All five U.S. car brands at General Motors boasted flamboyant new styling for 1959. Oldsmobile called its version The Linear Look.
Ninety-Eight Holiday SceniCoupe
Nineteen-fifty-nine will forever be remembered as the wildest year ever for for styling at General Motors. The exuberance was inspired by some degree of panic, for with the introduction of Chrysler’s 1957 Forward Look cars, GM stylists realized they had fallen behind. A crash program then followed, and to save time and money all five U.S. car divisions—Chevy, Pontiac, Olds, Buick, and Cadillac—shared the same inner sheet metal. But meanwhile, each brand’s studio was given free reign to express its own visual identity. Oldsmobile called its exterior design “The Linear Look.”
Ninety-Eight Holiday Sport Sedan
When the new models rolled out on October 3, 1958, Olds buyers discovered quad headlamps set radically apart and simulated rocket exhaust pods atop the rear fenders. While the wheelbase of the junior 88 chassis grew only one-half inch for ’59, overall length grew ten inches, mainly to accommodate the shared body shells. In the end, the 88 was 218.4 inches in overall length while the flagship Ninety-Eight came in at 223 inches, and both were a full 80.8 inches wide. Leading the styling team was Art Ross, who’d been hired by GM design boss Harley Earl in 1935 and served as chief designer at Olds from 1946 to 1958.
Oldsmobile’s cockpit was as flamboyant as any in ’59, with a rocket-ship instrument panel and possibly the deepest dish on a steering wheel ever seen on a U.S. production vehicle. With six inches of offset (reportedly) between the hub and the rim, Oldsmobile branded the the thing “Safety-V.” Another remarkable feature was the Trans-portable radio, in which a separate head unit could be removed from the dash and taken outdoors for listening.
While the 371 cubic-inch Rocket V8 continued in ’59, the Super 88 and Ninety-Eight engines grew to 394 CID and 315 hp, the first-generation Olds V8’s final displacement. Olds departed from the other GM divisions in not fully embracing the X-frame chassis, incorporating a pair of perimeter rails and naming it “Guard Beam Design.” Olds did adopt GM’s Flying Wing four-door hardtop body shell, aka the Flat Top, and the slope-backed two-door hardtop style as well, which at Oldsmobile was called a “Holiday SceniCoupe.”
Dynamic 88 Fiesta Station Wagon
Oldsmobile general manager Jack F. Wolfram, who led the division from 1951 through 1964, set a sales target of 440,000 cars for 1959, a 33 percent increase over ’58. Theory was there was pent-up demand from the ’57-’58 recession. But it failed to materialize, at Oldsmobile at least, as volume topped out at almost 383,000 cars and Olds slipped from fourth to fifth. Oldsmobile would return with a new chief stylist, Irv Rybicki, and another new exterior design for 1960, and you can check it out here.
