Exciting 1965 Buick ads that show off the Riviera’s hidden headlights and new muscle

Buick had a strong year in 1965, building enough cars to pass Dodge and Oldsmobile in U.S. production. The 1965 Buick lineup covered a lot of ground, from big, comfortable family sedans to a couple of coupes with serious power under the hood.

The best-known of the bunch was the Riviera, Buick’s personal luxury coupe, which had debuted two years earlier. For 1965 it got the hidden headlights its designers had wanted from the start, tucked behind small grilles at the edges of the front fenders that opened when the lights came on.

The Riviera also picked up a new Gran Sport package with a bigger, more powerful V8. Buick added the same Gran Sport name to the midsize Skylark that year, after the Pontiac GTO showed there was a market for big engines in smaller cars.

GM gave its full-size cars new, curvier bodies for 1965. Buick’s version included the LeSabre, which was the brand’s entry-level big car, and the Electra 225, which sat at the top of the line and was so named because the original 1959 model measured about 225 inches long (earning it the nickname “deuce and a quarter”).

Most of these names stuck around for decades. The Riviera lasted until 1999, the Electra until 1990 and the LeSabre until 2005, while the Gran Sport went on to become one of Buick’s best-known performance badges.

The ads collected below ran in national magazines during the first half of 1965 and feature the Riviera, the LeSabre 400 and the Electra 225. One calls the Riviera Gran Sport “the Riviera with muscles on its muscles,” which is a fair summary.