Today fastbacks are so common that you can even find them on family sedans. That’s a big shift from the late-1960s, when fastbacks were restricted to a few sporty coupes.
“The very name fastback suggests speed and excitement — it was the jaunty rear sweep of glass and metal that . . . sold young people on fastback Barracudas and Mustangs,” noted New York Times reporter Phil Patton (2009).
Before proceeding I should clarify what I mean by a fastback. During the second half of the 1960s many two-door hardtops had relatively sloping rooflines. An example is the 1968 Chevrolet Impala and the 1968 Ford XL pictured below. This article focuses on smaller cars with “full” fastbacks and more sporting pretensions.
The 1967-68 big Chevrolet’s two-door hardtop (top image) was a semi-fastback requiring a different trunk lid than on four-door models. Ford fielded a semi-fastback from 1968-70 in addition to a notchback (Old Car Brochures).
I am also not including as fastbacks General Motors’ 1968-72 mid-sized coupes. Although they were early champions of the “fuselage” look, they were arguably notchbacks at heart.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO shows how GM gave its mid-sized coupes curvaceous styling that masked their notchback shape.
Fastbacks were exotic enough that even many sporty cars did not offer them. This may have been partly due to practical issues. For one thing, rear-seat headroom was tighter than with a boxier, “notchback” roofline. By the same token, a fastback’s larger and more horizontal rear window could turn a car into a greenhouse on sunny days.
The first-generation Chevrolet Camaro sported a “coke-bottle” shape that gave the car a vaguely semi-fastback roofline, but it was still more of a notchback than even the full-sized Impala two-door hardtop shown above.
Fastbacks didn’t always pencil out very well
A less-discussed factor that may have limited the number of fastbacks offered by U.S. automakers is that they could be costly to develop. A fastback typically required more sheetmetal changes than a notchback coupe. The 1965-66 Mustang “2+2” fastback was a rare example of a fastback that did not use a unique trunk lid.
The 1965-66 Ford Mustang is viewed as a classic. However, keeping the notchback’s trunk lid gave the 2+2 a hunchbacked look. Not surprisingly, this body style did not sell well compared to the notchback and, in 1966, the convertible.
In contrast, the 1969 Ford Cobra pictured at the beginning of this story had a different trunk lid and taillights than its mid-sized siblings. And when the Mustang was restyled in 1967, the fastback still shared taillights with the notchback but received its own trunk lid. That was the pattern until the notchback was dropped in 1993.
The 1969 Mustang lineup fielded the largest-selling fastback of the 1960s. The so-called “SportsRoof” (top image) had a more aggressive look than the notchback because of its unique, upturned trunk lid tip and fake scoops behind the doors.
Some fastbacks offered fold-down rear seats and a pass-through to the trunk that increased cargo-carrying capacity. This gave the cars a practical advantage over the standard two-door hardtop but required structural changes if the body was primarily designed for notchbacks. This cost more money, which could be a double-whammy if the fastback didn’t sell very well.
The 1965-69 Plymouth Barracuda (top image) and 1966-67 Dodge Charger offered the most versatile interiors of that era, with fold-down back seats and a tunnel to the trunk that allowed the carrying of long objects (Old Car Brochures).
U.S. automakers differed in their approach to fastbacks
Ford was the biggest champion of fastbacks in the late-1960s. The automaker offered fastback versions of its full-sized and mid-sized cars as well as the Mustang. In contrast, Chrysler confined fastbacks to two halo cars — the 1966-67 Dodge Charger and 1964-69 Plymouth Barracuda.
General Motors was even more cautious. The only full fastback GM offered was the 1963-67 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. The 1966-70 Buick Riviera and Oldsmobile Toronado had partial, S-shaped fastbacks. So did most of GM’s full-sized lineups from 1967-68.
The 1966-70 Oldsmobile Toronado and Buick Riviera had S-shaped, semi-fastbacks rooflines that preserved rear headroom and reduced the size of the rear window. A semi-fastback also arguably looked better on larger cars.
American Motors only offered one full fastback — the 1965-67 Marlin. When that car flopped, AMC resorted to semi-fastback designs for its Javelin and AMX. Their sweeping, concave decks were similar to GM’s mid-sized cars.
The 1968 AMC Javelin (top image) had a semi-fastback roofline to maintain the headroom of the 1965-66 Marlin without the latter’s bulkiness. Was the Javelin’s roominess a factor in it usually outselling the Barracuda (Old Car Brochures)?
Fastbacks usually didn’t sell as well as notchbacks
Perhaps the best example of the fastback’s second-class status was with the Mustang. Between 1965 and 1973 this body style generated only 20 percent of the pony car’s production. However, as you can see from the graph below, the fastback’s proportion of total output varied over time.
For example, in 1966 the fastback accounted for less than 6 percent of Mustang volume, whereas in 1970 it surpassed 47 percent. Higher fastback sales were significantly driven by the popularity of the Mach 1 series, which was introduced in 1969.
