GM introduced its pillarless hardtop coupe on the Buick Riviera in mid-1949. In the next model year, the sleek-looking roofline was offered on Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile models. I read that the stylists at GM wanted to capture the look of a convertible with the top up and the four windows down, with no B-pillar to obstruct the view. For Chevy’s new hardtop coupe, the Bel Air (named for the swanky Los Angeles suburb) was launched for the 1950 model year. It looked great on the previous year’s all-new styling and nudged out Chevrolet’s fastback Fleetline model as the “sporty-looking” Chevy. Here’s a spotless, well-optioned example of a 1951 Chevrolet Bel Air that was beautifully restored in the late ’90’s and part of a 130-car private collection. The seller, Mike, says the Bel Air was warehoused with the other vehicles for 27 years, and “was run every month and taken great care of.” The Bel Air currently resides in sunny Sarasota, Florida, and is listed for sale here on craigslist for $26,000. A Barn Find’s thank you to Rocco B. for spotting another GM gem and sending it our way.
Mike says he has done many frame-off restorations and knows a quality restoration when he sees one (he includes two photos of a gorgeous ’51 Chevy Convertible he restored), and says, “this is a super nice car, not some car that was patched over and falling apart!” Based on the photos, this Bel Air looks spotless and worthy of being in a private car collection. The dark metallic paint (I believe it’s Fathom Green Iridescent) is beautiful in the Sarasota sun, and the Moonlight Cream top and sun visor make a perfect looking, classy contrast. Add to that the glistening chrome and all of the other visual goodies on this fully dressed-up Bel Air (spotlight, fender skirts, front and rear bumper extenders and guards, wide whitewalls, etc), and you have an award winner if the next owner chooses to enter it in local car shows.
The “hardtop convertible” Bel Air had an exclusive interior available in four two-tone color choices: red, blue, black, and the green you see here. The green leather seats trimmed in striped “fine pile cord” wool fabric look great, as do the door panels, two-tone instrument panel, and steering wheel, and everything else I can see from the photos. The seller says “the glass is perfect, windows roll up and down perfect, and window frames are great. No rust!” There are also photos included of a clean trunk with a black trunk mat and a new spare tire.
Under the Bel Air’s hood is a very clean, stock 216-cubic-inch Stovebolt inline-six that produces 92 horsepower. It’s paired with a 3-on-the-tree column shift manual transmission. Mileage is listed at 76,000, but there’s nothing said about whether that’s original. The seller claims “the car runs perfectly, just push the button, and it’s running. Smooth running and drives perfectly.”
This is one of the nicest fully-restored ’51 Bel Airs we’ve ever featured here on Barn Finds. It’s still a good-looking “hardtop convertible” that would turn heads in fancy Bel Air, California, or in your garage in Anytown, USA. What do you think?
All I can say is WOW!!! This Chevy is stunning!!! What a beautiful design by GM with the hardtops. Great color combination too. This looks like a top notch restoration too. Hope it goes to a good new home, and hopefully gets carefully enjoyed on the road.
Could not agree more Driveinstile she is stunning. Would love to own this and take her out in the sun on weekends and just enjoy. But my finances right now say no but i can still afford to day dream all i want.
Lakota, about the day dream thing–a number of years ago I realized day dreams are cheaper than airline tickets. Day dream vacations and classic auto ownerships are better than real, especially as we get old and can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. No flight cancellations, long lines, muggings, etc. and with awesome cars–well just have to remember which ones you like best and can change anytime you see another one that you wish was yours. This is one nice 50 Bel Aire, remember them when new.
Nice. This model lead to the best of the series in ’54 and kicked off the presentation of the ’55, ’56, and ’57 cars that put Chevy on top of the heap.
Are you sure this car is a ’51? The reason I ask is that I see ’52
type chrome bands on the rear quarter panels. I’ve seen a lot of
’51 Chevys over the years and a lot of them did not have the ’52
trim on them. On the cars I’ve seen, a DeLuxe model did indeed
have the chrome stone guards on
the quarter panels but not the ’52
fender trim above the rear wheel
wells. Not nit pickin, just curious. My Uncle had a ’51 sedan without the rear fender trim and I had a ’52 that did. Any thoughts?….
