17_325_06_Text-51

Chapter 52

Introduced at General Motor Corp.’s Motorama exhibit in New York in 1954, Pontiac’s XP 21 Firebird rocket-shaped design and turbine-powered engine were inspired by recent advances in fighter jets. An opening-day crowd of 30,784 ogled the first experimental gas turbine ever to be built and tested in the United States. Serenading the crowds half a dozen times a day was a twenty-seven-piece orchestra complemented by a twelve-voice chorus. Wide-screen movies, a Broadway cast, and fashion models rounded out the entertainment, while TV and radio host Arthur Godfrey made a nationwide primetime telecast from the show.

Like the Corvette at the Motorama the year before, the idea for the Firebird came from the mind of Harley Earl, the fabled GM vice president of styling. Designed more as an exercise in what-if automotive engineering and fashion, the car, with its fiberglass-reinforced plastic body, was fueled by a power turbine that drove the rear wheels through a transmission. The engine was capable of a volcano-eruption 370-horsepower. By comparison, the first Corvette packed a sickly 150 horsepower.

GM never intended to build the car with the jet-like nose and miniature wing, especially with a turbine engine that spewed jet exhaust at a tailgate-deterring 1,250 degrees Fahrenheit. Like GM’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939–1940 and 1964–1965 New York world’s fairs, the Firebird and Motoramas (the similar nomenclature was not coincidental) themselves reinforced the luminous future seen in learned articles and beckoning advertisements of the day: Dads in hats would pilot jet cars with the little women and their children along for the soaring ride on lanes of air instead of asphalt. Packages would be delivered by missile, and tableware liquefied by superhot water would make dishwashers a relic of bygone times. The 1 percent would hop rockets overseas, while the coach class would own at least their own helicopters, and the mailman would be supplanted by fax machines. (The near-miss accuracy of those looks forward was mitigated by the absurd forecast that by the year 2000, the average female of the species would be more than six feet tall, and clomp around in a size 11 shoe.) The future was bigger and faster, and your journey to it would begin in a GM car.

“One thing Hollywood does well,” Spike Lee said, “is sequels.” Long before Hollywood churned out sequels, the auto industry perfected the art with new versions of old favorites, each pushing its predecessor on an ice floe of irrelevance. Visitors to the 1956 Motorama sat enthralled by a new, improved Firebird, because even the future needed to be upgraded.

A GM-produced movie projected an express-lane future that contrasted with the pokey present, wherein a nuclear family of today sits cramped in a hot metal box of the 1950s, stuck in a freeway jam. In a flash-forward to the future, they cruise in air-conditioned and high-speed luxury in a Firebird II on a “Safety Autoway,” an automated freeway where no other vehicles compete with this family idyll (perhaps the most science fiction-y of all the film’s SF futuristic concepts). A four-seat family vehicle, the Firebird II was a much more practical design. Featuring a low and wide look, the concept car included large dual air intakes in the front, a vertical tail fin, and a high bubble-canopy top. Inside, it came with snack tables, four reclining lounge seats that could be individually adjusted, and a luggage compartment that could hold up to eight bags.

The Firebird II was succeeded by the Firebird III at the Motorama in 1959. The bubble-topped titanium roadster sported cruise control, air-conditioning, and anti-lock brakes to go with its seven short wings and tail fins that had been exhaustively tested in a wind tunnel.

What the sea was to Melville, the future was to car companies and consumers. GM wasn’t the only automaker to scatter concept cars in front of the masses like pennies on the sidewalk, but it was one of the earliest. Its first efforts merged cars with wonder materials like the Ghost Car presented at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair in New York and the 1940 Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. Built by GM and chemical company Rohm & Haas, which developed Plexiglas in 1933, the Ghost Car was made of a transparent substance. Like most concept cars, the see-through sedan was never mass-produced, but heralded instead the widespread use of the shatterproof acrylic glass in airplane cockpits, submarine periscopes, gun turrets, and more during WWII.

Attendees at the 1955 Chicago Auto Show gaped at Buick’s Century Cruiser, a low-slung javelin of a concept car that came with hands-free driving, a refrigerator, and a TV set. In those pre-GPS days, drivers would insert a computer punch card with pre-programmed routes, which turned the car over to an autopilot. The mechanical mind would steer the auto and its occupants to their destination by receiving data transmitted from electronic highway centers.

Introduced at the 1959 Geneva Motor Show, the Société Industrielle de Mécanique de Carrosserie Automobile’s Fulgur was designed to suggest the cars of 2000. Atomic-powered, voice-controlled, and radar-guided, the Fulgur relied on just two wheels and was balanced by gyroscopes. Studebaker-Packard Corp. had a similar vison of the far-off twenty-first century when it wheeled out the Astral at the 1957 Geneva Motor Show. Balanced on one wheel using gyroscope technology, it would have looked at home in a Ridley Scott movie with replicants escaping their fate in it.

Few had the impact or the elan of the Ford Lincoln Futura, however. When the Ford Motor Co. displayed the Futura concept car in its exhibit at the 1955 Chicago Auto Show (the same one the Buick displayed its Century Cruiser at), it only hoped to accelerate consumer interest in its line. Built by hand in Italy for $250,000, the Futura was of course never produced, and the model used in the exhibit was eventually sold to famed car customizer George Barris, who for years left it languishing behind his Los Angeles shop. When producers for a new TV show in 1965 asked Barris to build a vehicle for its villain-vanquishing star, he reshaped the Futura’s nose and tail, painted it a velvet-textured black, and created the now-legendary Batmobile.