Up to speed
A decade on from the end of the Second World War, the motor industry was back in full swing.
New models were appearing in large numbers thanks to the efforts both of established marques and of those which had only just been created.
The variety of their work was incredible, and can clearly be seen in this list of vehicles introduced in 1955.
Following local conventions, we’re treating 1955 as a model year (which might or might not also be the calendar year) for those built in North America, and strictly as a calendar year for those built anywhere else.
The cars are presented in chronological order.
1. Alpine A106
1955 was not only the debut year for the A106, but for the Alpine brand as a whole.
Both were created by Jean Rédélé, owner of a Dieppe-based Renault dealership and a successful rally driver at the wheel of Renault 4CVs.
The A106 used the same engine and gearbox as the 4CV, but had a two-door, glassfibre, coupé body.
A humble machine by today’s standards, the A106 nevertheless led to the A110 (unarguably the world’s most successful rally car in the 1973 season), then eventually to the revitalised Alpine marque operating today under Renault ownership.
2. Chevrolet Task Force
During the 1955 model year, Chevrolet’s first post-war, commercial-vehicle range, the Advance Design, was replaced by the Task Force.
The names would almost have made more sense if they had been applied the other way round.
The Task Force looked outstandingly more modern than its predecessor (partly because of its innovative wraparound windscreen) and, though promoted as a workhorse, offered much greater driver comfort.
Both trucks had exact counterparts in the GMC range, where the New Design was replaced by the Blue Chip.
3. Citroën DS
Whatever their merits, no other vehicle on this list was quite as startling on its introduction as the Citroën DS.
It was powered by a development of a four-cylinder engine also used in the Traction Avant, but that’s where the conventional thinking stopped.
The shape was outstandingly aerodynamic, the rear indicators were mounted near the top of the ’screen so that they could be seen as easily as possible by following drivers, the suspension was hydropneumatic and there was hydraulic assistance for the brakes (whose front discs were mounted inboard), the steering, the clutch and the gearchange.
“A few people may have thought of all those beautiful ideas, but it was real bravery to implement all of them in one car,” said designer Marcello Gandini, one of the judges of this magazine’s competition to find the world’s most beautiful vehicle.
The DS received the greatest number of votes, beating the Jaguar XK120, the Ferrari 275GTB and the Jaguar E-type.
4. Dodge Custom Royal
Among the new Dodges introduced in 1955, the Custom Royal was the most luxurious and, thanks to minor tweaking of its 4.4-litre Red Ram V8 engine, marginally the most powerful.
Properly speaking, the Custom Royal was available only as a sedan, the mechanically identical hardtop and convertible versions being known as Custom Royal Lancer.
In a move which might today cause lips to be pursed and eyebrows to be raised, Dodge created a derivative of the Custom Royal called La Femme, sold with an umbrella, a rain cape, a shoulder bag and a pretty colour scheme, among other supposedly female-friendly features.
It was marketed as being, ‘by appointment to her majesty … the American woman,’ whose enthusiasm for the idea can be judged from the fact that Dodge abandoned it after the 1956 model year.
5. Fiat 600
By moving the engine to the back, Fiat was able to replace its two-seat 500 Topolino with the four-seat 600, even though the cars were almost exactly the same length.
Cheap and practical, the Fiat 600 was an enormous success, and was available in several forms including the extraordinary six-seat Multipla.
600s were built not only by Fiat in Italy but by Neckar in Germany, Zastava in the former Yugoslavia and Seat in Spain, among other examples.
Abarth produced several high-performance derivatives, some of them looking more or less like the standard car, but others fitted with quite different bodies.
6. Ford Escort
For many people, the name Escort refers either to a series of compact European Fords produced from 1968 until almost the end of the 20th century, or to a slightly shorter and later run of North American models.
In fact, Ford first used the name in 1955 for a small estate car related to the Anglia and Prefect saloons.
It had a more upmarket, though mechanically identical, equivalent in the Squire, which was significantly more expensive.
Perhaps for that reason, the Escort was much more popular. Ford built nearly twice as many Escorts as Squires, and while the Squire was abandoned in 1959 the Escort remained on the market for a further two years.
