Cars - Personal luxury car

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	Cars - Personal luxury car

A personal luxury car is a highly styled, luxurious automobile intended for the comfort and satisfaction of its owner/driver, sacrificing passenger space, cargo capacity, and other practical concerns for the sake of style. The personal luxury car has often been a lucrative market segment of the post-World War Two automotive market.

Definition

Personal luxury cars are usually, though not necessarily, two-door coupes or convertibles with two-passenger or 2+2 seating capacity. They are distinguished from GT cars or sports cars by their greater emphasis on comfort and convenience than on performance, although the distinction between a luxury GT and a personal luxury car is often hazy. Personal luxury cars are typically mass producted (rather than custom-bodied), sharing their mechanical components with more prosaic sedans to reduce production costs and increase profitability.

Origins

The antecedents of the personal luxury car are the expensive, often custom-bodied sporting luxury cars of the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most famous of which were built by Bugatti, Delage, Delahaye, Duesenberg, and Mercedes-Benz. Two well-known examples were the Duesenberg SJ and Mercedes SSK: tremendously fast and stratospherically expensive automobiles eschewing the comfort of pure luxury cars while being too large and heavy to be true sports cars. They nonetheless offered distinctive style, impeccable craftsmanship, and strong performance for wealthy buyers (including film and music stars, kings, and gangsters) who wanted to project a dashing image. The Great Depression and World War Two eroded the market for these expensive, bespoke cars, but the postwar era still produced noteworthy examples like the Bentley Continental R Type with its fine two-door body built by H.J. Mulliner. A related, primarily postwar phenomenon was the grand tourer (GT), a relatively comfortable, high-performance car intended for high-speed, long-distance travel. Italy became a major producer of GTs, with marques like Ferrari and Maserati offering distinctive, often custom-bodied models of considerable performance.

Both the bespoke luxury car and the GT were beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest buyers, and the 1950s saw a growing trend in both the United States and Europe towards mass-market "specialty cars" catering to drivers who coveted the image of the bespoke machinery, but who could not afford the cost -- and to wealthier buyers who could afford the genuine article, but disliked the inconvenience and complexity of servicing and repairing it, especially outside of a major urban area. Buyers were also interested in automatic transmission, air conditioning, power steering, and other convenience options not generally offered on GTs or sports cars of the day.

The result was a burdgeoning market for "factory customs," models using standard or mostly standard engines and other mechanical components, but with unique styling. A prominent early example was the 1953 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, whose customized styling gave it a price tag nearly twice that of a standard Cadillac ragtop despite nearly identical underpinnings.

The personal luxury car market segment in the United States was largely defined by the Ford Thunderbird. The first Thunderbird, launched in 1955 and sold through 1957, was a two-seat convertible, but despite its compact size and respectable performance, Ford made no claims that the softly sprung T-bird was a true sports car, calling it a "personal car." Although some Thunderbirds were quite fast for their time, and some successfully competed in various forms of competition, it was more of a compact luxury car than a GT.

In 1958 Ford transformed the Thunderbird into a bulkier, four-seat model with a large array of comfort features and styling gimmicks and found it a tremendous success, outselling any of the earlier, two-seat T-birds. While the four-seat Thunderbirds had only average performance and mediocre handling, their airplane and rocketship-inspired design cues found a receptive audience.

The personal luxury market emerges

Curiously, other U.S. automakers were slow to react to the success of the Thunderbird. It was not until 1962 when Pontiac offered the Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick offered the Wildcat, followed the next year by the Buick Riviera, that the T-Bird had serious competition. By 1970 the segment was growing, and would achieve even greater success in the later 1970s.

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