2026 Greenwood Car Show: General Motors

It's my biggest car spotting day of the year, the Greenwood car show. Let's start with GM.

With GTOs, you may be looking at a "tribute car" which is a polite name for "fake". Take an ordinary Pontiac LeMans, update the engine and the badges, and you've got a much more valuable GTO. Both this 1969 GTO Judge and this 1968 convertible appear authentic to me, though the Judge doesn't have the correct air cleaner to make the ram air induction system work. Fun fact: When the Judge was first offered, it only came in this color.

I've posted this incredible car before, but there's nothing more amazing than seeing a fuel-injected 1963 Corvette split-window.

Restored 1957 Bel Air convertibles like this one sometimes go for over $100K now. The hardtop coupes aren't much less. Always interesting to compare them to a car that's never been restored, like the sedan here. That off-pink color looks odd today but was popular in the 50s.

Very nice 1966 Sting Ray.

The 1970 Chevelle Super Sport is considered the pinnacle of GM muscle. This one has the 396. The truly legendary examples have the 454.

This 1964 Pontic LeMans coupe has 326 badges, but it appears the owner has dropped a 389 tri-power engine under the hood.

This 1948 Buick is just a great looking car.

Tweet

1957 Chevrolet 3200 Pickup Truck

This truck looks like it's trying to tell me stories about 66 years of traveling the pacific northwest. The 3200 was the long-bed model. I understand that the length and width of the beds on Chevy trucks stayed the same for 30 years. Note that the grill is painted, not chrome. That was optional from the factory, I assume it was slightly cheaper. This was the last year before they went to four headlights.

Tweet

1957 Chevrolet Corvette fuel-injected

At least $150,000 worth of ultra-rare Corvette just sitting in the parking lot at South Center Mall. With the 4-speed no less. No armed guards or anything. If it were mine, I wouldn't let it out of my sight for a second.

 

 

Tweet

1964 Studebaker Lark Daytona convertible, 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk

Two exceptionally rare Studebakers I spotted on my trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. The Studebaker plant in South Bend, Indiana closed in December of 1963. This car could have been one of 417 Daytona convertibles made there for the 1964 model year, or one of 286 made at the company's Canadian plant. This was the last Studebaker convertible made, and the Canadian plant closed as well in 1966.

The Golden Hawk was possibly the fastest car made in America, built with a Packard V-8 in 1956 and a supercharged Studebaker V-8 in 1957 and 1958.

Tweet

1957 Ford Fairlane convertible, 1961 Ford Thunderbird and other clean used cars

 The '77 Malibu from my last post was from the Shoreline used car dealer who happens to sell a lot of vintage cars. Don't know where he gets them.

 

Ford sold more cars in 1957 than Chevy, but a '57 Bel Air convertible is worth three times as much as the Fairlane convertible from that year.

 

There's no mistaking a Thunderbird for any other car.

 

More from the bigger is better era: 1962 Chevrolet Impala with 283 v-8.

1977 Chevrolet El Camino. If the classic car-truck is your jam, and you're on a budget.

Tweet

1957 Cadillac Coupe DeVille

The giant slept deeply. In the giant's dream, all the gas stations on Route 66 were open again, and all selling 100-octane premium leaded gasoline. The giant roared down the desert highway to a vanishing point on the western horizon. And the giant dreamed on.

Cadillac's first all-new car since 1948. In 1957 the Caddy 365 V-8 produced a gravel-crushing 400 ft. lbs. of torque.

Tweet

The Beautiful 1957 Ford Thunderbird... and the Hideous 1958

Ford replaced the two-seater Thunderbird in 1958 with a four-seater that looked like a mutated catfish. And it was wildly successful, far outselling the previous model. Unbelievable.

Tweet

Sunset in Seattle - in traffic behind a '57 Nomad

Tweet

1957 Pontiac Safari

Everybody loves the Chevy Nomad, the "hardtop" 2-door wagon sold from 1955-57. But few are aware that Pontiac sold the same car with different trim. Slightly more than 20,000 Nomads were sold during the 3-year production run compared to only 9,000 Safaris.

Tweet

1957 MG MGA

The British automobile industry was playing catch up with car makers from other countries in the 1950s. The MGA was the first car in its T-series that did not have a frame and body made partially of wood. The floorboards, however, were made of plywood.

Tweet

1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner hardtop convertible

The Ford Motor Company struggled in the early postwar years, but by the mid-1950s it was conducting business in a way that might politely be described as "overconfident".

Now this might be hard to believe, but in the 1955 Ford was still a privately-held firm, with the Ford family itself owning 25.5%. Ford also owned its own iron mines and steel plants and made every part in house, with the exception of tires. Ford went public in early 1956, and the success of its initial public offering, which raised $660 million (about $6.5 billion in today's dollars), seems to have gone to its head. Specifically:

* In the fall of 1957, Ford launched the Edsel program, often considered the biggest product launch failure of all time. By the late-1959 cancellation of the project, Ford had lost $350 million. And one wonders how they managed to lose that much, given that:
(1) Ford promised that the Edsel would be a whole new kind of car, when really it was just a Ford or Mercury with a new skin.
(2) Ford did no studies on whether the Edsel could be profitable.
(3) Ford never test-marketed the vehicle and proceeded under the assumption that buyers would like it when it hit the showroom (they didn't).
(4) Incredibly, Ford didn't dedicate any assembly lines to the early Edsels, so they were built on the same lines as Fords and Mercurys, causing confusion as workers attempted to switch back and forth between parts bins and assembly routines, resulting in cars of poor quality.

* In 1956 Ford created a Continental division to sell its new super-premium Continental Mark II, a car which cost $10,000, or close to $100,000 today. One has to wonder what the point was, given that even at that price, Ford lost $1,000 on every Continental Mark II.

* Last but not least, we have the car pictured. The 1957 model was one of the most successful Ford products of all time, outselling Chevrolet and making Ford the number one seller for the first time in many years. But take a look at the Skyliner hardtop convertible, another short-lived project into which Ford sank a lot of money. From Wikipedia:

"The Skyliner top has seven reversible electric motors, four lift jacks, a series of relays, ten limit switches, ten solenoids, four locking mechanisms for the roof and two locking mechanisms for the trunk lid, and a total of 610 ft (185.9 m) of wiring."

Potential buyers asked the obvious questions: What happens when one of those electric motors rusts? Or one of the ten solenoids wears out? How long can this car last? And Ford had anticipated these questions. So guess what? They completely over-engineered the whole system so as to guarantee long-term reliability resulting in, again, a car on which Ford lost money on every copy.

Tweet

1957 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon 4X4

Sure, why not?

Tweet

1969 Lynx-Jaguar XKSS

A genunie 1957 XKSS is worth $18 million. I'm not kidding. The XKSS was the street-legal version of the Jaguar D-type race car, and only 16 were made. This car looks like the genuine article, but as far as I can tell there were no left-hand drive examples of the XKSS. And who would drive an $18 million car over Seattle potholes, right?

I think this is a Lynx-Jaguar XKSS, a car created by putting a custom-built body and XKSS-reproduction parts atop a regular Jaguar E-Series chassis. This car was no cheap replica, and it's probably worth about $500K.

Tweet

1957 Ford Thunderbird

To see a car like this in original, unrestored condition is very unusual.

Tweet

1957 Chevrolet 210

Everybody's favorite needs no introduction.

Tweet

1957 Chevrolet 3100 pickup truck

Tweet