Todays awesome tail fin is on this 1958 Mercury Park Lane found on ebay. Not only does the fin itself have a cove that runs all the way to the front of the rear door, but there is a freestanding chromed laser-pod looking thing suspended in it.
This just further cements that 1958 is my favorite year for gratuitous finmobiles. 1959 cars may have been bigger and gaudier, but most of them had some cohesiveness to them. The 1958 cars look like the just stuck every bit of chrome trim, bumpers, wings, fins, spears, etc. they could find onto to their prototypes and whatever didn’t fall off on the test drive was put into production.
Also the ’58 mercury above has the least intuitive transmission ever created.
Awesome fins, though the ’58 Mercs always looked to me as if the rear bumper/taillight combo from some early 70’s car was grafted on retroactively by some wannabe Ed Roth on a bender. That said, someone in the Garden State’s tourism department should restore and paint a Mercury Turnpike Cruiser in NJ Tpk livery as an act of pork-barrel benevolence.
Standalone pod lights rock. Chrysler elevated that art to it’s highest form in the early 60s. I think it was the ’62 Imperials that had front and rear pods– Six pods per car! SIX!