General Motors’ Firebird III may well be the most spectacular concept car ever made, not just because of its radical appearance but also its engineering, which was decades ahead of its time. While it normally resides in GM’s Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan, the iconic masterpiece made an appearance recently at the 2018 Canadian International Auto Show.
Words by Gerry Malloy / Photos by Jeremy Malloy and General Motors
Looking to the future from 60 years past, the Firebird III was designed and built specifically for GM’s 1959 Motorama extravaganza, where it made its public debut in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on October 16, 1958. It also appeared at General Motors of Canada’s version of Motorama, in Toronto, in 1959.
Three Firebirds
The Firebird III was the third in a succession of Firebird “dream cars” (as they were called in those days before the term “concept cars” was coined), all of which featured styling strongly influenced by the aerospace infatuation of the time and all powered by gas turbine engines. They’re seen here with the Legendary head of GM Styling, Harley Earl.
Not just a hollow showpiece, as many concepts are, the Firebird III was a fully-engineered runner. To prove the point, GM produced a Hollywood-style film of the car’s development that included testing both at the company’s Mesa, Arizona proving ground and on a public freeway in the Detroit area.
The decision to build the car, designated internally as XP73, was made just 18 months before the Motorama show, at which time not a single line of its design had been drawn. Responsibility for that design was assigned to the company’s Advanced Design Studio and specifically to a recently-hired Industrial Design graduate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, named Norman James, who had done some detail work on the Firebird II.
James got his marching orders directly from GM’s infamous V-P and head of Styling Staff, Harley Earl. ‘Mistearl’, as he was known internally, wanted the new car to build on the design theme of the 1956 Pontiac Club de Mer dream car (a recreation of which is seen here), with its big central fin. And he wanted something truly spectacular – something he equated to the automotive equivalent of a Las Vegas show girl, albeit using his typically more-colourful language.
James was assigned an engineer named Stefan Habsburg to assist with the technical aspects related to the design. After getting their design brief from Earl, according to James’s autobiography, Of Firebirds and Moonmen, he said to Hapsburg, “If we don’t put fins on it, somebody else will!” And so they did – seven of them.
Another of Earl’s descriptors for the car he envisioned was, “what you would expect the astronauts to drive to the launch pad on their way to the moon.” So it was no wonder the Firebird III adopted design cues redolent of aircraft and rockets, as GM’s production cars were already doing.
The Firebird III’s nose shape was inspired by that of the North America F-100 fighter plane with its recessed front air intake opening, according to James.
The upward rake of the Firebird III, towards the front, took its inspiration from the F-104 Starfighter jet, which had a “lightness of form” that James tried to emulate. (It would be anathema for a road car today given what we’ve since learned about aerodynamics.)
Inspiration for the multiple fins came from a visit to an airshow where James saw a Nike Surface-to-Air missile being towed parallel to the ground. It was rotated so that its four stabilizing fins, at both its tail and amidships, were at a 45-degree angle to the vertical- and ground-planes. He liked their look.
The exact shape and placement of the fins were a product of much experimentation and were dictated, to some extent, by the mechanics of the vehicle, which necessitated a longer than ideal wheelbase from the designer’s perspective. The car was powered by a midship-mounted, Whirlfire regenerative gas-turbine engine, developed by GM Research and rated at 225 horsepower. A 10-horsepower four-stroke gasoline engine, mounted up front provided power for the cars extensive hydraulic and electronic systems.
Among the Firebird III’s many advanced technical features was an all-season climate control system – the first with a single dial electronic temperature set according to GM – which was aided in dealing with the Arizona heat by aluminized coatings on the bubble tops. They were subsequently replaced by clear bubbles to enable photography.
James recognized that the reverse-teardrop shape of the bubbles was not aerodynamically correct and he tried proper teardrop shapes but they just didn’t look right with the rest of the lines so function gave way to appearance.
Other technical features included an early form of ABS and air-cooled, aluminum drum brakes, assisted by automatic pop-up panels beside the central fin that served as air brakes, a la Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. There was also an air-oil suspension system with adjustable height control, as well as a lighting system that turns on automatically when it gets dark, an “ultra-sonic key” that opens the doors using high-frequency sound waves and a timer that can be set to start the accessory drive engine prior to passenger entry to pre-condition the interior temperature. This was 60 years ago!
The driver controlled the Firebird III via a central joystick: push fore and aft to go and stop; left and right to turn; and rotate to select forward or reverse. But it also had an autonomous feature – at least within the confines of GM’s Proving Ground. It would follow the path of a wire embossed in the road without any driver input. (The interior was originally trimmed in red but has since been redone in black.)
The Firebird is ancient in its origins and common to a broad array of cultural mythologies, including Slavic, Greek (the Phoenix) and Native American (the Thunderbird). According to GM lore, Norm James saw a depiction of a Firebird, “with its wings spread and sort of feathered," in the Phoenix airport and created a similar design to adorn the Firebird cars (although he makes no mention of that tale in his book).
While it incorporates a host of individual features, such as bubble roofs, fins and air intakes, all of which scream for attention, they all come together as a whole in the Firebird III, such that without any one just where it is, the car would seem incomplete.
Arguably, no other concept car before or since has broken as much new ground or looked as spectacular in doing so as the Firebird III. As proof of that point, 60 years on, it still looks futuristic!
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