Curbside Classic has an article on the Pontiac Star Chief. The article describes the original model correctly but misses its oddness. Most carmakers were playing the same game in the early 50s. Introduce a special upscale hardtop as your first hardtop, give it a rich and romantic name, then later step the name down through the hierarchy as new special upscale hardtops got new names. Pontiac played this game with the Catalina. Others had Holiday, Hollywood, Belvedere, Fairlane, Bel Air.
The Star Chief was unique. It was introduced in 1954 as a special upscale model, but it wasn’t a hardtop. It was a sedan with a longer passenger compartment and a longer trunk. The extra space in the trunk made it popular with tourists and salesmen, not with secretaries or midlife crisis businessmen.
Nobody else ever treated trunk space as a luxury feature!
Polistra's Mill 