First of the Dream Cars: Buick’s Y-Job

The first of the fabled GM dream cars sparked a Buick success story and changed the face of all the cars in the world. It also confirmed the eminence in the GM boardroom of styling chief Harley Earl.

That’s when it all began. We were climbing out of a depression and digging our way into a war in the late 1930s. Enrico Fermi was uncovering the mysteries of the atom; Gone With the Wind had just been made into a film and F.D.R. was well into his second Presidential term. In Roswell, New Mexico a college professor named Robert Goddard was experimenting with something called a liquid-fueled rocket.

In Detroit, Michigan two young men, Bill Mitchell and Gene Bordinat, were stepping on the bottom rungs of ladders that would take them to the top of car designing at GM and Ford. In 1939 both were working for the man who put that profession on the map, Harley Jarvis Earl. And GM’s Earl was driving to work in a brand-new special car that was the wildest thing on the American road. It was called, simply, the Y-Job.

“I was completely amazed by the car,” says a designer who then was new to the Styling Section. “For that time...it was fantastic.” Built in 1938 and put on the road in 1939, the Y-Job had tremendous impact on auto design at several levels. It directly inspired the design of the 1942 Buicks, inside and out. With their low, sweep-­fendered lines and wide grilles, these Buicks set the pace for GM’s post-war cars and, in fact, for all American automobiles. It all started with the Y-Job, which still looked so sharp on the streets of Detroit in 1948 that a wire service reporter, spotting it by chance, spread photos of it across the country identified as a sneak preview of the 1949 Buick.

The styling chain whose first link was the Y-Job extended even further. In Italy, after the war, Piero Dusio, a wealthy businessman and car enthusiast, owned a ‘46 Buick. Instructing the men who were to design a body for a car he wanted to build, Dusio said it should look like a wider, lower version of the Buick, whose lines he liked very much.

The designer was Pinin Farina, and the car was the Cisitalia 202 coupe—the gem-like creation that formed the foundation for all the finest postwar sports-car shapes and styles. By then the Y-Job was semi-retired, pushed out of the spotlight in 1951 by a new generation of GM dream cars, the Le Sabre and the Buick XP-300. Neither was as profoundly influential as this long, black roadster with the curious name.

A giant of a man, both physically and professionally, Harley Earl had just begun to establish his Styling Section at General Motors in the late 1930s, under the protection of the head of the company Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. The GM division most receptive to his styling ideas was Buick, which had been directed since 1933 by super-salesman Harlow H. Curtice. In 1936 the Flint-based division acquired an enthusiastic new chief engineer, Charles A. Chayne. These men knew what Earl was talking about when he proposed radical changes in the shapes of future Buicks.

Earl turned to Buick late in 1937 when he needed support for the construction of a radical special car, one that would serve two purposes. It was to be a trial horse for some new styling ideas. It was also to be a personal car for Harley Earl, a supreme showman who knew how to publicize both his business and himself. “I want a nice little semi-sports car,” Earl told a small cadre of designers, “a kind of convertible.” He wanted it as low as possible, recalls Vince Kaptur, Sr., on whose years of experience Earl relied to bring his ideas to life.

“We were always working with X-cars, for experimental,” remembers Kaptur, “and this job was one step beyond that. We just called it the Y-Job!” Vince was in charge of the body engineering of this one-off car, with assistance from John Parks on the machinery details. An exceptionally capable stylist, George Snyder, was the man who interpreted Earl’s desires and drew the lines that defined the Y-Job.

The Earl/Snyder creation had a classically tapered nose and a modified boat-tail rear deck, blended together in a sleek central fuselage unmarked by moldings or running boards. Blended into the main form, in a manner that looks smooth and simple now but was exceptional then, were firmly-tapered front and rear fender forms. Skirts were integral with the fenders at the rear, as emphasized by the fine chrome striping covering them. The bold vertical trailing edge of each fender was new, a subtle precursor of the finned era.

In a decisive manner the front-end design of the Buick-based Y-Job broke completely away from any semblance of vertical orientation. The grille was entirely horizontal instead, with a pleasing rounded contour and vertical bars, both of which were inspired by the grille of the just-introduced 1938 Mercedes-Benz W154 Grand Prix car.

