Motor Trend’s November 1964 issue predicted a few things that didn’t happen. They included:
- In 1966 Pontiac would come out with a sporty four-seater on a 104-inch wheelbase that was equipped with a six-cylinder overhead cam engine, independent rear suspension and disc brakes.
- American Motors would introduce in mid-1965 a new fastback that could look somewhat like the Tarpon show car . . . but would have a fiberglass upper body atop a regular Rambler body below the beltline.
Of these two items, a sporty Pontiac sounded more plausible — and perhaps reflected an effort by the likes of John Z. DeLorean to build external enthusiasm for such a car to overcome resistance by upper management, much like Lee Iacocca had done to get the Ford Mustang approved (Halberstam, 1986).
Imagine how the trajectory of the pony car field might have changed if Motor Trend’s full prediction had occurred. Pontiac did come out with an OHV six and you could get optional front disc brakes on the new-for-1967 Firebird, but the suspension was typically crude for an American car.
Paul Niedermeyer (2024) summed up the basic problem with pony cars such as the Firebird’s corporate sibling, the Camaro): “(I)t was the antithesis of the Corvair: lousy brakes, heavy or over-assisted steering, terminal understeer, rear axle hop under acceleration and braking, etc. But it had that long hood and big, cheap V8s.”
One could argue that this is what Americans wanted — style and power over roadworthiness. However, I would suggest that the public wasn’t given a viable choice. As a case in point, by 1966 the Corvair’s reputation had been tarnished too heavily for it to be a competitive sporty coupe.
On the Rambler, yes they did come out with the Marlin, which looked like a Tarpon blown up to intermediate size. What’s weird is why Motor Trend would take seriously the idea of a fiberglass roofline. That might have made sense for a convertible with a removable hardtop option, but not a fastback whose roofline is typically integrated with the rest of the body.
Other Motor Trend predictions that mostly happened
Motor Trend did correctly predict a few things. For example, General Motors largely limited to 400 cubic inches the size of V8 engines in its A-body intermediates until 1970 (DeMauro, 2024).
In addition, GM did introduce front-wheel-drive models in the “Riviera class” whose goal was to “get a low, flat floor in the passenger compartment” (Motor Trend, 1964; p. 6).
Motor Trend also reported that Chevrolet dealers were pushing for the two-speed Powerglide to be replaced because Ford and Chrysler had shifted to three-speed automatic transmissions. That did happen — but it took awhile. A version of the Turbo-Hydramatic was made available on almost all Chevrolet cars with six-cylinder and small V8 engines in 1969. However, the Powerglide continued to be a low-cost option on smaller cars through 1973 (Wikipedia, 2024).
Some news items could have been true at the time of publication but subsequently changed. As a case in point, Ford Motor Company management had “decided against” giving the Lincoln-Mercury Division a longer and more luxurious version of the Mustang because they feared that it would hurt Thunderbird sales (Motor Trend, 1964; p. 8).
Also see ‘Popular Mechanics published amusingly wrong predictions about 1968 cars’
Motor Trend also offered slice-of-life news that can sound quaint by today’s standards. For example, some buyers were bothered by California’s requirement that all new cars be equipped with seat belts. The magazine noted that the car owner was not required to actually use the belts — and could even remove them from the car. “He may find, though, that lying in a ditch somewhere is more uncomfortable than sitting on seat belts” (1964, p. 8).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- DeMauro, Thomas A.; 2024. “GM A-body History from 1968-’72: A Crescendo Of Curves, Cubes, And Capability.” Hemmings. Posted July 9.
- Halberstam, David; 1986. The Reckoning. William Morrow & Co., New York, NY.
- Motor Trend; 1964. “Spotlight on Detroit.” November issue: pp. 6-8.
- Niedermeyer, Paul; 2024. “Curbside Classic: 1966 Chevrolet Corvair Monza — The Best European Car Ever Made In America.” Curbside Classic. Posted Oct. 3.
- ——; 2024. “Curbside Classic: Chevrolet Vega — Winner of 1971 Small Car Comparison And GM’s Deadly Sin No. 2.” Curbside Classic. Posted Jan. 11.
- Wikipedia; 2024. “Powerglide.” Page last modified April 12.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcarbrochures.org: Oldsmobile Toronado (1966)
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- 1964 Rambler Tarpon: Wikipedia Commons public domain.
It’s rather an exaggeration to say these things “never happened”.
