You may have caught this The 1956 DeSoto Firedome station wagon was the best of the day earlier this week. The most interesting thing about this wagon was its taillights, which are completely different from the DeSoto coupes and sedans. In the 1950s and 60s, there seem to have been many station wagons equipped with unique taillights that were quite different from their less utilitarian brethren.
Of course, if you’re a child of the 1970s and 80s, you might be thinking, “Well, Mom’s Country Squire sure had a different taillight than the sedan!” and you wouldn’t be wrong. During that time, however, hundreds of thousands of station wagons were built, while from the 1950s to the early 60s, wagons gained steam in America’s consciousness, if not in sales. Try finding, say, a 1961 Mercury Comet taillight (as in our lead image) for a 1971 Buick Estate Wagon—one is a wild goose chase, while the other is more of a common sight.
Inspired by the DeSoto, we dug up images of station wagons with unique taillights. There’s a good chance you’ll feel like you’ve never seen them before, although they may not have been memorable because station wagons weren’t memorable for a while.
