GM’s largest division threw caution to the wind and restraint out the window with the fabulous 1959 Chevrolets. 

How the 1959 General Motors product line came to be—Chevrolet included—is one of the great stories in Motor City car lore. In August of 1956, young GM stylist Chuck Jordan, then a rising star in the studio, stopped to check out the brand new 1957 Chrysler products in a local Detroit holding lot, and he was stunned by what he saw.

These new Mopars, the latest development of VIrgil Exner’s Forward Look, were longer, lower, and wider than anything he and his associates in the GM design studios were working on at the time. In an instant he realized that GM’s styling, with its heavy shapes and power dome hoods, was headed in entirely the wrong direction.

Jordan immediately went to his boss, Bill Mitchell, then second in command to GM styling vice president Harley Earl, and told him what he had seen. (Jordan would eventually become VP himself.) Then more GM studio designers went to the Chrysler holding lot to inspect the competition and panic set in, followed by resolve. Something had to be done, quickly.

Since Earl was away in Europe, Mitchell made the executive decision and secured the approval of GM brass. While it was too late to do anything about the ’58 models, all work on the ’59 product line was scrapped and they started over, throwing caution to the wind. Their efforts produced arguably the wildest year in GM body design ever, including what must be the most most boldly styled Chevrolet in history.

SInce the GM passenger cars had adopted largely new sheet metal for ’58, changing everything again for ’59 was a costly proposition. Thinking on their feet, Mitchell and crew devised a way for all the body shells to share the same basic architecture, Chevrolet included, saving the automaker millions in tooling costs.

And while the ’59 Chevy was nothing like the ’58 in exterior appearance, underneath it shared the same GM X-frame chassis from the previous year with a minor revision to the rear suspension. A good part of the X-frame scheme’s rigidity was in the body’s reinforced rocker panels. The four-speed Borg-Warner transmission, previously available only in the Corvette, became a factory option, burnishing the division’s growing performance image.

About those crazy ’59 tailfins: They are every bit as flamboyant as the famous fins on the ’59 Cadillac, but laid out horizontally rather than vertically, creating a striking batwing effect. The draws are so extreme that the quarter panel is actually two stampings, an upper and a lower, with the seam hidden by a bright metal molding at the edge of the batwing. The unconventional look even generated a barstool theory that the horizontal fins generated aerodynamic lift at speed, unloading the rear wheels. Decades later, Frank Markus of Motor Trend magazine arranged to test a ’59 Chevy in the GM wind tunnel and proved that the story, while gossip-worthy, was a myth.

Despite the last-minute, moon-shot program to keep the ’59 Chevrolet’s styling up to date, all that effort wasn’t really reflected in the sales figures that year. The division’s volume for the model year amounted to around 1.48 million cars, better than the previous year’s 1.21 million, but probably attributable to an improving economy as much as anything. It demonstrates that in the auto industry, the designers and engineers often have to run at full speed just to stay in place.