7. Ford Thunderbird
The first of what would become 11 generations of Ford Thunderbird was introduced during the 1955 model year and, unlike the conceptually similar first-generation Chevrolet Corvette, was only ever supplied with a V8 engine.
Ford quickly decided that its potential was limited by the fact that it had only two seats, and in 1958 it introduced a second T-bird which, as well as being considerably larger and more powerful, could accommodate four people.
Sure enough, sales ballooned, and did not return to mid-1950s levels until the introduction of the final, two-seat Thunderbird in 2002.
8. Imperial Crown
Having used Imperial as a model name several times since the 1920s, Chrysler relaunched it as a stand-alone luxury marque in 1955.
The Crown was the largest and most expensive of three models introduced that year, the others being a four-door sedan and a two-door hardtop known as the Newport.
All were designed by Virgil Exner and powered by a 5.4-litre version of what is now considered to be Chrysler’s first Hemi V8 engine, though at the time it was branded as the FirePower.
Imperials were built over five generations until 1975, and then again in a sixth from 1981-’83.
9. Jaguar Mk1
In the same year that it won the Le Mans 24-hour race with the D type, Jaguar entered a new market sector with a car known retrospectively as the Mk1.
The first Jaguar with unibody construction, this compact saloon sat in the space between the marque’s sports cars and the very much larger MkVII.
In 1955, it was known as the 2.4 in reference to the capacity of its XK straight-six engine, a full litre smaller than the XK had been when it first appeared in 1948.
A 3.4 was added to the range in 1957, and two years after that both were replaced by an updated model officially named Mk2.
10. Mercedes-Benz 190SL
Although it was made to resemble the more famous, and slightly earlier, 300SL, the Mercedes-Benz 190SL was a different kind of car – a two-seat tourer rather than an overtly sporting model.
Its structure was based on that of the 180 saloon, but it was powered by a new, 1.9-litre, overhead-cam engine.
Unlike the 300SL, which started out as a gullwing-door coupé and later became a roadster, Mercedes’ 190SL was available as both a roadster with a folding roof or as a coupé with conventional doors and a removable hardtop, with a folding roof available as an option.
The 25,881 examples, most of them intended for the US market, were built from 1955-’63, when both this car and the 300SL were replaced by the first of the Pagoda W113 SLs.
11. Mercury Montclair
The Montclair was introduced in 1955 as the top model for Ford’s Mercury division, above the Monterey and the Custom.
Powered by the V8 engine also used in the equally new Thunderbird (initially measuring 4.8 litres, though this was raised in the second year to 5.1 litres), the Montclair was mostly available either as a convertible or a pillarless coupe.
In 1955, Montclair customers could also choose the Sun Valley, which was simply the coupe with a partly transparent roof, but very few of them appear to have done so.
As elsewhere in the US motor industry at the time, development was so rapid that the Montclair went into its second generation in 1957 and its fifth in 1965, before the nameplate was dropped in 1968.
12. MGA
Replacing the long-running T-type series, which had first appeared in 1936, the MGA was the marque’s first truly modern, post-war sports car.
It was always powered by the BMC B-series engine, though the capacity of this unit was raised from 1.5 to 1.6 litres in 1959.
A Twin Cam version was built in small numbers from 1958-’60, but while this was successful in motorsport it required higher-octane fuel than was generally available at roadside pumps, leading to reputation-threatening reliability issues.
Manufactured for seven years, the MGA was the first MG with a production run of more than 100,000 units, exceeding the total number of MGs built before the Second World War by a factor of more than four.
13. Peugeot 403
In its usual form, the Peugeot 403 was a conventional saloon with three-box ‘ponton’ styling, though it was also available as an estate, a convertible and various types of commercial vehicle.
It quickly became known for its reliability and later, thanks to the introduction of a diesel engine (a rarity for a family car at the time), for its fuel economy.
Following a demand from the French government to increase exports, the Peugeot 403 was also briefly successful in the US until a collapse in American enthusiasm for European cars brought that to a halt in 1961.
Despite this, the 403 convertible became part of US culture in the following decade, when it was often seen being driven by Peter Falk in his role as the lead character in the TV detective series Columbo.