The grille was given center stage by a novel hidden-headlight system. In front of each light was a circular lid split horizontally so its two sections could blink open, up and dow, like eyelids. They opened electrically whenever the lights were switched on. Echoing the grille shape on the original Y-Job were the flared tips of its fenders. At first it had bumper guards like those that were introduced on 1941 Buicks. The basic bumper shape appeared on the ‘42 models. After the war the car was fitted with stock 1946 Buick bumpers, which it still has.

No lightweight with its steel body and chrome-plated bronze brightwork, the Y-Job rolled on a 1938 Buick Century chassis with a 126-inch wheelbase. That was Buick’s first year with all-coil suspension and an improved straight-eight engine, “Dynaflash” in the exuberant jargon of the era. From 320 cubic inches it developed 141 bhp at 3,600 rpm, a figure raised to 200 by Chayne. Early in its career the Y-Job was equipped with a prototype of the Dynaflow torque-converter transmission that became a Buick option in 1948.

The Y-Job’s dash also was a pace-setter for future Buicks, with its central speedometer, clear round dials and minor controls built into the decorative bars across the radio speaker grille. The seat was a pleated bench design. The big accelerator pedal had its heel deeply recessed into the floorboard to give extra legroom for the lanky Earl.

Two of the dash switches were pushbuttons controlling another pioneering feature of the Y-Job: electric power windows. Another pair of pushbuttons operated the convertible top. This was also electric, a complicated machine that automatically raised and lowered the rear-deck cover while the top was moving up or down.

Of two novel chassis features tried in the Y-Job, one was successful. This was power steering, built by Bendix to the designs of pioneer Francis W. Davis. Buick was the first GM division to get excited about power steering’s potential. It had made firm plans to introduce it as an option on the ‘42 models but two gentlemen named Hitler and Tojo, caused second thoughts about that. Not until the 1950s did the Y-Job’s power steering become widely available.

Another experimental system didn’t make the grade. This was a novel drum brake that used a bladder, instead of the usual cylinder, to press the linings against the drum. A derivative of a brake design that had worked in aircraft, it was a flop in the Y-Job. When it worked it didn’t slow this heavy car very effectively. The bladders could also burst and put the brakes right out of commission. This happened once in Georgia to Leonard McLay, whose post-war job it became to keep the Y-Job rolling. One reason these brakes were tried was that the Y-Job had 13-inch wheels, miniscule by 1938 standard The wheel discs had louvered slots intended to help cool the brakes.

More than in any of these details, the real significance of the Y-Job lay in its overall proportions. During the 1930s Harley Earl had led the fight to move the automobile’s passenger compartment forward, where it would be better placed between the wheels, and downward. Unlike the classic roadster, which was all hood, the Y-Job had a rear deck that was longer than the hood.

In the major auto companies the Y-Job set a trend toward shorter hoods and longer rear decks that prevailed until the early 1960s. Always intrigued by aircraft, Earl was influenced by their proportions in his successful drive to transform the profile of the automobile.

There was no glamorous press introduction for the Y-Job. Weathered in by the gloom of a depression and the lowering clouds of war, the American press wasn’t much interested in experimental cars when the Y-Job was completed in 1939. It became instead a sales tool for Harley Earl, who put many miles on it during and after the war years at his homes in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and Florida.

With the Y-Job as his springboard, Earl succeeded in the 1940s and early 1950s in transforming the shape of the American car. He had help from Harlow Curtice, who rose from the top job at Buick to the presidency of GM, and from Charles Chayne, who became GM’s vice president in charge of engineering. They worked as closely with Earl in creating the GM cars of the 1950s—some of the best and worst General Motors automobiles of all time—as they had in the building of Harley Earl’s first dream car.

Looking mature and elegant, like a diplomat in a tuxedo next to a race-track tout in a zoot suit, the Y-Job was rolled out in 1951 for comparison with Earl’s next dream machine, the Le Sabre. An avalanche of dream cars was about to emerge from GM’s shops and studios. All could trace their parentage to this proud black classic roadster.