Have you noticed how angry all the full-size trucks and SUVs look today? Could they look that way because we’ve been constantly at war for a couple decades? Even on their commute, people feel more secure in a giant, aggressive-looking, body-on-frame 4x4 that looks like it should be patrolling Kabul or Mosul rather than in a practical little sedan.
Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, war was on everybody’s mind, too. Instead of Humvees and helicopters, though, it was fighter planes flying high above the fray that drew Americans’ attention. Studebaker leaned into this, debuting a line of cars for 1947 that took obvious styling cues from the piston-driven planes of the recently finished World War II—most obviously the
