Dodge Once Butchered Station Wagons To Make Fabulous Pickup Trucks With Huge Tailfins

The pickup trucks of today can be as much status symbols as they are work vehicles. For many buyers, a high-end truck is better than buying a German luxury car. Having a truck as a sort of “prestige” vehicle is the norm today, but it wasn’t back in the 1950s when automakers flirted with the idea of merging the beauty of a car with the capabilities of a truck. In 1957, Dodge launched the D100 Sweptside, a truck featuring prominent two-tone paint and giant tailfins. If those fins look familiar, it’s because Dodge butchered a wagon to do it.

There’s a certain romance to an old truck. Today, we think of classic trucks as simple working machines. They weren’t loaded down with electronics and niceties would have been such additions as full pile carpeting and a fancy radio. However, it could be argued that the groundbreaking of the path that led to today’s high-end trucks started in the years after the war.

Trucks in the first decades of automotive history were often just cars with trays on their rear ends. The first trucks built by the Dodge Brothers, which didn’t come around until World War I, were no different. Dodge eventually found itself in the hands of Chrysler in 1928 and in 1929, the last Dodge Brothers company design was the Merchant Express half-ton. Like other automakers, Dodge spent the 1930s refining its designs before having to pause during the outbreak of World War II.

American life experienced a dramatic shift after World War II. Many of the people who lived out in small towns and rural communities decided to move into rapidly expanding cities and suburbia. These people took their lives along for the ride, including the trucks they used for work. Automakers soon figured that a growing number of Americans didn’t want to sell their trucks once they moved into the urban lifestyle. Instead, people wanted trucks that felt a little closer to cars.

Dodge was quick to pounce on America’s insatiable lust for trucks after the war. Dodge took its military trucks and adapted them for civilian use, creating the immensely popular Power Wagon. However, like Ford, Dodge had its ears in the truck market and it was gearing up to create an all-new truck for this new era of America.

The B-Series brought style to the jobsite with its integrated fenders and “Pilot House” cab featuring a panoramic windshield. Dodge trucks had sharper steering, more comfortable rides, and increased payload capacity.

The Dodge D100 Sweptside would become a great example of the ideas and optimism that were rattling around American designer heads soon after, even if their ideas weren’t primed to go mainstream just yet. Dodge wasn’t even the only pioneer to combine work and relaxation into a truck.

The Inspiration

According to Classic Chevy International (PDF download), GM designer Chuck Jordan created a new type of truck. Jordan joined GM after graduating from MIT in 1949. His first role was that of a junior designer in GM’s truck studio. Jordan would leave GM briefly for military duty at the Air Force Missile Test Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. While there, Jordan loved to sketch his ideas for new trucks. Reportedly, some of his sketches included illustrations of missiles behind the trucks, suggesting that the military influenced Jordan’s truck designs.

Jordan returned to the welcoming arms of GM in 1953, a time when the Chevrolet brand was still cooking up its Task Force generation of trucks, which would launch two years later. It was here when Jordan noticed that GM wasn’t really moving the needle on truck beds with the Task Force. What if trucks were just as sleek as cars? One of Jordan’s designs featured a smooth and sleek bed with lines that flowed into the cab, creating a truck that was closer to a car in styling.

Jordan’s bed, which was crafted with the help of fiberglass on top of a standard bed, was a radical change. Its initial design was even more radical than that, too, as Jordan pitched a truck with an integrated cab and bed for a perfectly smooth car-like aesthetic. However, as Mac’s Motor City Garage writes, GM engineers figured out that welding the bed into the cab would have resulted in excessive twisting forces exerted on the cab. That’s something Ford had to learn the hard way a handful of years later.

Still, the Jordan design that was given the green light was something else. Launched in 1955, the Chevrolet Cameo Cruiser was still a GM truck at heart and forward of the bed, but the bed closer resembled the cars of the era than something meant for work. Chevrolet really drove home the idea that this was an upscale truck with creamy white paint, heavy chrome, red secondary tones, and an interior with more options checked than a standard truck.

Ford, which began a focus of adding more car-like features to its trucks back with the 1948 F-Series, launched its own upscale car-like pickup in late 1956 with the 1957 Ranchero. Now it was Chrysler’s term not to miss out on this trend.

As Hemmings reported, Dodge had struggled with truck sales since 1947. Things were looking even bleaker in 1957 as Chevrolet enjoyed immense success with the Task Force series and Ford’s offerings had the freshest designs on the market. Dodge’s trucks were stale in comparison to what its competitors were doing.

That’s not to say that the folks at Dodge were entirely asleep behind the wheel. Leading Chrysler design was Virgil Exner and in the mid-1950s he came up with an idea to make lower, longer cars with quarter panels that swept into the sky. The “Forward Look” design, which made its debut in 1957, took Chrysler design to a new level.

