The 1960s opened with Detroit's new compact cars and closed with muscle cars and pony cars built for speed. In between came the Mustang, jet-age turbine cars lent to ordinary families, rotary engines and fiberglass dune buggies, and a fierce public fight over car safety that ended in the first federal safety standards. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments of that decade.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1960s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1How Ford traded a millionth Mustang for its first
On the tile: Mustang No. 11964-1966
Three days before the Ford Mustang's official debut on April 17, 1964, a 33-year-old airline pilot named Stanley Tucker bought a white convertible at George Parsons Ford in St. John's, Newfoundland. It was a preproduction car known as Serial Number One, and Ford soon asked for it back. Tucker said no. By 1966, with nearly a million Mustangs sold, Ford made a better offer: trade it for the one-millionth Mustang, fully optioned his way. Tucker marked the whole option sheet with one big X. Serial Number One now belongs to The Henry Ford.
General Motors had a rule: no engine larger than 330 cubic inches in its midsize cars. A Pontiac team led by chief engineer John DeLorean wanted to put the big 389 V8 from Pontiac's full-size cars into the midsize Tempest anyway. Their loophole was that the rule said nothing about options, so the car was sold as an option package for the Tempest LeMans, costing about $300. DeLorean borrowed the name GTO from Ferrari. Doubtful sales managers limited the first run to 5,000 cars. Buyers took 32,450 in the 1964 model year.
Porsche unveiled its new sports car at the Frankfurt motor show in 1963 as the 901. Series production began in September 1964, and the next month the car went to the Paris Motor Show, where Peugeot objected. The French company said it held the rights to car names made of three digits with a zero in the middle. Porsche's answer, credited to designer Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, was simply to double the 1. According to Porsche, 82 cars had been built as 901s before the change. The 911 name has stayed ever since.
4An overnight dash to Geneva in a brand-new Jaguar
On the tile: E-TypeMarch 1961
At the Jaguar E-Type's launch at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1961, demand for test drives swamped Jaguar's press team, so company boss Sir William Lyons sent for another car. Test driver Norman Dewis was testing it at a proving ground in England when the call came. He left Coventry that evening, crossed the Channel by ferry and drove through the night, reaching Geneva by the next morning. Instead of resting, he was sent straight out to give demonstration drives. That car, 77 RW, is now the oldest surviving open E-Type.
In February 1961, Studebaker hired designer Raymond Loewy to create a sporty car, fast. Loewy set up a small team in a rented house in Palm Springs, California, and they finished a scale model in about a month. The Avanti, with a fiberglass body and disc brakes, debuted in April 1962. But Studebaker was struggling, and it closed its South Bend plant in December 1963 after building about 4,600 Avantis. Two local dealers, Nate Altman and Leo Newman, then bought the name and molds and kept building the car by hand as the Avanti II.
Built in Germany from 1961 to 1968, the Amphicar looked like a small convertible on land and became a boat in the water. Only 3,878 were made. President Lyndon Johnson kept a Lagoon Blue one at his ranch in Texas and used it to startle guests. With an unsuspecting visitor aboard, he would head for the steep bank of a lake, shout that the brakes had failed and roll straight into the water. Then, to the guest's great relief, the car simply floated and motored along like a boat.
Toyota's 2000GT, developed with Yamaha, was a sleek coupe, and only a few hundred were built. When it was cast in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, there was a problem: Sean Connery, who stood over six feet tall, did not fit comfortably, and the cramped cabin made filming tricky. So Toyota built two open-top versions for the film, reportedly in about two weeks. They had no folding roof at all. They remain the only open-top 2000GTs Toyota ever officially produced.
The story goes that in 1962 Carroll Shelby had just one Cobra, CSX2000, and plenty of magazines wanting to test one. So, the tale says, he had it repainted between visits, red, then blue, then yellow, so editors would think a whole fleet existed. The car's 2016 auction catalog repeats the story. The evidence is thinner. No published photos from 1962 appear to show it in any color but bare aluminum and yellow, and a crack in the paint on one door reveals only yellow beneath today's blue.
