In the anything-goes world of automobile styling in the 1950s, for one quick moment the dorsal fin looked like the next big thing, but the moment quickly passed.
On a fish in the sea, the purpose of a dorsal fin is to stabilize the creature from rolling, enable quick turns, and sometimes to aid in propulsion. On an automobile traveling at highway speeds it really serves no purpose at all, but that didn’t matter in the anything-goes Motor City design studios of the fifties. A pair of tail fins was standard equipment on nearly every car from Detroit at the time, so it must have seemed only natural for the stylists to try three. More is better.
The proposal shown above, completed in the spring of 1957 in the General Motors studios, shows the soon-to-be 1959 Buick in almost its final form, except for this: a third fin in the center of the deck lid. The studio glider’s details and level of finish suggest that the extra fin was no casual experiment, but that it was under serious consideration for production.
The photo above, showing the left side of the same car, shows a few more interesting details. This studio model is a pillarless four-door hardtop on one side and a four-door post sedan on the other. Also, there’s a different chrome trim treatment on each side for the stylists and executives to compare. These were common tactics in the studios to save development time and cost. The proposal also includes a grille-mouthed rear bumper, a feature that makes the ’59 Buick’s rear aspect look even more angry.
Why GM design vice president Bill Mitchell and his team ultimately rejected the dorsal fin on the ’59 Buick is unclear. We can see that it adds considerable cost, weight, and complexity to the deck lid, especially when we consider the metal finishing required to blend it into the panel. (As a bolt-on piece, it would look tacked on.) Ultimately, perhaps Mitchell and the executives decided that one more tailfin was simply one step too far. GM continued to explore the dorsal fin for a few more years, but it never made it to production.
A look at the production ’59 Buick Electra 225, above, shows that dropping the third tail fin was probably the right call, though personal opinions can certainly vary. The next big thing in auto styling, the dorsal fin, was not to be. But you never know: Styling trends aren’t always dictated by taste, form, or utility. Sometimes the car-buying public simply decides that it likes something.
Of course, cars aren’t designed in a vacuum, and it’s hardly surprising that stylists at the other automakers around Detroit were thinking along the very same lines: For a while, the dorsal fin was a natural, intuitive idea. Below is a proposal for the car that became the 1961 Ford Thunderbird.
Aha! You have unearthed Batman’s civilian family car! Even if I was from “Finland”I wouldn’t have liked that feature! The ’59 GMs were “finished” without the dorsal fin, and at the time, among the least attractive cars in my (then) young opinion. As they and I have “matured”, I have not only come to tolerate them, but have softened my opinion of them to a mild appreciation.
The 1960 Electra and Invicta 4-door harp tops are purely beautiful automotive art.
All they needed to do was add rockets to the fins!
Thank goodness saner heads prevailed and dorsal fins only became bad dreams of what could have been!
You’re not wrong though. With a simulated jet engine rear third light (think early 60’s fords), this might actually work.
While the Dorsal fin may never have seen production in North America, The same cannot be said of Eastern Europe, where the luxury make TATRA in Czechoslovakia featured large central backbone fins in production thru the T-600 Tatraplan through the mid ’50s.
When the all-new TATRA T-603 sedans were introduced in late 1956, the rear window was a 2-piece affair, with a vestigial fin starting in the roof and ending in the rear engine cover, just above the license plate area. The 603 series cars went through various changes, most notably the T2-603, but the little fin remained until the last T2-603 left the factory in 1975.
To envision what the series 603 rear window and vestigial fin looked like, all one needs to do is look at a 1963 Corvette split window coupe.
And as an aside: After the fall of the Iron Curtain, I went to Europe and found a Tatra T2-603, and a few months later while attending a large vintage car event in Pennsylvania, I met a well-known Corvette collector. Jokingly I told him I had just bought a 1962 split-window, factory equipped with 4-wheel disc brakes and factory installed hemi V8! He insisted that NO Corvette ever had a hemi engine, and the car had to be a 1963. He also said that the 4-wheel discs came out years later. I bet him a steak dinner I owned a split window with factory installed 4-wheel discs and a hemi.
The bet was on! I pulled out the photos of the Tatra, and he said “That’s not a ‘Vette!”, and I responded “I never said it was a Corvette!” That was one of the best tasting steaks I’ve ever had!
Love it!
It looks to me that not only was the fin abandoned but the wings are smaller on the production car. They start behind the front doors and are not as high at the taillights. I had a ’60 La Sabre 2drHT that sported less radical fins, and while driving south of Lake Michigan a brutal side wind pushed us across the center line on the highway. My black beauty was great looking but sadly turned out to be a lemon.
I always thought the Buick was the best looking of GM’s ’59s