Yes, Ken. The 1952 had curved pieces across and around the front of the centre-bar in the grille area which the ’51 lacked. So, this is a 1951. But it’s a Bel Air, and during this era, manufacturers frequently made mid-year or late-year changes, especially when they were tooling-up for a facelift and not a re-style. The 1952 Chevy was nearly identical to the ’51, but they are easily distinguished by the bar across the middle of the grille lacking those trim-pieces on ’51 models. The Korean War limited production on the ’52s, so you find many more ’51s than ’52s, though the latter are not “rare” by any means! It could also be possible that the restorer of this one preferred the 1952 trim and simply incorporated it: every car has a story to tell…
A gorgeous `51! An item I’m not used to seeing are those nice rear bumper ends! Can’t say I’ve seen those before, but in an era of bumpers getting “locked” in parallel parking situations I can understand them. They’re beautiful.
Very nice, but they waited too long to sell it. The potential buyers are all 75 years old now and not buying cars anymore. They’re trying to sell the ones they’ve got left.
As nice as it is, this is not an “investment vehicle”. The price only continues to decline due to the demographics involved. Buyers look down the road and speculate that they probably can’t get out of it for $10k in 5 years, after they’ve “used” it a bit. That’s a real depressor on the price.
This era of car is just about to hit the Model T/Model A territory. Amusing hobby cars owned by guy who just want something unique.
If they get an offer of $15k, they ought to take it.
I’ve been sayin this for years…us “oldies” are dying and no one is picking up the slack…..
When I was 14, I joined a car club in my small hometown. I was subscribed to hot rod magazine, had a project sitting in the back yard, and loved old cars. I was so excited to attend my first car club meeting! I assumed we would all sit around and discuss cars. Guess what? We didn’t talk about cars at all. These old men just sat around and campaigned about how the hobby was dead and that no young people were into it anymore. I looked around and felt completely confused. Here I was, a young person who was into cars and they were so hung up on this idea that their precious hobby was dying that they couldn’t even see me. They proceeded to plan their boring dinners and drinking parties and couldn’t figure out why no young people wanted to hang out with them. Well, I’m 43 year old now and here we are. You are all still whining about how the hobby is dying and that no young people are into cars. Wake up grandpa! The hobby is alive and doing better than ever! Cars are selling at auction for record numbers every year and guess who’s buying them? Who’s playing all those car racing video games? Who’s getting back into Formula 1? Who’s attending Cars & Coffee every Saturday? It’s definitely not the old guys at that car club meeting I attended 30 years ago. They are all dead so there must have been a few other young guys like me who were into cars! So, stop whining and go out and find a young person to mentor. Show them how to change their oil. Take them to a car show. Take them on a drive. Do anything. Just don’t complain to them about how young people aren’t into cars!
very stunning Belair. it seems to be getting harder to sell these types of cars due to aging out of the early 50s cars. today’s gen has no interest in them
Just a beautiful car! But like Terry Morrison said. I can only dream.
This is the fatal flaw in the hype that has been generated by the TV auction houses, classic car insurance industry, and the old car media.
For run-of-the-mill cars that are not rare and not truly classic like Ferrari/Alfa/Bentley/Duesenberg, etc., there is a distinct price curve that is exposed.
Teenagers who used a certain era of cars in their youth get to be 40 years older in their late 50s, and they now have cash, no kids around, and a longing for the old days.
That lasts 20 years in the marketplace, as they begin liquidating their inventory and downsizing their lives. Or their estate has to sell off the goods.
This puts a lot of pressure on the prices, as there is not a backstop in place. The next generation only want their own teen fantasies re-created. Today that is muscle cars, but we are now on the tail end of that one, where accumulation is no longer taking place, but mass selling has not yet arrived.
The buyer pool dries up (so to speak), while the inventory for sale explodes.
For 1953 vehicles, we are already on the far side of the transaction.
Complicating it further, many younger guys now live in subdivisions with a garage full of other stuff, not room in the yard, and HOA restrictions on old cars sitting around.
So a lot of guys who might want something like this have no practical way to own it.
All very interesting and logical.
I think though , cars like this are pretty timeless and a lot less expensive than the vehicles you mentioned.
I think there will always be interested buyers and down the road prices may well increase again.
