It happens that I've been car-conscious as long as I can remember. But didn't become seriously so until the 1950s when I passed through junior high school, high school and most of my time at university, then in the 1960s while in the Army and grad school. Those were years when automobile styling was particularly varied and interesting both in Europe and the USA. Those American car designs are seared into my memory, the foreign ones not so much. The foreign cars I know fairly well are the ones imported to America along with exotic ones featured in Road & Track magazine and elsewhere.
On the television program cited above, many of the cars shown were not imported to the USA. I was particularly struck by a rear-quarter view of a car that seemed large, luxurious and like nothing I'd seen before. It was a British Ford Zodiac Mk. III saloon from 1962-1966, the executive version of the Ford Zephyr (Wikipedia entry here). The reality was less large and luxurious that it first seemed. Wheelbase was 107 inches (2718 mm) -- not small, yet hardly in 2019 Bentley Flying Spur territory: 125.7 inches (3194 mm). That said, it looked impressive on TV next to more everyday English cars in the same scene.
Styling credit for Mark III Zephyrs and Zodiacs goes to Roy Brown, who survived his background of having been in charge of Ford's Edsel styling.
Lets' take a look.
This was the appearance I noticed on that TV show. What caught my eye besides its unfamiliarity were the angular rear fenders, the six-window passenger greenhouse, and those horizontal chrome strips.
Showing side views of the Mark III design. The main difference is that the Zephyr has four windows and a Ford Thunderbird style wide C-pillar.
This is the four-cylinder Zephyr with its simple grille.
Six-cylinder Zephyr grilles had a central, vertical divider and more elaborate framing.
Dropping back a few years. The horizontal strips at the rear were introduced to better distinguish Zodiacs from Zephyrs and were carried over to the Mark IIIs. Note that the passenger greenhouse window design is quite similar to that of 1952 American Fords.
Now for an abbreviated walkaround. Zodiacs were given quad-headlights (ugh!) and a different grille bar theme.
2 comments:
I also looked these up because of that show. When I was a little kid I was aware of English and German Fords, despite not many of them being around in the US. Some British Ford models were definitely imported but not the German ones until the Capri, I think. But American GIs did bring various European cars back with them. British Fords were like 3/4 (or less) scale model US Fords in various ways.
Sometimes I keep hoping for a closeup of a badge to identify some obscure (at least to us) British car on these shows.
It looks like the front end bodywork on these was designed around the 1962 Ford Zephyr 4 Mk. III separate grille/headlights and then the rest had to fill in the grille-accommodating shape of the hood. Similar to the Jeep Wagoneer, which kept the original hood until the end despite not having the center grille it was designed around for most of that time.
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