Cheap “Plain Jane” American Cars of the 1950s

Today, we'll take a road trip through the 50s, looking at six of the cheapest subcompact, compact, and full-size American cars, built from 1950 to 1959. Let's get started. These are all real cars suitable for daily driving. I'm aware of, but won't be including, low-production, one-cylinder, quasi-cars like the King Midget or kitty-car-sized Eshelman, at least not in this episode. We'll kick things off with the cheapest car on the list, by a wide margin, the 1950 Crosley Standard Convertible. Offered at an astonishingly low base price of just $882, roughly $12,000 in today's money, this car does have some optional equipment, like chrome wheel trim rings, whitewall tires, and radio. These would have bumped up the price a little. To understand this car, you have to look at its creator, Paul Crosley Jr. Crosley had already built a sizable empire manufacturing affordable auto accessories, radios, and his famous Shelvedore refrigerators. But his true passion was building a practical economy car for the masses. Crosley started building his tiny cars in 1939, and when the post-war car craze hit, a vehicle-starved public snapped him up, giving the company a brief but massive sales boom. But disaster was lurking under the hood. These early post-war Crosleys were powered by the innovative Cobra engine, which stood for copper brazed. Instead of a heavy cast iron block, it was made of stamped sheet metal. It was incredibly light, but it was also incredibly susceptible to electrolysis and corrosion. In everyday driving conditions, the engines practically dissolved from the inside out, and the massive wave of warranty claims almost sank the entire company. By 1950, Crosley had wisely replaced it with a tough traditional cast iron block assembly, known as the Seba engine. 1950 also saw the return of drum brakes, as the innovative disc brakes introduced the previous year were susceptible to severe corrosion caused by the new trend in northern states of salting roads to melt ice in winter. The 1950 standard convertible gave buyers an 85-inch wheelbase, a folding top, and a spartan but serviceable interior. This was basic and economical transportation for short-distance driving. Top speed was about 50 miles per hour. At just 1,300 pounds, the spunky little Crosley got about 35 miles per gallon in the city and up to 50 miles per gallon at sustained speeds, at least twice what you could expect from most other cars of the day. If you were willing to sacrifice having doors, Crosley offered another option that year, the hot shot. Stripped down to the bare essentials and utilizing that tough new cast iron engine, the cute and lively hot shot is widely considered to be the first true American sports car. But despite being advertised as America's most needed car, fewer and fewer Americans seem to need one. Crosley quietly ceased automobile production in 1952. Moving on from the micro car world of Crosley, let's look at one of the cheapest big three cars of 1950, the Ford Deluxe Business Coupe. Today, the Business Coupe is a largely forgotten model, but in 1950, it was a backbone of American commerce. This three-passenger coupe was the favorite vehicle of many traveling salesmen, repairmen, and local delivery fleets. Many brands made Business Coupes, even medium-priced brands like Dodge, Pontiac, Nash, and Packard. At $1,333, about $18,000 in 2026 money, it was the least expensive car in Ford's lineup. Its standard six-cylinder engine got decent mileage. From the outside, it looked exactly like a standard two-door sedan, until you opened the door and looked inside. Instead of a rear passenger seat, Ford installed a flat luggage platform. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. A back seat is completely useless for a guy hauling 300 pounds of hardware samples or plumbing fixtures from town to town. And because this was the bottom-tier stripper model, it did not come with a heater. It didn't come with a radio. It didn't even come with turn signals. If you wanted any other creature comforts, or maybe overdrive to make those long sales routes a little more bearable, you had to open your wallet and pay extra. It's hard to find an original example today. Those that didn't end up in junkyards have often been customized into restomods or street rods. This junkyard find is an abandoned project. Someone apparently tried to convert this business coupe into a convertible with a back seat. Even though someone added rear armrests and ashtrays, the fact that the rear windows are fixed in place, as well as the shape of the trunk lid, reveal it was born a business coupe. By the way, different makes had different configurations for their business coupes. Plymouth and Dodge had a shortened passenger compartment and added the extra space to the trunk. The Henry J was a car born from a lifelong dream, a federal mandate, and a brutal lesson in automotive economics. Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser had always wanted to build a modern-day Model A, a true car for the working man. But when he and Joe Frazier started their post-war car company, they had to build medium and high-priced cars to recoup their enormous startup costs and turn a profit. So what finally forced Kaiser to build his cheap car? The U.S. government. To secure a large federal loan to keep his company afloat, a specific clause required Kaiser to design and build a vehicle that could retail for under $1,300. But the reality of the auto industry is that building a profitable, cheap car is incredibly difficult. The fixed costs, like engineering, labor, and the huge presses needed to stamp the steel, cost roughly the same whether you were building a small economy car or a huge luxury cruiser. To hit that magic loan number, Kaiser had to strip the Henry J to the bone. The basic, standard model had no glove box, no armrest, and incredibly, no trunk lid. If you wanted to load groceries into the back, you had to fold down the rear seat and shove them in from the passenger compartment. Even this totally stripped-down version couldn't quite hit that magic under $1,300 target price. The 1951 Henry J standard