Coke Bottle Classic Cars
The swoops and curves of the Coca-Cola bottle served as critical inspiration for a generation of automotive designs in the 1960s.
Stretching the Christmas Theme
With the Christmas season comes Christmas-themed car articles. In the past, we’ve covered Christmas movie cars, cars we’d recommend for hauling Christmas trees, and even cars from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. So, this time, we didn’t feel it was too much of a stretch to play off Coca-Cola’s Christmas marketing in which the beverage and the holiday are now inextricably connected (based solely on the color red, it seems). If it’s not Christmas without a Coke, we figured this was the best time of year to talk about the “Coke bottle” car styling popularized in the 1960s.
Among automotive visual trends, Coke bottle styling is among the best known and most influential. It’s right up there with today’s giant grilles, integrated headlights, tailfins, and the trendiest thing 1910s automotive design, giving cars fixed roofs. If you’re a muscle car fan, you’ll know the look had become de rigueur by the late 1960s, but where did the trend of Coke bottle styling begin? And what do we mean when we refer to a car as having Coke bottle curves?
1962 Studebaker Avanti
The first car to deploy what became known as Coke bottle styling was the 1962 Studebaker Avanti. The Avanti was an outlier of a car from the beginning, designed to save Studebaker from the brink of insolvency. Among its “personal luxury car” cohort, the Avanti was singular. It was for a time the fastest production car in the world with styling to match. Studebaker’s Raymond Loewy took inspiration from the classic Coca-Cola bottle for the car’s rear quarter panels, which rise and widen to give the car a subtly pinched waist. Not coincidentally, Loewy had actually worked on redesigning Coca-Cola’s bottle back in 1955. The Avanti was also not the first vehicle to borrow the Coke bottle look, Northop’s F-5 fighter jet also featured slipstream-friendly curves and a pinched waist in 1959.
1963 Buick Riviera
Another early progenitor of the Coke bottle styling trend was the first-generation Buick Riviera. Designed by Bill Mitchell, the Riviera won instant praise for its audacious looks. The front end of the car, with protruding fender caps and aggressive forward lean were balanced by the curvaceous side and rear panels. The Riviera assured us that while the ostentation of the ‘50s was gone, the automotive designs of the 1960s would be no less ambitious or compelling.
1963 & ‘68 Chevrolet Corvettes
The Coke bottle look saw wide application throughout the 1960s, as we’ll see below, but its most natural home was in coupe form. So befitting was the Coke bottle design that the Corvette applied it to two successive generations of the car and in vastly different ways. The C2 Corvette Stingray was, not coincidentally, another Bill Mitchell led design effort. The car contrasts a long and flat front end with Coke bottle curves in back, perfectly illustrating the tension the design enables and why it works so well for sport coupes. The widen rear fenders evoke both the athletic hunches of a predatory animal about to pounce and the classical female silhouette.
Where the C2 deployed the Coke bottle look subtly, the C3 Corvette took the form to its most extreme as the front and rear fenders swoop dramatically upward and back down so that the third-generation Corvette looks for all the world like a Coke bottle lying on its side.
1965 Chevrolet Impala
I know I wrote above that the Coke bottle look found a natural home in coupes and convertibles but that doesn’t mean the styling didn’t pack a visual punch for larger cars. Enter, the fifth-generation Chevy Impala. The look of the prior fourth-gen Impala had been defined by its arrow-straight belt line further accentuated by a car-length trim spear. The new fifth-generation Impala instantly differentiated itself with puffed up rear fenders and a sloping roofline.
1965 Pontiac Bonneville
The Impala wasn’t the only GM sedan to benefit from the adoption of Coke bottle styling. The 1965 Pontiac Bonneville, like the Impala, benefitted from the contrast created by the long straight lines of the slab-like design and the interrupting curves of the Coke bottle styling. The Bonneville’s pillarless four-door hardtop looked particularly sharp as the deleted B-pillar also marked the widening of the Coke bottle curves.
1966 Lamborghini Miura
Coke bottle styling was not exclusively an American phenomenon. The groundbreaking Lamborghini Miura features similar swoops and curves with a pinched waist. The undulating fender humps of the Miura presage those of the C3 Corvette of a few years later.
1968 Ford Mustang
We return from sedans and European sports cars to the proper province of Coke bottle styling: the muscle car. From its inception in 1964 the first-generation Ford Mustang featured at least a nod toward the Coke bottle style with the modest belt line hump directly preceding the rear fender. That hump grew more pronounced through the first-gen Mustang’s production run and was most noticeable and fashionable in the Mustang’s famous fastback designs.
1968 Chevrolet Camaro
The Chevy Camaro was GM’s answer to the Mustang and as such it naturally incorporated Coke bottle styling to its rear quarter as well. In a bit of styling one-upmanship, the Camaro featured a more pronounced Coke bottle curve as the belt line dips and rises at the door line.
1967 Toyota 2000GT
Like the Miura, the Toyota 2000GT was another non-American example of Coke bottle styling. The 2000GT was a major leap forward for Toyota. Not only did the car push the envelope technologically but aesthetically as well. It turns out, form followed function in the case of the 2000GT. The car’s rear strut mounting was so high it necessitated the belt line sweeping upward to obscure it. The result was a Coke bottle curve.
1969 Dodge Charger
The 1969 Dodge Charger is among the best and meanest looking muscle cars from the golden era of muscle cars. Critical to the Charger’s aggressive stance is the athletic pose provided by the car’s incorporation of the Coke bottle style flaring of the rear quarter panel.
