Car tailfin

The tailfin era of automobile styling encompassed the 1950s and 1960s, peaking between 1955 and 1961. It was a style that spread worldwide, as car designers picked up styling trends from the US automobile industry, where it was regarded as the "golden age" of American auto design and American exceptionalism.^[1]

General Motors design chief Harley Earl is often credited for the automobile tailfin, introducing small fins on the 1948 Cadillac, but according to many sources the actual inventor/designer of the tailfin for the 1948 Cadillac was Franklin Quick Hershey,^[2] who at the time the 1948 Cadillac was being designed was chief of the GM Special Car Design Studio.^[3] It was Hershey who, after seeing an early production model of a P-38 at Selfridge Air Base, thought the twin rudders of the airplane would make a sleek design addition to the rear of future modern automobiles.^[4] Tailfins took particular hold on the automotive buying public's imagination as a result of Chrysler designer Virgil Exner’s Forward Look, which subsequently resulted in manufacturers scrambling to install larger and larger tailfins onto new models. As jet-powered aircraft, rockets, and space flight gained public recognition through the Space Race, the automotive tailfin assemblies (including tail lights) were designed to resemble more and more the tailfin and engine sections of contemporary jet fighters and space rockets.

Plymouth claimed that the tailfins were not fins, but "stabilizers" to place the "center of pressure" as far to the rear as possible and thus "reduce by 20% the needs for steering correction in a cross wind",^[5] while Mercedes-Benz called its own tailfins Peilstege, sight lines that ostensibly aided in backing up.