And progress Buick certainly did. While it is easy to fault the amount of chrome used or the bizarre aspects of the design, in its day the voluptuous Buick was a highly-regarded automobile, only one step down from a Cadillac, and to be behind the wheel of Buick was a sign of a successful career. Forecasting the growth of the automobile market, in 1945 Curtice had persuaded General Motors' chief executive Alfred P. Sloan to fund an expansion programme to increase Buick's manufacturing capacity to over half a million vehicles a year. It was a couple of years before that total was reached, but 1950 saw it exceeded by a wide margin and Buick leapt to number three in the sales charts, behind Chevrolet and Ford - a remarkable achievement.

The curvaceous nature of the Buick was accentuated by a body line that sloped down from the top of the headlight and dipped in front of the rear wheel before climbing back up and giving a distinct definition to the rear fender. This was at a period when most other body styles tried to eliminate the rear fender shape, and harks back to Harley Earl's 1939 Y-Job Buick concept car which foretold many of the styling ingredients that were to become identified with Buick in the 1950s.

One of the smallest of these styling artifacts was the gunsight or bombsight hood ornament. Back in 1946, Nickles produced a design that would be suitable for mass production, based on the Y-Job ornament, and the feature remained until 1958. Undoubtedly more of a Buick trademark were the VentiPorts on the sides of the front fenders. Nickles is almost always credited for these (copied from a fighter plane exhaust stubs) when he cut holes in the hood of his '48 Roadmaster convertible and fixed lights behind them wired to the distributor so they would flash like exhausts.

Ragsdale was horrified at seeing Nickles' customizing and complained to Curtice that the young designer had ruined a perfectly good car. Curtice looked for himself and, far from censuring Nickles, incorporated the portholes in the 1949 Buick models. Initially these VentiPorts were said to release fumes from the engine compartment and were fu!Sy functional. For various reasons - not least reports of inebriated passers-by using the orifices to urinate on the engine - the holes were blanked off and they became purely decorative. For 1950 models, the VentiPorts were elongated to look like slots; the more expensive models had four per side, while others had three.

The excess chrome on postwar Buicks was explained by Nickles as coming about due to a shortage during the war. Once free of restrictions, designers used chrome for glamor and perhaps overdosed on the shiny stuff. Nickles was quoted as saying: "...we were entertaining people with chrome on cars..." and it surely did that. Not all designers took such a sanguine attitude in iater years, Henry Lauve calling it 'Club Sandwich Chrome' and you can see what he means. Lauve also said that the huge teeth only came about because "...we wanted to be different..." Again, there can be little argument that they succeeded!

However, looking at the era in which the 1950 Buicks were conceived, they were totally appropriate for their time. Big, bold, brash, certainly - yet they established keynote features that would instantly tell you that the car was a Buick from a block or more away, not something that can be done that easily in the Nineties. Stylish? Yes, the 1950 Buick had style aplenty and it showed.