The 1971-73 Mustang fastback was less popular than its predecessor, perhaps because of an unusually horizontal roofline behind the B-pillar. The chunky styling was not very attractive and rearward visibility was terrible.
Meanwhile, the 1970 Mercury Cyclone saw volume modestly increase in a generally down year for mid-sized sporty coupes when it switched from a full to a semi-fastback.
The 1970 Mercury Cyclone (top image) may have sold slightly better because its new, semi-fastback styling had more balanced proportions than its full-fastback predecessor (Old Car Brochures).
Perhaps most dramatically, Dodge produced only 37,300 Chargers in 1966 and less than half that amount in 1967. It wasn’t until the car switched to a notchback that sales soared to over 96,000 in 1968 and 89,000 in 1969.
Plymouth’s Barracuda fastback sold unusually well
The fastback body style was not always the main reason a sporty coupe didn’t do well. For example, the cleanly styled 1967-69 Plymouth Barracuda fastback regularly — if modestly — outsold its notchback sibling.
The 1967-69 Barracuda notchback is perplexing. The fastback body style was one of the cleanest — and most “European” — of late-60s American sporty coupes. Yet the notchback was an utter disaster. Its pronounced hunchback look gave the car a short-hood, long-deck look.
The 1967-69 Plymouth Barracuda fastback may have sold better partly because of its more versatile packaging, but it also looked better than the notchback, which was arguably the most ill-proportioned pony car of that era (Old Car Brochures).
I don’t think that the core problem was that the Barracuda did not have the Mustang’s proportions. For designers lengthened the car’s wheelbase in front of the cowl and shortened it behind the B-pillar while chopping the deck. That gave the Mustang sportier proportions, albeit at the expense of rear-seat room.
The 1968-70 Charger illustrates how the Barracuda could have turned its more sedate proportions into an aesthetically appealing sporty coupe. The C-pillar needed to be moved farther back and more of a tunnel-back roofline used.
Ford was most successful with mid-sized fastbacks
The 1968-70 Charger’s success arguably had as much to do with the iconic quality of its design as its body style — particularly compared to first-generation models.
I wonder if the 1966-67 fastback would have looked better if designers had not made the C-pillar so massive. A more rounded and tapered treatment could have done wonders for the car’s proportions.
The 1968 Dodge Charger (top image) was remarkably different from its predecessor despite using the same basic body. The notchback worked better aesthetically on a mid-sized car with a fairly long rear deck (Old Car Brochures).
Ford was more successful with its mid-sized fastbacks. The Torino GT fastback outsold its sister notchback coupe by a three-to-one margin in 1968-69 and the entire Charger line in 1970. More surprisingly, the Fairlane 500 fastback’s output was roughly even with that of the notchback during 1968-69.
The mid-sized 1968-69 Ford fastback looked much sportier than the notchback. This was particularly the case in marketing images, which had distorted proportions (Automotive History Preservation Society).
The post-1966 Mustang fastback arguably displayed the ideal proportions for a fastback body style on an American car. The relatively long hood and short deck gave the Mustang much better proportions than the mid-sized Ford. This is particularly apparent when you compare the images below of a 1969 Cobra and a 1968 Mustang.
Even without rear-quarter windows, the 1967-68 Mustang fastback’s sail panel did not look too massive because of a short deck. This was in contrast to the Barracuda, which used the longer deck of the Valiant (Old Car Brochures).
The Mustang’s fastback was usually the most popular
By putting all of the fastbacks in one graph, you can see how the Mustang was often the most popular in the 1960s — with a few interesting exceptions. In 1966, Barracuda output surpassed 38,000 units, which was a few thousand higher than that of the Mustang fastback. And in 1968 the Torino GT fastback handily outsold its smaller sibling.
Once the Camaro shifted to a fastback in 1970, it outsold the Mustang fastback — but not the overall line. In 1972-73 the Torino GT’s successor, the Gran Torino Sport, also outsold the Mustang. In contrast, sales of the Cyclone/Montego GT fell so low that its fastback body style was dumped for 1974.
For 1972 the Mercury Cyclone (top image) was replaced with the Montego GT. The fastback body style was shared with the Ford Gran Torino Sport — which sold 10 times as many copies in 1972 and 1973 (Old Car Brochures and Advertisements).
By the mid-70s the fastback boomlet was mostly over
By the mid-1970s fastbacks were largely the province of subcompacts and pony cars. This may partly reflect the U.S. market’s shift away from sporty-looking coupes to ones that embraced the brougham look. The most obvious example of that was the Charger, which became a thinly disguised Chrysler Cordoba in 1975.
Perhaps equally important was that larger cars — including those in the mid-sized class — didn’t look all that good with full fastbacks. The most tragic late-60s example was AMC’s Marlin.
Of course, one might also point to the boat-tailed 1971-73 Buick Riviera, but that’s a story for another day (go here for photos of a 1972 model).
