-57 Continental Mark II, and then on Ford and Mercury cars starting in 1957 (above) and the Edsel in 1958. However, Lincoln and Ford Thunderbird from 1958 on went in a different direction, adopting full unit construction—but not without some manufacturing and quality problems, Lincoln in particular. However, the body-on-frame cow belly design on Ford, Mercury, and Edsel cars proved to be completely reliable, even with a rigorous test in the early years of NASCAR.

Ford even took a shot across the bow at General Motors and its X-frame configuration in a 1961 ad campaign (below). Without mentioning GM by name, the Dearborn carmaker noted that the cow belly frame, here labeled “guardrail construction,”  offered more side impact protection than the X-frame (but without taking into account GM’s reinforced rocker sills). The cow belly chassis remained in production on full-sized Ford and Mercury passenger cars through 1964, when it was replaced by a full perimeter-frame design.