14. Pontiac Safari
With three doors (including the tailgate) and a new V8 engine known as the Strato-Streak, the Safari was the top model in Pontiac’s 1955 station-wagon line-up.
Bearing a factory price of $2962, it was the most expensive Pontiac of that year, and had considerably the lowest production total – only 3760 examples were built, compared with 99,629 of the Catalina Coupe Custom.
A similarly suboptimal price/popularity ratio also applied to the Safari’s exactly contemporary counterpart, the Chevrolet Nomad, and for the 1958 model year General Motors abandoned both of them.
However, Pontiac used the Safari name several times for later station wagons, before dropping it entirely after 1991.
15. Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud
The Silver Cloud was the last Rolls-Royce available both as a complete car and as a rolling chassis ready to accept a body made by an independent coachbuilder.
It made its debut in 1955 with a 4.9-litre, straight-six engine, but this was replaced four years later by the newly available, 6.25-litre L-series V8.
That change led to the car being renamed Silver Cloud II, and it became the Silver Cloud III after a 1962 redesign which included quad headlights and a slightly smaller, though still prominent, radiator grille.
All of the above also applies to the nearly identical Bentley known originally as the S1, and later as the S2 and S3.
16. Saab 93
At first sight, the 93 was very similar to Saab’s first production car, the 92, which had made its debut in 1949.
There were several changes, though, including a vertical rather than a horizontal radiator grille and, more significantly, a three-cylinder, two-stroke engine which, despite having a lower capacity than the 92’s twin-cylinder unit, produced more power.
Two years after its introduction, the 93 became the 93B, which had a single-piece rather than a split windscreen, and in 1959 Saab built a few hundred examples of the 93F, the only model in the series with front-hinged doors.
The 93 was the car that established Saab as a leading contender in international motorsport, thanks partly to Erik Carlsson’s overall victories in the 1957 Thousand Lakes and 1959 Swedish rallies.
17. Sunbeam Rapier
In detail if not in overall body shape, the Sunbeam Rapier resembled the otherwise completely different fourth-generation Studebaker Champion of 1953 – a not entirely surprising development, since the Raymond Loewy studio was involved with the design of both.
It was the first of the Rootes Group’s Audax saloons, followed in 1956 by the Hillman Minx and the Singer Gazelle.
All three were updated many times (Series IV Rapier pictured) before they were discontinued in 1967.
In the dozen years of its existence, the Sunbeam Rapier experienced a dramatic increase in engine capacity from 1390cc to 1725cc, and in some of its Series it was available as a convertible as well as a saloon.
18. Toyota Crown
Toyota claims that the original Crown was the first Japanese car designed and built entirely without the help of foreign manufacturers.
Popular in Japan, no doubt partly because its front and rear bench seats allowed it to carry six people, it was also the marque’s first car to be exported to the USA.
This didn’t go well because the 1.5-litre engine wasn’t powerful enough for American highways, but Toyota responded by raising its capacity to 1.9 litres in 1960.
Crown has since become Toyota’s longest-running nameplate, having entered its 16th generation in 2024.
19. Triumph TR3
The TR3 was an evolution of the TR2 which, despite its name, was the first rather than the second model in a long series of Triumph sports cars.
The TR2’s 1991cc Standard four-cylinder engine was carried over, though during the TR3’s lifetime its capacity was raised to 2138cc.
This larger version, and indeed many other parts of the TR3, were used for the TR4 which, however, looked very different thanks to its Michelotti-styled body.
TR3s were used extensively in competition including, briefly, by future double Formula One drivers’ champion Jim Clark.
20. Volkswagen Karmann Ghia
Named after Karmann, which built it, and Carrozzeria Ghia, which designed the bodywork, Volkswagen’s second passenger car was based on the Beetle despite being a different sort of vehicle altogether.
While the Beetle was an upright saloon, the Karmann Ghia, as it first appeared in 1955, was a sleek coupé, with a convertible being added to the range two years later.
Both versions are known as Type 14. The Type 34 which arrived in 1961 was larger, more expensive and less popular.
The Type 34 did not quite make it to the end of the decade, but the original Karmann Ghia remained in production until the mid-1970s.
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