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The Original: Take A Closer Look At The 1938 Buick Y-Job, The First Concept Car


The Original: Take A Closer Look At The 1938 Buick Y-Job, The First Concept Car

The amount of effort that goes into the planning and development of a new model of automobile is beyond scope for those who are not in the industry. Meetings, sketches, more sketches, design changes, engineering changes, research into what the public wants and more importantly, doesn’t want…hell, if it was legitimate, you’d see company presidents climbing a mountain to consult the Oracle on what the next move should be. The design can make or break a car, for sure, but what about an entire industry? Look at the automobile industry after the Great Depression. For years, spending coin on a car was only done out of pure necessity and nothing more. There just wasn’t any spending cash to go around, and not much was being done in the name of progress. Stagnation isn’t good for a business model that needs to move product, and GM designer Harley Earl saw this plain as day. He had a vision in his head that pretty much set the tone for nearly forty years: longer, lower, wider.

Earl’s idea was simple enough: create a car that would stir up the buying public well enough that it would effectively buy Buick some time before a production vehicle could be brought to market. Earl had the ideas, and designer George Snyder got the job of translating Earl’s ideas into a shape with wheels attached. The chassis was a stretched Buick with a standard straight-eight powertrain to keep the car mobile…there was no real magic there, just what worked. No, the magic was the shape: no running boards. Hideaway headlights. A front fender shape that went into the door. The first hint of the grille that would become a Buick hallmark for decades. Thirteen-inch wheels on fat whitewalls to accentuate the visual aspects of it all. And mass…this thing has the length of a moving van.

The Y-Job was a one-off car, but was fully functional. It served Harley Earl as his personal car for years. When you look at a picture of a 1939 Buick production car, and then park it next to the Y-Job, you get a true appreciation of just how radical this car was for the time. Since then, many concept cars have come and gone, some barely more than a preview of the next model, some so ridiculous that they never got past the hand-carved model stage (see also: Ford Nucleon) but only one can claim to be the first.


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