Dream Cars

For most of the past 120 years or so, men have loved fast and flashy cars. I’ve always enjoyed Jaguar’s sophisticated, enduring design, and solid and intelligent, no-nonsense engineering. They were never cheap, but they offered the surprising value for the money that Sir William Lyons demanded of every car his company built: “Grace, Space, and Pace”. The clueless self-destruction of Jaguar’s gender(less) reveal party in Miami on December 2^nd, unveiling their cars of tomorrow, is disconcerting to longtime fans of the firm’s twin chrome symbols, the Leaper and the Growler. (I realize, of course, that the company wants to get away from being associated with older buyers, especially male ones; I mean, these days, what advertiser doesn’t?)

Car shows—dream cars—and the men who dreamed of them: all very different once. Spring 1962. Easter Sunday was late that year, April 22. I was ten, and had just had my confirmation, a Catholic rite of passage for boys. As a reward, one of my uncles, an NYPD sergeant, generously took me to the New York Auto Show, at the Coliseum on the west side of Manhattan. It was there that I’d first encounter a dream car, as they were then called. The memory has an indelible connection to that other Madison Avenue exploitable corner of the male imagination, dream girls, as you will see.

Ford always sponsored one of the show’s biggest exhibits. A decade earlier, they presented the Futura, a bubble-topped dream car that was filmed being driven around Fifties Manhattan with the three Ford brothers (Edsel’s sons) in the front seat. Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably seen it. It was slightly restyled and completely repainted to become TV’s Batmobile.

For ’62, they presented a show car called the Cougar, which had nothing to do with the subsequent Mercury of that name. Cougar was never meant to be driven; it was a real car but designed only for occasions like this. On a stage under a ring of intense spotlights, it was gleaming with chrome and candy-colored turquoise body work.

A loudspeaker extolled the features of the experimental car, with a smooth, easy delivery that sounded like Motor Trend magazine embodied as a honey-voiced woman. Then the turntable revolved, and we saw the woman, speaking live, looking gorgeous and effortlessly reeling off details, of cubic inches and compression and final drive ratios. She paused for audience questions and strode over to us, the ring of spectators behind the railing, with a big smile. The first men she pointed the microphone at were startled or embarrassed. They babbled ignorable cliches. “Do you come with the car?”

And then, oh my brothers and sisters, with a great heavenly moving spotlight, the spokesmodel strolled over to me. “So, how about it? Do you have a question?”

I piped up eagerly, “Will this car really be for sale someday?”

She grinned even wider, delighted to have a question that had a stock answer. “Very possible, son. Very possible.” The crowd laughed and applauded. As far as ten-year-old me was concerned, adult life was going to be wonderful.

Of course, there was plenty else to see at the show that year. Studebaker displayed its new Avanti, a production car that looked like a show car. Designed by Raymond Loewy, it wasn’t enough to save Studebaker. But it was good enough to outlive its parent company by decades, as a series of investors kept Avanti going as a minor brand. Even as late as 1997 (Gattaca), moviemakers still used it as a futuristic car.

Israel was promoting its first sports car, the fiberglass-bodied Sabra; it got few if any US sales, but it had modest sales at home. There also were a couple of what we might now called vaporware cars, one electric, the other driven by a gas turbine. No vehicles, but prospectuses to offer investors. One actual electric car was on sale in ’62, the Henney Kilowatt, a Renault Dauphine with batteries.

Although there were a handful of experimental one-off cars built in the Thirties and Forties, the dream car phenomenon was really ignited in the Fifties by General Motors’ annual Motorama shows. These featured GM’s newest designs, including ones touted to be tomorrow’s cars. Held in a handful of cities, Motoramas travelled from town to town in custom-built transport trucks. They were enormously expensive, elaborate shows, ones that only the richest corporation in the world could afford.

There’s a hierarchy among show cars. The lowest level are mere “design exercises”, known more bluntly in the auto trade as “pushmobiles”—they are basically wheeled sculptures with no working innards (apparently what Jaguar displayed on Dec. 2). Most pushmobiles don’t even have useable doors. A “ghost interior” made of black felt simulates the shapes of a steering wheel and seat headrests.

A big step up are real cars with drivetrains and interiors. A chromed V-8 under the hood looks awesome. However, chances are it’s not a “runner”. The next step: drivable cars with working engines. Even those are seldom driven faster than a walking pace, just enough to get them out of the truck and onto the show floor.

Rarest of all are show cars intended for actual road use, like Ford’s Futura or Chrysler’s 1963 turbine cars. GM’s 90s electric car, EV1 was like Chrysler’s turbine car of 35 years earlier, a pilot marketing project: more than a pure experiment, less than an immediately saleable product.

Auto show cars often have exotic, super-expensive paint that looks great under the lights but whose colors fade fast in sunlight. These cars are seldom if ever safety-tested (if there’s only one in existence, you can’t crash-test two dozen of them.) They aren’t made to stand up to rocky roads, torrential rain or freezing temperatures. And that’s primarily why, like GM’s EV1, they are destroyed once they leave the show circuit and the test market: Liability worries. America is a very litigious country. GM’s lawyers tried and failed to come up with a release-from-liability contract that would stand up (in Heinlein’s phrase) even before the Throne of God. Too bad for automotive history.

There are exceptions. Private collectors like the famous Joe Bortz and Jay Leno seek them out, sometimes even resurrecting them from junkyards. For them, GM, Ford, and Chrysler/Stellantis wink and look the other way, because Bortz and Leno are rich, sophisticated experts who won’t try to sue the company if the 40, 50, 60-year-old parts go wrong.

Dream cars are in movies and TV. We mentioned Gattaca’s Avanti and the Ford Futura-derived 1966 Batmobile. There are plenty of others. A Twilight Zone episode features Buick’s 1951 Le Sabre as a 21^st century car. The Outer Limits depicted the early 80s twenty years earlier by using cars from local L.A. customizers. Even the Nazis might have joined the act; in 1938, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wrote to Volkswagenwerke, asking about the possibility of borrowing a few cars to film a futuristic European scene. The Germans, unsurprisingly, didn’t take Louis B. Mayer up on the offer, but did send MGM a lavish color brochure.

In 1957 and ’58, at the height of our love of automobiles, a wave of debunking books hit the best-seller lists, like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, or John Keats’ Insolent Chariots. In time, they’d help trigger the consumer movement. Both told the story of why car dealers put a red convertible in the showroom window, even though few buyers will ultimately order it: it brings in foot traffic from men. Vance Packard claimed it was because the convertible was a symbolic mistress. If so, most women accepted it as a fairly harmless rival, provided the family could afford it. Most men agreed that they couldn’t, not really, and then husband and wife both laughed it off while hubby dutifully signed on the dotted line for a sensible four-door sedan.

I once read a perceptive but somewhat cynical definition of romantic love: “A friendship based on beauty.” That’s not a fair way to treat a woman. But it’s a perfectly fair way to treat a show car.