Designed by Lawrence Shinoda
The 1963 Corvette coupe, the Cindy Crawford of sports cars, would be just another fair fastback without its cleft rear window. GM design boss Bill Mitchell used the thin band of bodywork to sweep his signature windsplit from the top of the windshield to the tail--and to assert his dominance over Corvette chief engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, who hated it. (It was gone for '64.) The split rear glass was considered a radical design gesture in its day, but Corvette stylists experimented with even more extreme proposals. One sculpted in 1957 by Peter Brock, code-named the Q-Corvette, featured doors that hinged up and forward from a split windshield.