How the Corvette and Muscle Cars Helped Destroy Sloan's Hierarchy

As expensive as a Cadillac coupe

In How Fake Luxury Conquered The World, Jack Baruth started a productive conversation on just which cars or group of cars disrupted Alfred Sloan’s “a car for every purse and purpose” hierarchy of brands that was such an important factor in GM’s success in the 20th century. Jack believes that letting each division sell fully equipped full size cars like the Caprice, Regency and Park Avenue trim lines cheapened the Cadillac brand and blurred the lines between all GM brands. In the comment thread to Fake Luxury, some of the Best & Brightest suggested the 1965 Ford LTD’s seminal role in breaking down the lines between middle class and luxury cars. Yet others suggested the blurring of lines began in the 1950s with cars like the Buick Special, a less expensive Buick.

Before the 1970s, the brands at GM were individual corporate divisions, with considerable autonomy. They shared some corporate R&D but for the most part developed their own engines and transmissions (well, before the dominance of the Hydramatic, which was developed at Oldsmobile – the other divisions had their own automatic transmission efforts), bodies and even frames. The brands were distinct from one another, but more relevant to Sloan’s model, they didn’t compete directly with each other, on either purse (price) or purpose (available equipment).

At the cusps between socioeconomic groups of customers, around the margins, yes, they may have competed but even in those cases not quite directly. As you got more affluent you might have considered an lesser equipped Pontiac or Oldsmobile instead of a loaded Chevy, but as Jack pointed out in Fake Luxury, you couldn’t buy some of Cadillac’s options on a Buick. Twilight Sentinel, the photoelectric gizmo that turned on a Cadillac’s lights, was a signature element for Cadillac. There was some democratization of luxury with those options that had a wide potential market, like air conditioning or Delco’s signal seeking Wonderbar radios, but just as you couldn’t option out a Buick into a Cadillac, at lower price points, Pontiac offered equipment that you just couldn’t buy on a Chevrolet. Remember, in the 1950s Plymouth, Ford and Chevrolet were not embarrassed to market themselves as the best value of the “low priced three”.

So those that trace the decline of Sloan’s hierarchy to the 1950s have a point. The brands still, though, didn’t really compete directly. While Jack traces that decline to competition for mass market buyers seeking luxury in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, if I can offer my own take, I think the performance market may have created intense direct competition between GM brands before “fake” luxury did. I blame one of General Motors’ most successful products, so popular that it’s known by its initials, SBC. Ed Cole’s small block Chevy engine was a breakthrough in 1955 because before then, high compression overhead valve V8s were only available at the more prestigious GM marques.

You didn’t just pay for luxury when you bought an expensive car. There’s a reason why the song is called Hot Rod Lincoln and why the guy in the Cadillac is annoyed by the little Nash Rambler. Expensive cars were also fast cars. Cadillac competed, famously at the time, in the Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico. The ’54 Caddy from that race is in the GM Heritage Center collection. So making a powerful motor available in a Chevy was a big deal. Still, a V8 Chevy was cheaper than a V8 Pontiac or Olds, so the brands didn’t really compete on price. Enter “performance” cars.

When it was introduced in 1953, the Corvette was more expensive than many of the cars sold by GM’s more prestigious brands, even some Cadillacs. Tase price of a Corvette was $3,498 (heater optional), almost the same price as a Caddy coupe that year, $3,571. When the Vette got the SBC in 1955 the prestige of being an expensive car was burnished by now being a fast car. Chevy, GM’s entry in the “low priced three” market, was now selling a car that was as expensive as Cadillacs and even faster than some of them.

As long as it was just one car, Sloan’s carefully arranged applecart wasn’t upset. As performance became more an more of a selling point into the 1960s, though, and as dealers pressured their brands to supply them with muscle cars, the GM brands started competing directly with each other. John Delorean and Jim Wangers’ efforts to revive the staid Pontiac brand with the GTO prompted just about every car company, including most of the GM brands, to put a big engine in a midsize car and try to sell it to young people. By the mid 1960s you could choose from a SS Chevelle, a GTO, or an Olds 442.

While they may have competed on performance and now price (those big block packages were not cheap, that’s why they’re rare and collectible today), at least the sheet metal was different. The familial resemblance between the mid ’60s GM A body intermediates is there but not particularly strong. That would change with the Pontiac Firebird. When the Camaro came out as Chevy’s response to Ford’s Mustang and Plymouth’s Barracuda (at Chrysler, selling performance at their low priced brand would mess up their brand hierarchy as well, eventually leading to Plymouth’s demise as a brand), Pontiac dealers and the Pontiac organization demanded what became the Firebird.

While the Firebird came with Pontiac engines, it was obviously a Camaro with different front and rear fascias. That didn’t seem to bother Pontiac buyers nor Pontiac dealers, nor did the fact that they were now competing directly with Chevrolet dealers selling another GM brand. That direct competition intensified with the new 1968 A body cars at GM. They were completely restyled, and while each carried brand unique styling cues, this time the familial resemblance was unavoidable. Though a base Chevelle was cheaper than a Tempest which was cheaper than a Skylark which was cheaper than a Cutlass (at least GM was smart enough not to make an A body Cadillac), when those same A bodies got muscle car packages, the competition on price was much closer.

Yes, if you were from an Oldsmobile family, you could get that A body with a real Rocket V8 and likewise get a Chevy with your choice of small block or big block Chevrolet branded V8s, or a Buick GS with a “nailhead” Buick V8, but that was inside baseball. To the average consumer, they looked alike, they performed alike and they were not that far apart on price. So before “fake luxury” overturned Sloan’s hierarchy, its foundation had already been fractured by selling performance and a youthful image.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS