Buick

In the late 1950s, GM lacked a personal luxury car to compete with the highly successful Ford Thunderbird. To fill this gap, an experimental Cadillac design, the XP-715, was created. When Cadillac passed on the venture in 1960, the project was passed on to Buick. It was again introduced as a concept car called the Buick Riviera Silver Arrow. The production Riviera was introduced in October 1962, as a 1963 model. The elegant styling sported the new "Coke bottle look" introduced the year before on the Studebaker Avanti. Inside, the Riviera featured a luxurious four-place cabin with front bucket seats and bucket-style seats in the rear. 

The Riviera was radically redesigned for the 1971 model year with flowing and dramatic "boat-tail" styling, inspired by the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray coupé. Large, round wheel openings were intended to convey more of a sporty air. Despite these features, Riviera sales for 1971 dropped to an all-time low.

For the 1974 model year, Buick replaced its distinctive 'boat tail' roofline with a more conventional-looking "Colonnade" treatment. This turned the car from a hardtop coupé into a pillared coupé, as it featured wide B pillars and fixed quarter opera windows. Thus modified, the car looked far less distinctive than its predecessors. The revised styling did not improve sales, which fell to 20,129 in 1974, although it is impossible to determine how much this was a result of the energy crisis and how much was due to the tame appearance.