Firebirds I, II, and III
General Motors
1953-1959

The Firebirds were incredibly striking cars, the very essence of Jet Age design, but their significance as futurist artifacts comes from the fact that they actually worked. The 1953 Firebird I was built, in part, to test the feasibility of gasoline turbine engines in automitive applications and driven, somewhat hesitantly, at Indianapolis. Firebird II, showing three years later, had a less powerful if supposedly more user-friendly engine and a body made of titanium, which was extremely exotic as it was still considered a strategic metal at the time; it also had an autopilot of sorts, a guidance system that would supposedly follow wires embedded into the highways of tomorrow. Firebird III, in 1959, had it all, the turbine, the titanium, the bubble canopies and the fins, as well as being steered, throttled, and braked with a joystick between the seats— as the pamphlet said, it was "An Amazing Experience In Automatic Car Control!"

Of course, none of the Firebird's marquee technologies made it into production, although the research and development probably paid off in countless ways, as R&D always does. What makes the Firebird concepts remarkable is the sheer optimism of the engineers and designers who put them together, who decided that the complexities of 1200° F exhaust temperatures, driver's joysticks, and functional aerodynamic surfaces were going to be part of an increasingly ambitious national landscape someday sooner than we thought.

Photo Credit: Automotive History Online