In 1961 Japan's trade ministry proposed rules that could have kept new companies out of the car business. Soichiro Honda, whose company was known for motorcycles, fought them hard. On June 5, 1962, at Suzuka Circuit, Honda showed two tiny vehicles: a sports car and a mini pickup truck. The truck, the T360, went on sale first, in August 1963, with a lively double overhead cam four-cylinder engine. The S500 sports car followed in October, and the little S360 roadster shown at Suzuka was never sold at all.
From October 1963 to January 1966, Chrysler lent 50 Turbine Cars to ordinary drivers. Each got one free for three months, paying only for fuel, and 203 drivers in 133 cities took part, logging more than a million miles. The turbine engine had no pistons and could run on almost anything, from diesel and kerosene to peanut oil. Drivers liked its smoothness and low maintenance but noticed sluggish acceleration and poor fuel economy. When the program ended, Chrysler destroyed most of the cars. Only nine survive.
In 1962 General Motors unveiled two turbocharged cars within a few weeks. Chevrolet showed a turbocharged Corvair Monza Spyder at the Chicago Auto Show, and on April 20 Oldsmobile answered in New York with the F-85 Jetfire. Its small all-aluminum V8 made 215 horsepower, one for every cubic inch. The Jetfire also needed a drink of its own, Turbo-Rocket Fluid, a mix of water and methanol injected to fight engine knock. When the fluid ran out, a valve cut back the boost. Oldsmobile dropped the Jetfire after 1963.
Bill Lear had helped build Motorola into a leading car radio maker in the 1930s, and in 1963 his new Learjet business jet made its first flight. By 1965 he had also developed a new music cartridge with eight tracks, improving on a four-track design from Earl Muntz. Ford agreed to offer Lear's Stereo 8 players as optional equipment on its 1966 models, and 65,000 were installed that year alone. One history of sound recording calls it the first recorded tape format to reach a true national mass market.
Four-wheel drive and anti-lock brakes are common today, but in 1966 the small British firm Jensen put both into a fast, luxurious grand touring car. The FF was named for the Ferguson Formula, a four-wheel-drive system developed by Ferguson Research, and a 6.3-liter Chrysler V8 took it past 120 mph. Its Dunlop Maxaret anti-lock system had been created for aircraft, to stop wheels from locking and skidding under hard braking. In five years of production, only 320 FFs were made.
Electronic fuel injection had a shaky start. An earlier Bendix system, offered by Chrysler for 1958, proved so unreliable that cars were refitted with ordinary carburetors. Bosch tried again, and on September 14, 1967, at the Frankfurt motor show, it unveiled the Jetronic, first fitted to Volkswagen 1600s bound for the United States. Volkswagen needed it: precise electronic control of the fuel helped the engine meet California's strict emission rules. Bosch calls Jetronic the first electronic gasoline injection system to go into mass production.
Painted lane lines were hard to see at night and in the rain, so in the 1950s a California highway engineer and former chemistry professor, Elbert Botts, oversaw research into raised lane markers. Early glass versions broke loose and left exposed nails that punctured tires, until a special epoxy glue fixed the problem. Botts died in 1962, and his work was filed away. It was later revived, and by 1966 California required the little round dots on its highways wherever snow did not fall. Drivers who drift feel them rumble under the tires.
In April 1963, Toyo Kogyo, the Hiroshima company now called Mazda, set up a rotary engine research department of 47 engineers with an average age of 25. Their director, Kenichi Yamamoto, likened them to the 47 samurai of Ako, heroes of a famous Japanese tale. Their worst problem was chatter marks scraped into the engine's housing, which Mazda engineers called the nail marks of the Devil. They cured it with seals made of carbon infused with aluminum. The result, the two-rotor Cosmo Sport, went on sale on May 30, 1967.
Bruce Meyers was a California boat builder who knew fiberglass. In 1964 he used it for a car: a fiberglass body on Volkswagen Beetle running gear, with a shorter wheelbase than a Beetle's. It became the Meyers Manx. In April 1967 Meyers and his friend Ted Mangels drove one the length of Baja California, from La Paz to Tijuana, in 34 hours and 45 minutes, beating the record held by motorcycles. That fall a Manx won the first Mexican 1000, the race that became the Baja 1000. Other companies built an estimated quarter of a million copies or more.