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on March 30, 2016 and expanded on Nov. 16, 2020, March 23, 2022 and Aug. 7, 2023. Market share and production figures for individual nameplates were calculated from base data found in auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006) and Gunnell (2002).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
A while back we batted around the question of what would a modern simple car look like? The Volkswagen Beetle was used as a point of comparison, but I suppose a Citroen 2CV could have also […]
Collectible Automobile’s overview of the 1971-74 AMC Javelin is a good example of what John A. Heitmann describes as auto history written by a car buff. Heitmann, who is the editor of the Automotive History […]
Interestingly, the history of fastback body line continued pretty well in the 1970s and 1980s, because many manufacturers realized that, during the Malaise Era, the box design of a notchback was deemed problematic towards the aerodynamic efficiency. One example? The Challenger/Sapporo duo, which predicted that shovel rear glass some time before Chevrolet/Pontiac adopted into the aerocoupe Monte Carlo/Grand Prix of mid-1980s. Both cars were rebadged Mitsubishi Lambdas, but when their production ended in 1983, it was the moment GM decided to get back to NASCAR and make the G-body slippery through the air.
The 60s fastbacks that used clearly defined notchback rear fenders with a shoulder was a big part of their problem. The design needed to be pure like the fastbacks from the 30s and 40s and the ’70 Camaro/Firebird. The ’49 Buick fastback got away with sharing the notchback’s rear fenders because it was a design halfway between the two. The ’74 Mustang II fastback worked because the fuselage design integrated the notchback rear fender shape with the C-pillar.
The fastback “craze” of the 1960s had to be initiated by the 1961 XK-E type Jaguar coupe (not the early roadsters with the hard top), in my opinion. The experiments that led to the Ferrari 250 SWBs and GTEs evolving into the (real) G.T.O.s also had to capture the attention of Bill Mitchell, given his involvement with the Stingray race car. Mitchell’s styling statement was the fastback 1963 coupe. Most agree that Dick Teague’s Tarpon looked better on the American platform than the Classic platform and Chrysler finally achieved balance on the Baccaruda fastback in 1967. The problem with most fastbacks on a long wheelbase is that they appear, at least to my eye, to be tail-heavy. Most consumers wanted cars with trunks, so semi-fastback slippery notch-backs like the 1965-1968 G.M. B-body coupes, rather than the 1966-1967 Dodge Charger with no real enclosed trunk. The flying-buttresses of the 1968 Dodge Charger was a great compromise. Historically, smaller wheelbase cars make better fastbacks as the fenders can be transitioned from the roof and the front / rear proportions are more in harmony, hence the Mustang II looked well-integrated.
Interestingly, the history of fastback body line continued pretty well in the 1970s and 1980s, because many manufacturers realized that, during the Malaise Era, the box design of a notchback was deemed problematic towards the aerodynamic efficiency. One example? The Challenger/Sapporo duo, which predicted that shovel rear glass some time before Chevrolet/Pontiac adopted into the aerocoupe Monte Carlo/Grand Prix of mid-1980s. Both cars were rebadged Mitsubishi Lambdas, but when their production ended in 1983, it was the moment GM decided to get back to NASCAR and make the G-body slippery through the air.
Had forgotten the ’84 Chrysler Laser fastback until the other day when I stumbled upon it. A very nice design!
https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2014/05/08/lost-cars-of-the-1980s-1984-1986-chrysler-laser
The ’89 Ford Probe liftback was also impressive.
The 60s fastbacks that used clearly defined notchback rear fenders with a shoulder was a big part of their problem. The design needed to be pure like the fastbacks from the 30s and 40s and the ’70 Camaro/Firebird. The ’49 Buick fastback got away with sharing the notchback’s rear fenders because it was a design halfway between the two. The ’74 Mustang II fastback worked because the fuselage design integrated the notchback rear fender shape with the C-pillar.
The fastback “craze” of the 1960s had to be initiated by the 1961 XK-E type Jaguar coupe (not the early roadsters with the hard top), in my opinion. The experiments that led to the Ferrari 250 SWBs and GTEs evolving into the (real) G.T.O.s also had to capture the attention of Bill Mitchell, given his involvement with the Stingray race car. Mitchell’s styling statement was the fastback 1963 coupe. Most agree that Dick Teague’s Tarpon looked better on the American platform than the Classic platform and Chrysler finally achieved balance on the Baccaruda fastback in 1967. The problem with most fastbacks on a long wheelbase is that they appear, at least to my eye, to be tail-heavy. Most consumers wanted cars with trunks, so semi-fastback slippery notch-backs like the 1965-1968 G.M. B-body coupes, rather than the 1966-1967 Dodge Charger with no real enclosed trunk. The flying-buttresses of the 1968 Dodge Charger was a great compromise. Historically, smaller wheelbase cars make better fastbacks as the fenders can be transitioned from the roof and the front / rear proportions are more in harmony, hence the Mustang II looked well-integrated.