For some car companies always on the brink in the 1950s and 1960s, being clever with designs paid dividends. Getting more with less tooling was one way to economize car manufacturing. Companies like Checker designed its car bodies so all four doors were made from one single stamping, with holes for hinges and door handles requiring a secondary stamping process making them either left or right doors. So if you were designing for economy, this was one very big way to get more with less. AMC’s Design VP Richard Teague went even further to help spread the company’s ever-shrinking development budgets. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Teague’s specialty is styling on a shoestring.”
A veteran of Packard, GM, and Chrysler, he’s shown here with his 1965 Cavalier concept that, if produced, would have used only two fender stampings and two door stampings. The right front fender was also the left rear, and conversely the left front fender was the right rear. Same deal with the doors. The left front door was also the right rear, and right front the left rear. Top sail panels defined the rear of the top. A grille fit into the opening in the front, or a filler panel and taillights into the rear cavity. Tooling, manufacturing, and stocking savings would be bountiful with this approach. It’s hard to see how linear and clean the Cavalier was in the limited archive images we have, but the idea of less tooling eventually reaped benefits with the Gremlin—a truncated Hornet, the AMX—a truncated Javelin, and was also how AMC spread its unibody stampings across both intermediate Rebels and luxury Ambassadors in the 1960s and 1970s. While we know all of the car companies share some inner structures or “platforms” today, this took some sneaky conjuring to pull off, which it did surprisingly well.
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