If you want to know where the market for a car is going, a good way to learn what’s up is to hunt down military members with paychecks in hand. A bunch of young Joes with their first taste of real money will, almost inevitably, score a new car in short order. I’ll speak from experience: after two tours, both times the parking lot at work wound up having an almost 90% turnover rate. Muscle cars, new pickups, that dream machine that someone was saving for…or in my case, you buy four or five low-buck beauties and leave your command wondering if you needed a day spa trip courtesy of the funny farm. Harley Earl knew this trick…he saw soldiers returning from the European theater of World War II who were importing sports cars left, right and center. He managed to con GM into giving it a shot and in January of 1953, the EX-122 prototype was shown at the 1953 General Motors Motorama at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the first time. The idea was a hit, but when the actual cars started to roll off of the assembly line later that year, they were barely passing at best. To keep costs down, GM put the body, made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, onto the chassis of the standard production car and other than some mild hop-up treats, the “Blue Flame” straight-six and Powerglide automatic were selected to move the machine. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the 150 horsepower output and two-speed slushbox wasn’t impressing anybody.

In case you were wondering, the Corvette wasn’t supposed to remain in plastic for 1954. The original plan was to do the first 300 cars in fiberglass-reinforced plastic, then to switch to a steel body. However, the idea of the plastic body was one of the car’s larger selling points and it was recognized that if this little ship was going to sail at all, that they had better stick to what the customers wanted, especially after complaints of leaky bodies and doors that would open without help started to appear. The Corvette’s early days were rocky, and the car was almost shelved not only early on, but at least twice more through modern days.