In 1954, Dodge launched a new line of trucks called the C series. These new so-called “Functional Design” trucks succeeded the “Pilot House” trucks of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Later, Hemi-equipped trucks in the C series would be called the “Power Giant” line. The C series trucks were a step forward. Dodge left the panoramic windshields of the ’40s in the past and the trucks featured contemporary lines. These trucks were perfectly fine, beautiful even, but they were missing the glamor found at Ford and Chevrolet. What was worse for Dodge was its puny 7 percent share of the pickup truck market. It took fifth place behind everyone including GMC and International Harvester.

A Nice Goin’ To Town Rig

The cabs of the trucks in ’57 did get some Exner touches. The team at Dodge brought over some touches including fenders that resembled the car line as well as a one-piece hood that hinged from the rear as opposed to the two-piece front-hinged design from before. Sadly, the trucks didn’t get Exner’s fabulous rear-end treatment.

The automaker’s answer to falling behind in the truck race didn’t come directly from the famed Exner and his studio. As the story goes, the man who most likely came up with the Sweptside design was Joe Berr, who was the manager of Dodge’s Special Equipment Group (SEG). The SEG wasn’t a division that designed cars or trucks. Instead, its purpose was to customize Dodge trucks to specifically fit the needs of a customer. Like the upfitters of today, SEG had the ability to make broad changes to trucks to get the job done.

As Old Cars Weekly writes, Berr knew that Dodge had to do something about its sinking sales, but he also knew that Dodge didn’t quite have the cash to spend on a moonshot. His solution? Break out the cutters and make the finned truck Dodge didn’t.

Berr’s work would result in a car-inspired truck like the competition, but he took the most bizarre way to get there. To create the Sweptside, Berr obtained a 1957 Dodge two-door wagon and had the quarter panel plus rear bumper sawed off. Then he turned around and cut out the sides of the box of a long-wheelbase 1957 D100.

From there, Berr had SEG employee Burt Nagos weld the quarters and the bumper from the wagon onto what was left of the truck’s bed. Reportedly, SEG also had to modify the truck’s tailgate to work with the truck’s new be-finned bed. The team also added some trim to give it a little bit of an extra pop. Additional chrome was added to the cab to ensure the bed looked like it belonged on the back of the truck.

Dodge dealers loved the truck and the project was greenlit as a sort of factory custom. The 1957 D100 Sweptside wasn’t modified alongside the standard trucks. Instead, SEG carried out the conversion from humble truck to glam truck. In advertising, Dodge said the D100 Sweptside would add prestige to your business and that it was the “most exciting pick-up on the road.”

Production versions of the Sweptside included the bed and chrome plus stylish hubcaps, two-tone paint, white wall tires, and the choice of healthy engines. On the lower end was a 230-cubic-inch inline-six flathead good for 120 HP and on the higher end was the 315-cubic-inch V8 good for 204 HP. This was well into Chrysler’s development of more modern technology, which meant buyers got 12-volt electrical systems and a choice of a column-shifted manual transmission or a three-speed push-button automatic.

If you wanted to make your Sweptside feel as luxurious as it looked, you were able to add power steering or power brakes, move up a trim level to the DeLuxe, which added a panoramic rear window. The trucks landed at dealers mid-way through 1957 for the price of $2,124 ($24,287 today) and sold through 1958 before getting canceled in 1959. This was a bit of an increase over what a base D100 cost without the fancy bed, which was $1,653 ($18,902 today).

What were sales like? The fabulous trucks weren’t exactly hits. Of the roughly 10,266 D100 trucks believed to have been sold in 1958, just 975 of them are believed to have the Sweptside bed. It’s believed fewer than 200 were built in 1957 and perhaps around 100 were built in 1959. So, even if we’re being generous here, fewer than 1,500 examples were built. Of those, it’s believed fewer than 200 have survived into the modern day.

I have found a few archived ads for these trucks and the prices are about as crazy as you’d expect with selling prices for decent ones hanging around the $30,000 range to well into the six figures for pristine examples.

The Chevy Cameo Carrier did much better, selling 10,320 units between 1955 and 1958. Still, even that better number was a fraction of the 393,312 total trucks Chevy sold in 1955 alone. Over at Ford, the Ranchero never quite had the success of the F-Series and later would fall behind the Chevy El Camino, too.

Really, it appeared that the high-end pickup was a tiny niche back in those days, one perhaps too small to keep alive for more than a few years at a time. In a way, these trucks were decades ahead of their time. Today, American truck buyers are obsessed with all kinds of leather, gadgets, and sporty style. Seven decades ago, if you wanted a truck like that, you might have bought a Cameo Carrier or a D100 Sweptside.