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 While the Ford Mustang made its debut at the 1964 New York World's
Fair and changed the face of American motoring almost overnight, another
vehicle debuted at the same time at the same venue and with the same
revolutionary goal but almost immediately slipped into utter obscurity.
General Motors by that time had been messing around with gas turbines
for more than a decade, ever since the Firebird concept car of 1953 -
allegedly the first gas turbine-powered automobile in the United States.
Like other manufacturers,
GM inevitably hit upon the idea of using a gas turbine to power
over-the-road trucks, resulting in the Bison concept that GM debuted in
April 1964 at the New York World's Fair.
Though there's little mention
of it in the reference books, the Bison concept seemed designed more
to show off GM's ideas of a worldwide system of standardized cargo
containers "which can be automatically loaded, unloaded, sorted and
stored by electronically-controlled equipment… at new peaks of
efficiency on tomorrow's express highways." Not much seems to have been
said about the turbine powering the truck, though GM's display at the
World's Fair did note a number of interesting features of the Bison,
including four-wheel steering, a flip-forward canopy and combination
jack-sanders between the wheels.
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