A friend in high school had one in 1958 and he did multiple things to make it pop mechanically as well as looks. It was a tan/brown and I believe a white top and sounded sweet with twin pipes.
I totally get what is being said about this era car and its lack of popularity with a younger audience. However, when you are looking at a car in this condition, some of those concerns don’t mean near as much. Also a 26 K asking price is not an unreasonable number for this model in excellent condition.
One of those 50s dream cars neither I nor my family could ever afford!
Why, oh, why is everyone talking about this sort of car as an “investment?” Someone will buy this ’cause he likes it and will keep it ’til he no longer likes it enough. By that time, chances are that he/she’ll be old enough to not need to cash in on the “investment.”
This sort of sale, in most cases, is just a matter of enjoyment, not business. You want ROI? Invest in real estate or precious metals.
And, yes, this Chevy is gorgeous and if I were in the market, I’d snatch it up just for that entertainment/pleasure factor, not ROI.
Will, I completely agree with you.
The people who are in the business of selling, insuring, and generally talking about old cars are the ones who try vary hard to make this hobby and “investment vehicle”. They have a very vested interest in doing just that.
In a certain sense, they have been successful for 3 decades, with some swings in prices along the way.
First of all, the truly rare examples have exploded in market price. Ferraris for $5 million are not uncommon anymore. Add in Duesenberg, Alfa, Astons, Lambo Miuras, truly rare and high-powered muscle, vintage Indy, and even some street rods.
All of that has exploded. It’s also the territory of multi-millionaires and billionaires. It’s a completely different class of buyer with a built in rarity in the objects themselves. These are Tier I cars and always will be.
What the old car industry tried hard to do was to equate the Tire I price run up with the rest of the hobby. If a Hemi Cuda convertible is $3 million then all Barracudas are worth more now, right? Way more.
It doesn’t work that way in real life. Most guys just want a decent, well-presented driver to take to a car show or tool around town on a weekend.
When the prices of presentable cars went into the $50k range, it priced out a lot of people. They either didn’t have those kinds of funds, or had the good sense to not pay such ridiculous prices for a runaround town vehicle that is not rare and not that important.
What’s happening now is liquidation. Older guys downsize, or their families have to sell the old car.
Guys who had the facility, skill, tools and motivation to “restore” old cars are hanging up the torch.
Younger guys live in subdivisions now, with garages full of other stuff and HOA restrictions and all that. Guy out in the country now focus on 4 x 4s.
The hobby is finally returning to being a just a casual hobby, not a means to make a buck. That means that most people really don’t want to spend much more than $10K (or less) on a nice presentable driver that they can drive and not worry if it got a paint chip on the trip.
What’s more they want to get their money back when they sell it. Spending $50k or more on some dolled-up GTO leaves a lot of doubt about that. It’s a financial loss (possible wreck, wear and tear, insurance, depreciation, maintenance) just waiting to happen.
I hope to get into a situation where I can get a fun car again. I hope the prices are sane when I do. It’s beginning to look like that is happening.
The hobby was sold a bill of goods that was based on pure fantasy and speculation. It worked for a while. The nonsense is now being exposed.
You could get a hobby car right now. Just can’t expect to get the same model that everyone else wants.
Seems like whenever this site features a truly beautiful classic car, there is always someone that jumps in to say that the market is drying up fast…. or the car is way overpriced because the people that want them are dying off. HOWEVER, I’ve noticed – nice cars aren’t cheap, and cheap cars aren’t nice. Just sayin’.
