Back in the 1970's, "personal luxury cars" ruled the roost similarly to today's crossovers and inexplicably so since they offered a fraction of the practicality of even the four-door sedans they were based on. To say nothing of the station wagons that were offered on the same platform or chassis. Little if nothing more than rolling fashion statements, none of them came to define the personal luxury car craze of the 1970's more than the most over the top styled of them all, the 1973-1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Our delightful subject is a 1975.
If the original Chevrolet Monte Carlo emulated the "suitcase fendered" classics of the Great Gatsby era the 1973 "update", actually it was more of a complete reboot, took that theme to absurd heights. And, wouldn't you know it, it being the decade that brought us disco and pet rocks, the 1973-1977 "colonnade" Monte Carlo's were incredibly popular. Why? That's a tough question to answer since we're looking in the rearview mirror of a cultural fad that first started to catch on going on fifty years ago. For whatever reason, people just loved the look of the car regardless of what it was attempting to be. Most people don't care about design or architecture per se - they just like what they like regardless of pretense.
Again, in hindsight, personal luxury cars are hard to understand. Big on the outside, small on the inside, not to mention ill handling and sluggish performers, they offered little if anything above and beyond being stylish. Stylish in swivel buckets even if said style was polarizing even back in its day. Personal luxury cars weren't unlike stiletto's - they may be uncomfortable but damn you look good in them.
If not indirectly, we credit the Ford Motor Company for creating the personal luxury car when they introduced their four-passenger Thunderbird for 1958. GM waited until 1962 to respond with the Pontiac Grand Prix, a not exactly personal sized automobile based on GM's B body, full-size chassis. Buick followed suit in 1963 with the Riviera - which was, ironically, at first intended to be a Chevrolet. Both the Grand Prix and Riviera found relatively small but loyal followings but it wasn't until 1969 when Pontiac launched a new mid-sized Grand Prix that the personal luxury car market really took off. Chevrolet introduced their original Monte Carlo the following year.
Personal luxury cars were also "insurance friendly" since, for the most part, they couldn't perform as well as surcharge inducing muscle cars did, could or portended to. Although Chevrolet offered larger optional engines on the Monte Carlo through 1976, they didn't provide significantly better performance than the smaller engines that were offered.
In many ways, our 1975 Monte Carlo is really a snap shot in time as Chevrolet didn't have anywhere near the success they had with these "big Monte Carlo's" with their new for 1978, drastically downsized successors. Emulating a design that emulated a design, sales were strong at first but they quickly waned eventually taking the entire hard to explain let alone understand personal luxury car market en masse down with it. Shield and all.
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