The General Motors Firebird lll gas turbine car was a concept developed in 1958 as a progression of the Firebird I and Firebird II vehicles. None of these cars were intended for mass production, instead they were a testing ground for new technologies and drivetrains.
The Firebird III was developed with a gas turbine drive system, a joystick controller in place of a steering wheel and pedals, a self-driving function and an early version of cruise control. It’s very likely that the engineers at GM thought that we’d have had self driving cars on the road within a decade of two of this film being made, of course the reality is that we’re only now on the cusp of it – 57 years later.
Click here to read more about the Firebird concept cars.
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
