The image below is of Firebird I making the rounds at one of the many colleges it toured; mainly engineering institutions and art schools which had recently begun teaching programs specializing in industrialized car design (GM Styling started this landmark idea). Harley Earl never made the rounds lecturing, but he made sure others inside GM did; primarily to inspire the up-and-coming next generation so they very well might want to come work for General Motors. Back then, planting the seed in academia was always part of GM's master plan. At this time, it was hospital routine for many of this company's special one-of-a-kind experimental cars to be on a parade nation-wide.

14 additional pages in this report shown here (no. 4 thru 17) list more engineering innovations. If demand warrants it, these pages will be added here at a later date. But, there are a number of significant engineering advances, and technological firsts, revealed in the pages that are here right now. For example, important ideas and "thought starters" first came to be in this radical experimental Firebird: Cruisecontrol, keyless entry, first-ever onboard computer, paper engine testing via digital computer technology (precursor to CAD), automatic guidance system, twilight sentential., etc... Many of the original innovations first experimented with on this specialty car are now standard equipment on 10s of millions of automobiles...In other words, HARLEY EARL WAS HERE.

This pioneering Auto Innovator also created Detroit's first hybrid vehicle, too; a vivid Firebird III in-house documentary movie made in 1958 displays this fact.

Harley Earl was one of the great pathfinders of the modern auto world who bucked the odds

What if the da Vinci of Detroit had not plunked down GM money for the majority of specialty cars he built in the 50's...what might we all be driving today? Do variations of Model-Ts or perhaps the Russian-Yugoslavian/Yugo ring any bells? 

Any enthusiast has only to sit in a 1957 Cadillac Coup de Ville, or any modern cars made for the American market place, to enjoy countless luxuries that most people take for granted today. Simply put, Harley Earl turned hurrying into pleasure.

Directly below are three of the other patents sited on Harley Earl's titanium Firebird II patent (above).

What's the bottom line?

The two mechanically motorized art forms graphically illustrated and used as an example at this online section were multi-million dollar concept vehicles. Back in the 1950s, H.J. Earl was the only experimental artist / engineer in Detroit who could pull off achieving this type of funding to build motoramic masterpieces. That's because the other design/engineers he was competing with were not yet even close to understanding him and how he created the auto design profession and all his automotive artistry in the first place.