Nice cars other than x-fire

[LE BARON]

Bob Bourke had been sketching bullet nosed cars since 1941, inspired by fighter plane engine nacelles, and kept getting turned down because postwar Americans weren't ready to celebrate war machinery yet. By 1950 enough time had passed, and Raymond Loewy's studio put Bourke's idea into production on the Champion Starlight Coupe alongside something equally ambitious, a four part wraparound rear window that wrapped so completely around the C pillars that comedians started asking whether the car was coming or going. The glass wasn't a styling gimmick. It gave rear seat passengers a panoramic view no other American car offered and flooded the cabin with light, but producing that compound curve required tooling and glazing techniques that added meaningful cost to a car Studebaker was trying to sell to economy minded buyers. The L-head 169 cubic inch six made 85 horsepower and returned the kind of fuel economy that won Mobilgas economy runs, which helped justify the price. Studebaker produced 343,164 bullet nose cars across a stretched 14 month 1950 model year, its peak output ever. The window that almost didn't exist turned out to be the thing everyone remembered.