Raymond's Site

Courtesy GM Media.

While going through the images that Mark McCourt collected for his feature story on GM’s Art and Colour section in the February 2016 issue of Hemmings Classic Car, we came across one not used for space considerations, an unsigned profile of a streamlined bus, van, something that, of course, we had to know more about.

The rendering’s dated December 29, 1936, and mentions GM’s Bus Division. That date makes it unlikely that the rendering was for GM’s Parade(s) of Progress, the first of which his the road earlier that year, and the second of which was still several years away (though the up-high central seating location for the driver looks awfully similar to the second parade’s Futurliners). The metadata from GM Media mentions “Henshall Publicity Coaches for Standard Oil of New Jersey,” and while many have pointed out ties between GM and Standard Oil over the years, Henshall Publicity Coaches doesn’t crop up in any of our reference materials.

What pops out at us is the remarkable similarity to the Brooks Stevens motorhomes that we looked at last year, not so much for the streamlined design – everybody jumped on that bandwagon in the Thirties – but for the possibility that, like Stevens’s designs, this may have been intended as a sort of mobile office or showroom for corporations like Standard Oil.

Or, like many Art and Colour renderings, it could have just been one of dozens (hundreds, thousands) of ideas that the designers treated like spaghetti thrown to the wall, seeing if any of them would stick. Too bad it never made the transition from paper to reality.