In 1956, GM Filmed a Self-Driving Car. Did It Come True?

In 1956, General Motors made a musical to sell America the future: a kitchen that bakes a cake while you dance, dream cars on turntables, and a car that steers itself along a wire buried in the road. We restored the film and scored all six predictions against today. One of them was really built and tested on a public road, eighteen months later. 0:00 GM's 1956 self-driving car 0:39 Six predictions, scored 1:01 Prediction 1: the kitchen that cooks for you 1:57 What never arrived 2:12 Prediction 2: the dream cars 2:36 Crushed on purpose: the Club de Mer 3:15 The one you can still buy 3:30 The survivor: Firebird II 4:01 Wait, this is a musical 4:44 The Motorama tour 5:01 Prediction 3: the road that drives the car 5:14 1957: the wired highway in Nebraska 6:00 How cars hold a lane today 6:15 Prediction 4: a camera instead of a mirror 6:29 The 1956 voicemail 6:46 The final score 7:33 What it got wrong about people Original film: Design for Dreaming (MPO Productions for General Motors, 1956), Prelinger Archives, public domain. Preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Watch it free: https://archive.org/details/Designfo1956 Restoration, narration, motion graphics and research: Revive Lab. Modern footage licensed via Pexels (Boris Ivas, Jakub Bukowski, Gustavo Fring, Pixabay, Curtis Adams, WeStarMoney Rec, Nothing Ahead, mygiguser). Music licensed for commercial use. Sources: GM Motorama 1956: 26 cars, 63 exhibits, Waldorf Astoria, tour to Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, over 2 million visitors (GM figures) Firebird II: Whirlfire gas turbine, titanium body, disc brakes, independent suspension, air conditioning; GM Heritage Center GM and RCA wired 400 ft of public highway near Lincoln, Nebraska, 10 October 1957; shown again at RCA Laboratories, Princeton, 1960 (Lincoln Journal Star; RCA Electronic Age, Jan 1958) Pontiac Club de Mer scrapped 1958, scale model survives (Bortz Auto Collection) Oldsmobile Golden Rocket last photographed 1962, whereabouts unknown (Old Cars Weekly) Buick Centurion (1956): rear TV camera in place of a mirror (Sloan Museum of Discovery, Flint) Frigidaire Kitchen of the Future: punched electro-recipe card with IBM, domed oven, telephone that showed written messages Revive Lab: lost films, restored, explained. #GeneralMotors #SelfDriving #RetroFuture