It’s totally insane. There’s no way it was serious, and I can’t believe it ever got the green light, but it happened, and now it’s an awesome piece of history that lives on forever.
I’ve watched the movie Dazed and Confused more times than I can count, and it glorifies two things: Old cars and partying hard. Although I was a few years too late to experience the seventies for myself, it seemed like almost everyone embraced the opportunity to get loaded as often as possible. Sure, it’s Hollywood embellishment to add to the show, but the idea had to be loosely based on truth, right? The seventies may have actually been like that, but in my opinion, they’re just the chemtrails following the glory that was the sixties. Mid-size cars, big engines, small brakes, bright colours, it was all there.
By the time the seventies came around, between government legislation and designers being “partied out,” to quote Wayne’s World, both the cars and the consumers suffered. Some models were up hundreds of pounds and down hundreds of horsepower. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few wild ideas that aged well, such as plastering a giant chicken on the hood of an attractive but overall underperforming Pontiac. Ford tried the same thing with the Mustang II, the sequel that never aged well. Even with a giant Cobra displayed in a similar fashion, it never fully caught on with mainstream acceptance.
The seventies van craze was understandable. After the sixties, people wanted a place to chill out and sleep it off. The peak of automotive obscurity happened right at the end of the ’60s, when Hemi cars and Slant Six cars had the same brakes, and when Chevy pulled the wings off a jet and called it the future.
The 1969 Chevy Astro III is, as you may have guessed, the third rendition of the Astro concept car. The first one looks like a third-gen Corvette mixed with a Ford GT, and it sat atop a platform very similar to the production Corvair. Astro II looked like a more civilian version of a third-gen Corvette mixed with a Ford GT and quite honestly would have been a great production car with a big nasty 427 installed in it.
The Astro III, though, that one came right out of the “Say Perhaps to Drugs” era. Looking like a fighter jet without wings, it features a gas-turbine helicopter engine made by Allison. Three-hundred and seventeen horsepower wasn’t a lot in 1969, but that’s a minor detail when you consider how radical this thing is. There’s no interior, but there is a cockpit, and it hinges forward and up, just like you might expect a cockpit to do. There’s no rear-view mirror, as there’s no rear window, just a closed-circuit television hooked to a rear-mounted camera. There’s not even a steering wheel, just a couple of joysticks.
Virtually the only feature it shares with a production vehicle is the fact that it has four tires, the front two packed tightly under the nosecone like landing gear. I don’t believe that the Astro III ever ran and drove, and I can guarantee it was never meant for production, but it was a really psychedelic idea of how the future of personal travel may look. Forget lithium batteries. I want a future that’s powered by rocket fuel from the designers that were powered by partying. I’m not sure if it had a trunk or a glove compartment, but you’re going to need a warrant to see inside if it does have.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
