ARISE, SIR VIVAL, SAFETY PIONEER
Older readers may remember the huge furore that followed the publication at the end of 1965 of Ralf Naderʼs famous book Unsafe at Any Speed, a study of how car manufacturers were generally reluctant to spend money on improving vehicle safety.
Before Naderʼs work, however, there had been a few pioneers experimenting on their own. In the 1990s, the Aurora resurfaced (Lost & found, December 1999), a safety car built around a crashed Buick Roadmaster, fitted with an ugly glassfibre body and featuring plenty of clever details. Sadly, the car arrived half a day late for its 1957 press launch in New York, having broken down 15 times on the 50-mile journey. The designer and bankroller of the car, the Reverend Alfred Juliano from Bradford, Connecticut, was bankrupted by the project and it was stored until 1993.
Customising legend Andy Saunders from Poole, Dorset, bought the car and brought it to the UK, where it was eventually restored and joined his collection.
Another extraordinary safety car has recently emerged from hibernation and been acquired by Jeff Lane of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. In the 1950s, Walter Jerome took the 1948 Hudson he had bought from Bellingham Auto Sales, then owned by Donald Moore, and cut it in half across the body in front of the windscreen.
The quite separate front section was then mounted to the back section by a type of hinge, with both the front and back halves having steel and rubber bumpers. As a result, the front section would take the force of most front-end collisions. The back section was also strange, with the driver controlling the car from a central raised seat in a kind of a turret.
The car bristled with innovative design features for the day, such as side-marker lights, headlights that turned with the steering, a collapsible steering column, seatbelts, a roll-over bar and lots of padding. The parallelogramstyle doors to the passenger compartment were designed to
stay closed in the event of a crash, but the most extraordinary fitting was a windscreen that revolved when it was raining, with the water being removed by a fixed windscreen wiper or squeegee.
The car was completed in 1958 and christened ʻSir Vivalʼ, but after appearing at a couple of major exhibitions it disappeared. Jerome died in 1988 and the Moore family, who had taken an interest in the Sir Vival, had it removed from the third-floor warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, where it had been stored in two halves, and it was taken to Bellingham Auto Sales, where it could be seen at the back of the showroom.
Jeff spotted the car when he spent a day at the dealership. “I recall it was not terrible, but also not in great condition,” he says. “Itʼs not as if itʼs been outside for 40 years rusting away.”