The ’67 Firebird was sporty and did have a standard OHC inline-6. It did lack disc brakes (sad) but the 108″ wheelbase isn’t too far off the 104″ prediction.
And Rambler did launch a fastback with a regular Rambler body (the Classic) below the beltline–it just wasn’t fiberglass.
This comment strikes me as pedantic but it did lead me to add some clarifying language in the post. The bottom line: Pony cars such as the Firebird did have crude engineering compared to the more sporting imports such as the Datsun 510. In addition, the idea of plopping a fiberglass fastback roofline on top of a regular Rambler body was implausible, particularly given the all-steel Tarpon.
As for the Pontiac comment I found this at:
https://www.motortrend.com/features/pontiac-banshee-xp-833/
as part of a discussion on the Banshee. No indication of when the XP-798 program was killed as it could have been prior to the MoTrend article. One might speculate that to some degree some of the various comments made to MoTrend for the 1966 predictions were “sleight of hand” moves for the benefit of the Detroit competition. Certainly, at 2 years out from introduction the actual version to hit the public was well locked in.
At this time, Collins tells us, “There were some left-over metal Banshee script emblems from the aborted 1966 XP-798 project, a four-seat Mustang fighter with four-wheel independent suspension and a 421 Tri-Power engine. In the end, that car was never shown to the public, and the less sophisticated [Camaro-based] Firebird F-body went into production. I found the emblems at design staff and thought they’d look good on the XP-833, so I installed them on both cars in 1973.”
According to Don Keefe’s Banshee history in High Performance Pontiac, November 2001, DeLorean kept lobbying for it until early 1966, although corporate management reaction to the presentation in summer 1965 was not encouraging. So, at the time Motor Trend went to press in 1964, it was still definitely a real project that DeLorean and Collins really hoped to build (and that I imagine DeLorean or someone else may have “leaked” to the magazines in hopes of building up some groundswell of enthusiast support for the idea).
I don’t know about the Tarpon plans, but the XP-833, as both the Hot Rod article Jeff links above and the HPP article explain, had a steel floorpan for its fiberglass body, and Collins said the production car was to have fiberglass outer panels on a unitized steel shell. This isn’t as strange as it sounds: You can do a steel monocoque with unstressed outer panels (à la Citroën Déesse or Rover P6) of other materials, and the Déesse originally had a fiberglass roof panel. Pontiac was toying with this for the Banshee project as a way to bring down the tooling costs, which was of course very important for a relatively low-volume model. I don’t know specifically what AMC may have been contemplating in that regard, but it seems plausible enough that they were looking at other variations of this idea for the same reasons.
The XP-833 did NOT have independent rear suspension, however. It had an A-body Tempest live axle, modified with what the Hot Rod article linked above as handmade Watt’s linkage.
It could have been interesting to wonder what if the Banshee have gone into a 2+2 sports car or 4-seater instead of just being 2-seater? Something close as the DeSoto Adventurer I show-car.
https://classiccars.fandom.com/wiki/DeSoto_Adventurer_I
https://automobilebrandsofthepast.blogspot.com/2013/02/1954-desoto-adventurer-i-ghia.html
It could be interesting to wonder what if Chrysler have given the green light to the Adventurer I but that would be a story for another topic. 😉
If one reads the car buff magazines from the late 1950s through 1965 like “Motor Trend”, “Car Life”, “Sports Cars Illustrated” which became “Car & Driver”, “Road & Track”, even “Hot Rod”…all had monthly gossipy reports of what was going on in Detroit and Europe of potential new models and technical details. Most of this stuff was because of leaks from suppliers for new models and new technical innovations or test mules being ferried back and forth at the proving grounds (like the front-drive Olds Cutlass sedans and Dynamic 88s in 1963-1964). Plus, as the spring and summer months lead-up to new car introductions, pilot production models were out on the streets in the hands of factory engineers to diagnose potential service issues.
This post brings to mind a question: Was there ever a “new” car or truck that upon press introduction was a total surprise to the marketplace and the rest of the vehicle manufacturing industry ?
While the Pontiac Banshee project was still a going thing in the summer of 1964 (even though its final form hadn’t yet been determined, a more embarrassing prognosticatory misfire was the item a year later (Motor Trend, September 1965) in which Roger Huntington speculated about a new Cadillac V-12 engine. This was also a real project, but the embarrassing part is that it had actually been canceled at least six months before the article went to press. (Since Huntington was a freelancer, he may well have submitted that item months earlier, at a time when the project was still clinging to life, but still.)