Buick Y-Job

In 1938, Harley Earl, the first designer to head a styling department at General Motors, unveiled the Buick Y-Job. It is regarded as the first concept car in history: a car built not to be sold, but to test ideas and herald the future.

Long, low and wide, it broke with the tall cars of its era. Its wings were integrated into the body, its headlights were concealed, its windows were electric and its hood folded away under a cover. Its vertical-bar grille would become Buick’s signature for decades. Its name comes from aviation, where the letter Y designated experimental prototypes.

Harley Earl used it as his personal car for several years, and many details of the Y-Job reappeared on American cars of the 1940s and 1950s. It is now kept at the GM Heritage Center, as the birth certificate of car design as a discipline.