In 1949, the Ford Motor Company almost joined the Motor City’s fastback movement, but the Dearborn carmaker eventually chose another course.

Detroit’s streamline era was a brief but memorable period in auto styling—roughly 1940 through 1952, give or take—that inspired a number of dramatic rooflines. While General Motors was the leading proponent of the look (see our feature on the GM streamliners here) but the other carmakers joined in, too. Nash, Hudson, and Plymouth all offered slope-roofed body styles, to name but a few.

The Ford Motor Company also flirted with the look, as shown in the lead photo above. When the Ford passenger car line was totally reengineered and restyled for ’49, serious consideration was given to a fastback two-door body style. The ’49 Ford styling story is a complicated one from a number of angles, and this adds one more interesting complication. As we know now, the model never went into production, but it’s fun to imagine it on the showroom floor.

Along with the ’49 Ford, the Mercury was also all-new for ’49, inside and out, and it was also slated at one point to receive a streamliner body style. While the Ford was essentially a two-door club sedan, the Mercury version was an elegant four-door with front-opening rear doors and large quarter windows, as demonstrated in the scale model above.

Sidebar: Pictured with the never-was ’49 Merc is Benson Ford, the least-well known of the three grandsons of Henry Ford. Henry Ford II was his older brother, while William Clay Ford Sr. was the youngest. Ben, as he was known to his friends, served the family car company in a number of roles, but took an early retirement due to health problems and died in 1978 at age 59.

Unlike Ford or Mercury, the Lincoln division actually produced a streamliner body style in 1949, but only for one year and only in one model: the ’49 Cosmopolitan Town Sedan, below. (See our feature on the Town Sedan here.) Identical in price and equipment to the conventionally styled four-door Sport Sedan, the Town Sedan sold in far smaller numbers and disappeared from the model catalog in 1950. The streamliner era in Detroit was quickly fading by then, and the hot-selling body styles of the ’50s would include station wagons and pillarless hardtops.