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Personal luxury car
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A personal luxury car is a marketing term used to describe highly styled, luxury vehicle intended for the comfort and satisfaction of its owner/driver, sacrificing passenger space, cargo capacity, and other practical concerns for the sake of style.
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Encyclopedia
A personal luxury car is a marketing term used to describe highly styled, luxury vehicle 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 II automotive market.
Definition
Personal luxury cars are usually, though not necessarily, two-door coupes or convertibles with two-passenger or 2+2 seating capacity, sometimes with more seats. 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 produced (rather than custom-bodied), sharing their mechanical components with more prosaic sedans to reduce production costs and increase profitability. A modern example is the Ford Thunderbird. The Thunderbird was never a sports car and since the marketers at Ford Motor Company basically defined "personal luxury," they could build it any fashion they wanted. A report in Road & Track magazine explained "[a]s a result of their own surveys, Ford decided that their personal car should be a four-seater." The company "considered the four-place Thunderbird hardtop to be a refinement of the personal luxury idea, even though the car was considerably less personal than its two-seat forerunner."
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 prestigious of which were built by Alfa Romeo, 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 II 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. Alfa Romeo never recovered from the Second World War. This void was filled by Ferrari.
Luxury and reliability over sport
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 where foreign car dealerships were few and far between. 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. In its August, 1967 issue, Motor Trend magazine noted that the domestic "luxury speciality cars" of the day (Ford Thunderbird, Buick Riviera, Oldsmobile Toronado, Cadillac Eldorado and Pontiac Grand Prix) appealed to buyers who wanted reliability and durability not found in the exotic European imports of the 1950s along with those aforementioned American-style options which kept them buying American cars." M/T added that "Motorists of just about every stripe can find a now car with pleasing and distinctive lines, good performance and all the things that go to make a car enjoyable."
Factory customs
The result was a burgeoning 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 rag top 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. This market segment was previously the province of the Studebaker Golden Hawk, a highly styled hardtop in the GT tradition with muscle car performance. 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, as well as the Studebaker Avanti, that the T-Bird had serious competition. In 1963, "GM design chief Bill Mitchell's 'personal luxury' land yacht set sail, with the Riviera squarely aimed at Ford's big Thunderbird in the four-place sports coupe marketplace." American Motors introduced the Marlin, a full-sized sports fastback that was based on an intermediate platform. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this market segment was growing, and would achieve even greater success in the later 1970s.
While Europe's slower economic recovery meant that it did not venture as much into this market until the 1960s, there were exceptions like the DKW 1000Sp, the custom-bodied Alfa Romeo 1900 Sprint, BMW 507, and Mercedes 190SL were popular in the personal luxury market, albeit on a smaller scale. By the 1960s models like the Jaguar E-Type, BMW CS coupes, Citroën SM, and Mercedes SL roadsters, while more expensive and somewhat smaller than their U.S. equivalents, were very much aimed at the same type of market. Indeed, the initial 6-series BMW's of 1977 were very comparable to models like the Riviera: they shared most of their mechanical components with contemporary sedans, offering very similar (and even slightly inferior) performance and less practicality at a higher price, but their distinctive style and image made them desirable automobiles.
The decline of the muscle car in the early 1970s coincided with a strong upswing in the personal luxury segment, as buyers shifted emphasis from performance to comfort, although there were some muscle cars that could be classified as personal luxury, such as the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, the Dodge Charger (SE models). The models of that time, including the Lincoln Continental Mark series, Cadillac Eldorado, Chrysler Cordoba and Ford Thunderbird, largely abandoned any pretense of sport for a more intimate, luxury-oriented feel, with plush interiors and vintage styling cues like Rolls Royce-style radiator grilles, opera windows, and vinyl tops.
Decline
American 'personal luxury' cars began to die out in the late 1980s as younger buyers moved toward imported European and Japanese cars, or toward sport utility vehicles. After years of steadily declining sales, the Oldsmobile Toronado died after 1992, the Lincoln Mark after 1998, the Buick Riviera after 1999 and the Cadillac Eldorado after 2002. An effort by Ford to reintroduce a retro-themed Thunderbird in 2002 failed after three years of sluggish sales.
Nevertheless, imported personal luxury cars from European marques such as BMW and Mercedes and Japanese manufacturers Lexus SC and Infiniti continue to sell well in spite of their typically considerably higher prices than their failed American competition.
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