base price at launch was $1,362, almost $17,000 in today's dollars. Even with this extreme cost-cutting, the math simply didn't work in their favor. A base, four-cylinder Henry J was only about $50 cheaper than a brand-new, full-size, six-cylinder Ford. And then there was the styling. Despite its fastback roofline and Cadillac-inspired rear tail fins, many buyers saw it as an ugly duckling. Sears even tried selling a rebadged version out of their catalog, renamed the Allstate, but it was a massive flop. While the Henry J sold a very respectable 80,000 units in its first year, sales fell off a cliff almost immediately. By 1954, the final year, they were stuck selling off roughly 1,200 leftover 1953 models. Now, let's jump ahead to the middle of the decade. The 55, 56, and 57 Chevys, the iconic cars that propelled Chevrolet into the modern V8 era, are collectively known by enthusiasts as the Tri-Five. Of all the Tri-Fives, my personal favorite has always been the 55, thanks to its clean shoebox styling and Ferrari-inspired front grille. I think this styling really shines on this base model 150, stripped of all the 50's chrome trim. Sometimes the unadorned, cheapest cars are the best looking. Earlier in our timeline, we looked at the stripped-down 1950 Ford business coupe. Did Chevrolet make a similar business coupe of their own? They absolutely did, but they called it a utility sedan. A 1955 Chevy 150 utility sedan is a pretty rare find these days, but what you will almost never find is one that still has its original inline-six engine. For example, while this specific car looks bone stock on the outside, hiding under the hood is a fire-breathing 402 race engine. Taking a look inside the rear compartment, you can see exactly why these were built. Instead of a back seat, there's a purpose- built cargo platform. The factory installed a sturdy plywood panel covered with a heavy-duty rubber mat, providing a wide, perfectly flat surface for hauling whatever a traveling salesman or local delivery driver needed to move. And the price for this commercial workhorse? Just $1,593. When you adjust for inflation, that translates to almost $19,000 in today's market, making this quite possibly the absolute cheapest full-size car you could buy brand new in 1955. As we move into the late 1950's, the American automotive landscape was beginning to shift. Small, inexpensive imports like the Volkswagen Beetle were suddenly driving real consumer demand for compact economy cars. The big three automakers were all scrambling to develop new compacts for the 1960 model year, but in the meantime, American Motors already had a perfectly serviceable compact ready to sell. Just in time for the 1958 recession, AMC dusted off the tooling for the original Rambler from 1950, freshened up the styling, and reintroduced it as the Rambler American. What makes this car so interesting is the reversal in marketing strategy. Back in 1950, the Rambler was pitched as a premium small car, loaded with standard features including a radio, clock, foam seat cushions, and heater. The base model 1958 American, however, was a much more stripped down affair, and at $1,789, it was one of the cheapest new cars you could buy that year. Plain Jane is a perfect way to describe this barren interior, devoid of even basic armrests on the doors. Performance was decidedly lackluster thanks to its outdated 90-horsepower inline F-head six-cylinder engine. It certainly wasn't going to win any drag races, but it was a sturdy, proven powertrain that you could depend on to get you down the road. For 1958, Rambler pretty much had the domestic economy compact segment all to itself, but as we are about to see, there would be a new competitor in 1959. Wrapping up our survey of cheap rides brings us back to a company that was fighting for its very survival. By the end of the decade, Studebaker was in dire straits. Sales had been steadily bleeding away year by year, and they had just been forced to kill off the iconic Packard brand a mere four years after a highly publicized merger. They had absolutely no money to develop a completely new car from the ground up. So, what did they do? They got incredibly resourceful. They took their standard full-size cars, chopped about a foot off the front and the back, shortened the wheelbase, freshened up the styling, and voila! They had a brand new compact car, the 1959 Studebaker Lark. Opinions on the styling vary, but I personally think it was an attractive and distinctive design even if that flat front with almost zero overhang looked just a little bit odd from certain angles. But Studebaker didn't offer just one compact model. The Lark was a full lineup featuring sedans, hardtops, station wagons, and in later years, even convertibles. But for our list, we are looking at the cheapest, bare-bones base model, the Lark Deluxe 2-door. At $1,925, it was strategically priced a couple of hundred bucks less than the cheapest full-size cars from the Big 3. Inside, the cabin wasn't exactly what you'd call super-deluxe, but unlike the Rambler we just looked at, it at least had armrests on the doors. More importantly, the six-passenger interior was surprisingly roomy for such a small car. Under the hood sat Studebaker's well-aged L-head 169 cubic inch inline six, pumping out 90 horsepower. The available 259 cubic inch regular fuel V8 generated 180 horsepower at almost the same fuel consumption. Both could achieve around 20 miles per gallon on the highway. 25 if you got the three on the tree with overdrive. People loved the compact Lark. The gamble paid off, at least for a little while. The Lark sold very well for its first couple of years, injecting Studebaker with some desperately needed cash. It was enough to keep the historic company going just a little bit longer before they finally ended American production in late 1963. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed this sampling of cheap 50s cars. There are so many more I could have featured, so please reveal your favorites in the comments. And for even more Hubcap Club, follow my daily posts on Facebook, Instagram, and threads. Until next time, for Hubcap Club, I'm Rob.