FINALLY, BRIEFLY, RIGHT.(Escape Roads)

AutoWeek, February, 2008

Byline: JOHN F. KATZ

GM'S response to Ford's spacey Thunderbird was more Bentley than Buck Rogers, a tantalizing tango of lush curves and razor angles, with flat, trimless side glass borrowed from European custom coachbuilding. Design vice president Bill Mitchell developed the Buick Riviera from a Ned Nickles sketch for a revived LaSalle, in which the junior Caddy's narrow-V nose became twin vertical side grilles fronting pontoonlike fenders. This left no obvious location for the headlights, and the designers tried some real atrocities before settling on the four widely spaced lamps that seemed to float within the horizontal center grille of the 1963-64 Riviera.

A better solution, aesthetically if not mechanically, was found for the 1965 facelift,...