“The makers of lower-priced lines, under pressure to find new buyers, had introduced longer, fatter, more expensive, more powerful, and more luxuriously designed models that competed directly with their traditional superiors in status such as the Pontiac, Dodge and Mercury.
As Time magazine has pointed out, the Chevrolet grew two feet in two decades, to become bigger than the Oldsmobile of ten years earlier and more powerful than the Cadillac of five years earlier. Meanwhile, Buick, not content with being the chic, sleek car for doctors and upward-mobile semi-upper-class people, began competing downward for new recruits. It stressed how low priced some of its models were, and underscored this broadening of its image by sponsoring boxing matches on television.
As a result of all this recruiting, both upward and downward, the status gap between different makes of motorcars shrank, and the Detroit-made motorcars in their various multi-hued, elongated forms began seeming less significantly different than they used to. Consequently, some of the makes began losing a little of their effectiveness as status symbols. The way was open for many of the nation’s taste makers to show their distaste for the trend toward homogenization in Detroit by becoming enthusiasts of the small — and often expensive — foreign car.”
— Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (1959)
RE:SOURCES
- Packard, Vance; 1959. The Status Seekers. David McKay Company, New York: pp. 315-316.
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