Ford's showpiece at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair was the Seattle-ite XXI, a name that blended Seattle and satellite, with XXI for the 21st century. Designer Alex Tremulis, who had earlier styled the Tucker, gave it six wheels, with two pairs up front that both steered and drove. It promised fingertip steering, a computer navigation and map system, and interchangeable power units, perhaps even a compact nuclear one someday. There was a catch: publicity photos made it look full size, but it was only ever shown as a three-eighths-scale model.
In November 1965 a lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed. It argued that unsafe car design, not just careless drivers, was a real problem in highway safety, and it highlighted the handling of General Motors' 1960 to 1963 Chevrolet Corvair. Around the book's release, GM hired an attorney, who chose a private investigation firm to look for evidence that could discredit Nader. When the scheme was exposed, GM president James Roche apologized at a Senate hearing on March 22, 1966. The uproar turned the book into a huge bestseller, the opposite of what GM had wanted.
In 1962 Ford stylist Gale Halderman was busy meeting the deadline for the full-size 1965 Ford, so he drew his ideas for a small, sporty car at home. Design executive Joe Oros picked one of Halderman's sketches, a two-door with a long hood and a short rear deck, and the team refined it into the Mustang. Halderman had grown up on a farm in Tipp City, Ohio, and spent 40 years at Ford. After he retired in 1994, he opened a Mustang museum on his grandparents' old property in Tipp City.
Robert McNamara joined Ford in 1946 as one of the Whiz Kids, young former military officers hired to help the struggling company. He rose to run its car division and backed a practical compact, the Ford Falcon, which was unveiled in September 1959 as a 1960 model and sold 435,676 in its first year. On November 9, 1960, he was named president of the Ford Motor Company. About a month later he accepted President-elect John F. Kennedy's offer to become Secretary of Defense.
When California set up a board in 1960 to control pollution from cars, one original member was Arie Haagen-Smit, a Caltech chemist who had identified the compounds behind the flavor of pineapples. Beginning in 1948 he showed that most of California's smog formed when exhaust from cars and industry reacted with sunlight. Oil refineries hired an expert to dispute him, so he mixed flasks of artificial smog in front of audiences. California set the nation's first tailpipe emission standards in 1966, and in 1968 he became the first chair of its new Air Resources Board.
In 1960 Pat Moss, sister of the racing driver Stirling Moss, and her co-driver Ann Wisdom entered the Liège-Rome-Liège, a 96-hour rally of about 2,200 miles through Germany, Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia. Their Austin-Healey 3000 needed a new gearbox along the way, and Moss drove for nearly 90 hours with almost no break. Only 13 teams finished. Moss and Wisdom finished first overall, ahead of every other crew, and became the first all-female crew to win the grueling event.
In 1963 Donna Mae Mims won the Sports Car Club of America's national championship in the H Production class, driving a pink Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite. The SCCA calls her the first woman to win one of its national road racing championships. She was hard to miss. She raced in a pink driving suit, a pink helmet and a pink wig, with Think Pink lettered on the back of her car, and she was known as the Pink Lady. She also raced in endurance events at Daytona and Sebring with Suzy Dietrich and Janet Guthrie.
The Batmobile of the 1966 Batman TV series started life as a Ford concept car. The Lincoln Futura, styled by Bill Schmidt after sharks and manta rays he had seen while diving, was built in Italy for $250,000 and first shown in 1955. Ford later sold it to Hollywood customizer George Barris for one dollar. Given a tight deadline by the show's producer, Barris turned it into the Batmobile, painted gloss black with glowing orange trim. In 2013 it sold at auction for more than $4 million.
Craig Breedlove's Spirit of America was powered by a surplus military jet engine. In October 1964, on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, he became the first person to reach 500 mph on wheels. Then his braking parachutes failed, and the car veered through telephone poles and into a salt pond. He climbed out through the roof hatch. His duel with Art Arfons sent the record back and forth, and on November 15, 1965, Breedlove averaged 600.601 mph, the first record over 600.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, born in 1916 near Cento, Italy, went into business after World War II building low-cost tractors from the parts of old military vehicles. In 1963 he founded Automobili Lamborghini to build grand touring cars, with a bull on the badge for his zodiac sign, Taurus. Three years later came the car that made the name. The Miura, unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1966, had a V12 engine mounted crosswise and was named for a famous breed of Spanish fighting bulls. Lamborghini calls it the first true supercar.
