Photos: When GM's designs ruled the road

When it became official this week that General Motors would be going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, like a lot of Americans we couldn't help but be a bit nostalgic. Along with Ford Motor, which has been less battered by the recession, the 100-year-old GM has long been a red, white, and blue institution. Its Chevrolet unit, in fact, had a hit jingle in the 1970s with the refrain "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet," that sought to identify the things Americans liked best.

So we took a tour of GM's photo archives and came up with this somewhat arbitrary showing of automotive designs from the company's heyday in the broad middle of the 20th century, before the first oil crisis and the surging presence of Japanese imports on U.S. roadways. We'll start here with a "market segmentation price ladder" of GM models from 1925: Cadillac sedan, Chevrolet touring, Pontiac coupe (first year), Buick touring, and Oldsmobile sedan.