Everyone loves a good concept car or two. Concept cars are, more often than not, an attempt by auto manufacturers to drive up sales of their products or upcoming vehicles and to showcase what their design departments can do. Not every concept car that gets made makes it into production. And some that do look wildly different to what the original concept envisioned. But concept cars are still something pretty cool, even if many never get made. One of the best showcases of concept cars though has to be the classic General Motors Motorama.
Beginning in 1949 and ending in 1961, the General Motors Motorama was a series of shows that showcased some incredible concepts from various brands under the GM umbrella, such as Chevrolet and Oldsmobile, in a way that no one thought possible. Some of the cars on show had designs that even today would make you stop and stare. The Motorama shows of 1953 and 1954 are perhaps the most incredible, with some truly amazing cars on show to the public. Some of them have survived to this day, while others whereabouts remain a mystery.
What The Motorama Was All About
The Motoramas were essentially automobile extravaganzas, with the first show in 1949 called the Transportation Unlimited Autorama. The shows would bring together some fancy prototypes, concept vehicles and special and halo vehicles together. The idea behind the shows was to whet the public's appetite for their models, and to hopefully boost sales of the cars as well. Existing chassis of GM cars would have fiberglass bodies on them, many of the designs custom and either one-offs or in produced in very, very low numbers.
In 1953, the show was officially first called the Motorama. This is when the show also began to travel the United States rather than just stay in one location, and it attracted more than 1.4 million visitors in that first year. Some 45,000 came to the show's opening day alone in New York. Dancers, singers, an orchestra and more were on hand to make it one hell of a day out. Some of the cars on show were simply extraordinary, with the 1953 Corvette being one of them and the Oldsmobile Starfire being another highlight of the show. And there were plenty more stars too.
The Stars And Cars Of The Early 1950s Motoramas
There were plenty of insane cars on show during the Motorama event. One of them was the Firebird 1 XP-21. This was a fighter jet inspired car that was the first of four distinct models GM would make, and powering it was a Whirlfire Turbo Power gas turbine engine good enough for 300 hp, and this car very much survives in 2022. From the design studio of Pontiac came the Pontiac Bonneville Special that was first shown off to the world in 1954 at that year's Motorama. This was the first two-seat sports car prototype the division had made, and it had a 4.4-liter V8 under the hood. Pontiac made two of them, and both exist to this day.
Some of the cars, though, just vanished following the show. The 1954 Corvette Nomad Station Wagon is one of those, which was one of the most eye-catching of that year's cars. Rumors have run around that it was somehow stolen from GM and stashed away in California somewhere. The 1953 Oldsmobile Starfire, of which three were ultimately made, is another disappearing mystery from that year's Motorama. At the time, GM saw them as just fleeting visions of its future, but today these Motorama machines have become quite valuable and highly sought after cars.
Restoring A Motorama Car
A good number of the Motorama cars though have survived. Including an incredible Chevrolet Corvette from 1954, which had the chassis and engine of a ’54 Corvette but a pale yellow body of a Motorama show car. This car had show body EX-129 on chassis S.O. 2151. It was first created as a proposal as to what the 1955 Corvette, the first with a V8, should look like. There is a real mystery as to how this car escaped from General Motors hands, as a lot of its history is somehow undocumented. But thanks to Billy Jay, it went through an incredible restoration complete with its original, restored body.
Nothing Quite Like The Motorama
The Motorama shows would go on once again in 1955 and 1956, before a break for a couple of years, and they then returned in 1959 and ran for the final time in 1961. In all, it's estimated that some 10.5 million visitors saw the Motorama shows from 1949 through to the final one in 1961. To this day, there hasn’t really been anything quite like the Motorama shows. Nothing has recreated the atmosphere of the events, nor produced cars so striking. But thankfully, we have some reminders of just how special these shows were.
Sources: YouTube, Old Cars Weekly, Corvettes.nl