Henry Ford II unveiled the Ford Mustang at the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, on April 17, 1964, the same day it reached showrooms. The night before, Ford ran commercials for it on all three major TV networks at once, and the car made the covers of both Time and Newsweek. Prices started at $2,368. Buyers ordered about 22,000 that first weekend. In Garland, Texas, 15 people bid on a dealer's only Mustang, and the winner slept in it until his check cleared. Ford sold more than 400,000 in the first year.
At the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, Ford's pavilion offered a ride created by Walt Disney's team. Visitors climbed into one of more than 100 new Ford convertibles, including the just-launched Mustang, and traveled past dinosaurs and the dawn of humankind before arriving in a futuristic Space City. For the 1965 season, Walt Disney recorded a new narration himself. Almost 15 million people took the twelve-minute trip through time. When the fair closed, the dinosaurs moved to Disneyland, where they became the Primeval World diorama seen from the Disneyland Railroad.
On September 9, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed two highway safety laws in the White House Rose Garden before about 200 guests. One, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, let the federal government set safety standards for new cars. It had passed both houses of Congress without a single vote against it. Sitting quietly near the back was Ralph Nader, whose book had helped push it through. The President shook his hand briefly, without any sign of recognition, and when the signing pens ran out, an aide gave Nader a ceremonial pen.
On June 19, 1966, Ford GT40s finished first, second and third at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first overall win there for an American manufacturer. Ford wanted a photo of its leading cars crossing the line together, so Ken Miles, in the lead, slowed to let Bruce McLaren, who shared a car with Chris Amon, pull alongside. But officials would not allow a dead heat. McLaren's car had started farther back on the grid, so it had covered slightly more distance, and it was declared the winner. Miles had already won at Daytona and Sebring that year.
On June 11, 1967, Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Ford Mark IV. On the podium, Gurney was handed a bottle of champagne. Instead of simply drinking it, he shook it hard and sprayed everyone within reach, including Henry Ford II, team manager Carroll Shelby and the photographers. The race's organizers credit him with starting a tradition now seen at races around the world. Photographer Flip Schulke took the signed bottle home, used it as a lamp base and years later gave it back to Gurney.
At the 1967 Indianapolis 500, Andy Granatelli's STP car had no piston engine at all. It used a Pratt & Whitney turbine, mounted beside the driver, with power sent to all four wheels. Parnelli Jones grabbed the lead and led 171 laps. Then, with only about eight miles to go, a transmission bearing failed and he coasted into the pits. A. J. Foyt won instead. Soon afterward, racing officials cut the air intake allowed for turbines. The car was later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
The 1968 film Bullitt is remembered for a car chase of about ten minutes, as Steve McQueen's Mustang GT fastback and a Dodge Charger race each other through the streets of San Francisco. Two Mustangs were used: a jump car for the stunts and a hero car for McQueen's own close-up driving. The hero car later passed into private hands, and in 1977 McQueen himself wrote to its owner hoping to get it back. He was turned down. When the car resurfaced in 2018, it became the 21st vehicle on the National Historic Vehicle Register.
The 1966 Monte Carlo Rally ended with Minis first, second and third, led by Timo Mäkinen. Officials then inspected the British cars so closely that, Paddy Hopkirk recalled, they counted the teeth on the gears. Their headlights used single-filament bulbs instead of the dipping bulbs of showroom cars, which officials ruled broke the regulations. The Minis were disqualified, along with the Ford Cortina that finished fourth. Victory went to Pauli Toivonen's fifth-place Citroën DS, and he looked rather bewildered holding the trophy. Many onlookers felt the Minis had been robbed. BMC came back to win in 1967.
To cast the star of The Love Bug, Disney producer Bill Walsh lined up several small cars where studio employees would pass on their way to lunch. People kicked the tires and turned the steering wheels, but everyone who walked by patted the Volkswagen. The Beetle got the part. Walsh, a baseball fan, gave it racing number 53, the jersey number of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale. The Love Bug opened at Radio City Music Hall on March 13, 1969, and became Disney's second most successful film up to that time, after Mary Poppins.