truth hurts,,,,facts don’t lie…..the “older” cars we are talking about don’t get a glance at most shows…
I see your point; however, there is also REALITY, which often isn’t kind to us archivists. I was born considerably earlier than most who look and post here — and I would LOVE to own and drive something I saw new in the showroom in 1938 as a boy. And I bought records primarily between 1940 and 1962, hundreds of them. My father bought most of his records between 1909 and the end of the 1930s. I have both collections — almost all 78s. I have loved them and enjoyed listening to them for my entire life. And especially in my young adulthood, I saw some of them rise to frighteningly high prices and catalogue-values in the collector market. However, in more recent years, I have watched as their prices collapsed again, to where most of them are of such low value, that even the Salvation Army wouldn’t take them. WHY? Well, for one thing, 78s are heavy and brittle, and simply storing and housing any quantity of them is a “pain” for nearly all people these days. Finding proper equipment to play them requires more effort than most people are willing to put into the enterprise of potentially collecting them. And nearly NOBODY CARES now. Because you see, most of us who bought them new are no longer around, or are housed in senior living with limited space and walls too thin to tolerate a hi-fi set-up. And those of us who even remember them are very few now. Our children don’t want them. Hundreds of thousands of them end-up in landfills. The same way that too many historical vehicles have found their abandoned and forlorn way into salvage yards or crushed for scrap. A 1951 Chevrolet Bel Air is a beautiful car which would serve someone well even 75 years later. But it requires maintenance which so many younger people don’t want to be bothered with, and those of our age no longer have the energy to keep up with (I have all I can do, just to climb into a car and climb back out again, let alone function as back yard mechanic for a car which no contemporary repair-shop will even touch. Very sad, indeed, since these are so easy to work on — and if all computers suddenly “died”, a car such as this would still run and provide fine service. All of this has severely curtailed the appeal for cars made before the “muscle” age of sealed grease fittings and other things that owners no longer need to worry about, and haven’t since about 1960. People want to get in it, start it, and drive it. They don’t want to fuss with a manual choke, re-set point-gaps, put a drop of oil into a generator bearing fitting every 800 Miles, and the like. This ’51 Chevy is pretty, but it lacks for certain modern features, and it is under-powered for to-day’s motoring. And as others here have said; at a car-show, folks would walk right past it, to go and look at a 1964-1/2 Mustang. Lack of interest equals lowered sale price. Worse, its value is on the way down, so it has no appeal as an “investment”. Whoever restored this one engaged in a labour of pure love.
Well said Harrison…..and very true…
To “Edsel” Al Leonard: it night be true, but it also is very sad. Given the work that went into this car, and the superb result, this dressy Chevrolet deserves to be worth far more than it is. But 1951 and 1952 Chevrolets never quite had the enthusiastic appeal as either the 1949-’50 models or the 1953-’54 ones.
A lot of us don’t like reading the comments, including me. But, it’s true, & I’ve noticed myself at car shows , even our annual Back to the Fifties event at the Mn. State Fairgrounds, it’s mostly old timers like us in our 70s who are there.
I sold my unmodified ’84 Cutlass Brougham for various reasons in 2017 after 27 years, 10 years of showing & 19 trophies. Sometimes I have my regrets , but the reality is, I don’t have anyone to leave it to, and if we leave the house for apartment living, that presents other issues like safe storage, etc.
So, I just go to shows, look, & come home. That, & the present world situation leads me to believe I made the right financial decision.
Funny that with all this doom and gloom about the values, nice cars like this still sell for more than they did 10 years ago….
Nothing funny about it…it affects everything; Inflation!!
Pete, most pre-war stuff doesn’t now, unless it’s Alfa or Bugatti or Duesenberg or Auburn, etc.
It has a lot more to do with the pool of interested buyers. Guys in their late teens and 20s remember their date nights and cruising with the buddies in the cars of their era.
When they get to be 50 to 70, they have the disposable income to get a decent one, for nostalgia purposes.
Once they pass 75, they are selling, not buying, and that puts enormous pressure on the pricing of the cars from that era.
The pre-war era is over. 1950s stuff is losing it’s audience quickly. Muscle cars are guys are starting the aging out process now, and they are not buying 1950s pieces.
We’ve also seen the result of the “cars are investments” hype that was promoted by the auction houses, the classic car insurance companies, and the car hobby media.
Cars cost a lot of money to own. They are not investments like a house. The pool of classic car buyers who jumped into this as “investments” has reached a peak and is now declining rapidly, as they found out that is was all hype.
So we’re headed back to a population of potential buyers who want old cars as a hobby, not investments, and they don’t want to pay more than novelty prices.
And they can get novelty prices if they just wait for the right opportunity, as “collectors” or their estates downsize and liquidate.
Barn Finds is proving that *some* owners of these vehicles still think it’s all unlimited potential and there’s no limit to pricing. They’re praying for some fool to come along and cash them out. That’s happening less and less, every day.
Exactly my point. Inflation keeps the values up.