Assisting Hershey were Bob Maguire and Damon Woods, both now deceased, and John Najjar and Art Querfeld, both now retired in Florida. The 1955 Fords were done under Frank Hershey, who was fired by George Walker as soon as he took over Ford's growing styling department in 1955. They were all experimenting with styling themes that would appear on a number of advanced designs and production automobiles. David Ash, Frank Hershey, and John Najjar. Some of the stylists who worked on the Mystere were Bill Boyer, L. Red and white was a popular color choice for the Oros contends there were a number of styling 'themes' being developed at the time that were carried out on the Mystere, as well as on many production automobiles. Joe Oros, who worked for George Walker's outside styling group at the time and later became director of Ford styling, claims that the Mystere did not directly inspire production automobiles. This was a non-running fiberglass styling study/show car that went completely into the astrals and back to incorporate numerous styling cues for 1955 and later FoMoCo production cars - but in far more extreme versions than ever made it to anyone's driveway. It could also be argued that the immediate inspiration for Ford's Crown Victoria was the Mystere. It had an all-fiberglass scarlet body and an all-glass (or Plexiglas) roof with a tiara of stainless steel. It could be argued that the original inspiration for the Crown Victoria was the Lincoln XL-500 fully operational show car done by Bill Schmidt and Elwood Engel for Ford's 50th Anniversary in 1953. Also featured on Crown Vics were a visored stainless windshield molding, vinyl pseudo bucket-seat interiors in candy-flavored colors, blinding chrome and bright stainless-steel trim at every curve and corner, and a rear-seat center arm rest. Crown Vics looked longer than the standard hardtop, although they weren't - all 1955 Ford passenger cars measured 198.5 inches overall and rode the same 115.5-inch wheel-base as in 1954. The Crown Vic's windshield was also lower, shared with the Sunliner convertible. This greenhouse, incidentally, was shared with the 1955 Mercury Montclair hardtops, while Mercury's Custom and Monterey models got the taller Victoria roofline. Ford prosaically called it a 'bright metal roof transverse molding.' Wrapping from the base of the B-pillar location over to the other B-pillar position, it was fixed - so the Crown Vic wasn't really a 'true' hardtop with an unobstructed side view.Ĭompared to the standard Victoria, the Crown Victoria's roof was lower (the first Ford closed car under five feet high), much flatter, and longer (the rear pillars were swept back an extra three inches). The 'Crown Vic,' as it has been affectionately nicknamed, was a stunning 'non-hardtop hardtop' featuring a stainless steel tiara (or 'basket handle') wrapped over the roof of the hardtop body. Matching the Chevrolet Nomad wagon in sheer freshness of design was Ford's Crown Victoria, king of the new Ford Fairlane series, named after Henry Ford Senior's Fair Lane estate in Dearborn. Plymouth, as ever, took the back seat in output with 705,455 units, and while this was an impressive 240,000-unit gain over 1954, it wasn't quite enough to overcome fast-charging Buick's 737,035 model-year output. Model-year production, however, was far more decisive: 1,704,677 for Chevrolet, versus Ford's 1,451,157. This brought about endless claims by both as to who really was 'USA-1.' Ford thought it had a chance to lick Chevy in 1955, but when the smoke settled it was Chevrolet with 1,640,081 sales to Ford's 1,573,276, a lead of some 67,000 units. But in the calendar-year sales race, Chevrolet outdid Ford, 1,417,453 to 1,400,440, or just over 17,000 units. In 1954, Ford had actually outproduced Chevy (barely) for the model year: 1,165,942 versus 1,143,561. But overall, 1955 was a banner year for the industry, with production just a hair under eight million units. It was murder on the dealers, and left the independents with no choice but to merge or become history. With the high-performance race already in high gear, the sales contest between the 'Big Two' was off and running in 1954. Road tester Tom McCahill, writing in Mechanix Illustrated, called it 'loaded with more saleable angles than a shipload of Marilyn Monroes.'

Little wonder that Ford's smart new Crown Victoria was to become a classic symbol of the times, if not one of the year's hottest sellers. It was the year of wraparound windshields, tubeless tires, flying saucer wheel discs, and more options, vivid colors, and flashy two-tones than a month of Canadian sunsets. Was a wrap-over-the-roof tiara that sportedīlack slots at the rear. The 1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria's claim to fame

Ford crown victoria