Dream Car Start

This 1954 Los Angeles Times newspaper story kicks off with, "When can we buy 'em?" Compelling Motorama news stories, like ones featured below, swiftly get on the scent trail of the Dream Car founder and his tale. After viewing historical booty like this, most savvy collector car enthusiasts who love this great era beg the question, "Where has all this fantastic Americana car history been locked up for so long!" 

The dream car phenomenon was another auto design leadership principle Harley Earl first created for GM to exploit in the modern business world. If GM's leaders today were to simply follow the more harmonic path of how this company's former president Harlow Curtice put it back in the above story, "We want to make what the American public desires" ...then, this auto loving nation of car and truck buyers would just go out and purchase millions more (designed) products made in Detroit at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Really, it's that simple. Basically, most Americans wouldn't then feel the need to buy some foreign maker's products! 

Put another way...if an auto maker styles, builds and then markets some kind of good product-design vehicle – generally known in the industry as a "hot car" – it's a widely accepted principle of this business that hundreds of thousands (even millions) of consumers will then go out and buy the product. For example, a recent article in the July 5, 2004 issue of AutoWeek put it this way regarding this observable fact, "To get a Toyota Prius from a dealer, you'd get in line (more than 20,000 orders pending) and pay a markup, which The Wall Street Journal says is typically $5,000 to $6,500 over MSRP. 

If you read the first paragraph of the "In the Pits" story directly above, you'll realize that many auto minded people, outside the trade, back in 1954 knew GM was doing something about quelling the import car craze going on at the time. And, one of the leading champions behind firing up and creating these race cars, which would take Detroit into the sport car field with a vengeance, was none other than Harley Earl

The following material helps answer why the fantastic history around the "dream car rise" was lost for so long in American history. At the end of the 1950s, there was a complete collision of opposites at the top of Detroit's auto world hierarchy whereby a new breed of leaders rose up and took power inside GM. Afterwards they went to extreme lengths to bury and or entirely gloss over the history behind significant past leaders of this company's illustrious mid-twentieth century accomplishments. Removing and replacing champion player's names became a big part of the plan moving forward. GM's new elite arrogantly spun things around to their liking and Zora Duntov's story, below, is a wonderful testament of this behavior. It perfectly demonstrates how easy it was for this company's top execs to cook GM's history books behind one of Chevrolet's greatest automotive hits of the century. 

Conclusion: This above information uncovers essential truths on a cast of characters - ranging all the way back to the early 1960s - who exploited the nation's largest corporation for personal gain, and ultimately, ordinary Americans paid the price. Only an un-American group could have continuously participated in sending trillions of dollars (lost revenues of Detroit's auto world over decades of time from 1960s right into the 21st century) to foreign lands abroad to stoke the furnaces of numerous import car companies. Some key controversial Detroit execs (Roger Smith was the epitome) played enormous roles in our nation's auto industry going into a tailspin. These false leaders created a ruse and went on to help perpetuate subverting vital American auto history; they deleted vast pieces of what could be called the pure essences behind the building blocks of Detroit's modern auto world. 

It's really a sad affair when such a bad group starts running the largest company on the planet; shooting from the hips business behavior and covering up the facts becomes hospital routine. GM's elite new cadre no intentions of continuing down the expensive roads men like Harlow Curtice and Harley Earl's blazed that were laden with GM remaining a high technology leader long into the future. Curtice and Earl, for example, had made promises to millions of American's they would continue to provide and deliver great American (GM) products for decades to come. Going in an all new opposite direction of the previous great leaders like Sloan, Knudsen, Curtice, etc... who all shared Earl's highly progressive "chairman of change" business ideology, GM's new gang could care the least about prior GM leaders beliefs or how they all had risked their reputations and entire careers to build fantastic cars for decades to come! 

It's very simple, that's why such sub-standard vehicles started being pumped off Big 3 auto makers assembly lines 20 years later in the early 1980s (not a one of them were "high-tech"). These poorly designed and engineered products that GM, Ford and Chrysler built (millions of cars and trucks) can not be erased in history and that's why looking back at the entire arc of modern American history of the last 60 odd years is vitally important. It's only in the last 5 to 10 years that Detroit's auto world is starting to show some real promise and actually could get be back on the right road of progressive auto design leaders similar to caliber of vehicles Harlow Curtice and Harley Earl would actually approve of if they were still around.