ShaneD3488 They were able to build this back then, only no way it would make them any money back then! If they were able to do V2 rockets in WWII, this was an option too, how to make money on it??????? The only question !
I am most impressed by the cabin noise suppression that lets you sit inside a jet engine yet have audible conversations with the control tower without any need for a headset. But luckily, there were no other cars on the road, so the control tower immediately knew who they were talking to. And everybody was some young, fit and handsome. Despite sitting in cars for hours on end doing nothing but pushing buttons and eating ice cream. But best of all - multi-generational harmony. What drugs were they all on?
But kind of like Siri, GPS, OnStar, Waz and other services we take for granted. Of course, today you'd get a recording asking you to push various buttons and just when you were getting through to a human it would disconnect.
@@walterweddle7644 jimmy carter was president in 1976 and was president until 1980 so if the towers were gone by the 80s then it would be because of jimmy carter.
I am old enough to being told this was the future-highways with electric strips that allowed for autopilot. In 1956 the Interstate Highway System was still legislation making its way through Congress. I would like to see an alternative version of this where the son turns the radio dial to 1976 and the family finds themselves stuck in a Chevette....
@@dw3403 Or getting caught in the traffic jams of the real 1976, because all those fantastic highways they wanted to build were cancelled by the various freeway revolts.
It is interesting to see how they imagined their version of connected google maps. One thing they got completely wrong though is the number of cars on the road.
I went to the Motorama exhibit in 1956 when I was 10 and thought it would be like this in the far off 1976. Saw the Firebird II there and later saw the Firebird III at the Seattle worlds fair in 62 I actually did see one of the Chrysler turbines driving into a A and W stand in 64 it came in and every guy there went over to look at it. Everything seemed possible back then
I got to ride in a Chrysler turbine at the Kennedy Space Center in 1976. It wasn't the one with the "concept car" body from the '60s, it just had a stock-looking '74-ish full-size Chrysler body. But it hauled, and was smooth, and made that recognizable turbine sound.
It was possible, but there was no money in the car. The public was told the car was unsafe because the exhaust would melt the car behind them. However, in 1968 a turbine powered car competed in the Indianapolis 500. The car was in the lead until a bearing burned out with three laps to go. The exhaust was not too hot to be dangerous to the other drivers either. I also saw Motorama, but in Los Angeles. So, here we are old men wondering what happened the future we thought was ours.
@@ronalds.658 The future is here with electric cars and I bet within 10years it will be the dominant car I won't be here but my kids will and it will be better
I love how they seriously thought everyone would have the patience or the time to have a ten minute verbal conversation every time they wanted to choose which road to drive on.
@AmateurThespian It's in it's infancy still, but it IS absolutely a real thing now. No sci-fi could have seen where things were going quite as they did back then.
SELF DRIVING CARS ARE STILL IN THE CRASH GET KILLED AND LEARN FROM IT MODE!! SCREW THE SELF DRIVING CARS!! NO WAY WILL I TRUST THAT SYSTEM UNTIL IT IS 100% PROVEN SAFE! TOO MANY THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG. RELIABILITY IS PROVEN TO BE IN SIMPLICITY OF A SYSTEM. HUMANS ARE BETTER AT DRIVING CARS UNLESS YOU ARE IMPAIRED FROM ALCOHOL, DRUGS OR TEXTING AND SURFING THE INTERNET WHILE YOU ARE DRIVING. IN THIS CASE OF IMPAIRMENT THE AUTO-PILOT WOULD BE SAFER.
I think all the rigamarole with getting the car ready to be "automatic control" is hilarious. It took them forever to talk about the amount of fuel and stuff they had... Not to mention that it was like an airplane taking off. Love the part where dad asks if he can smoke his cigar...
Your description of the PreFlight check out checklist is right on point! I couldn't wait until the guy lights that big turd (El Stinko) of a cigar and then stinks up the inside of the car forever. And spends the next hour coughing up a lung. I was one year old when this was made so I guess I have to accept the fact that no one ever realized that by the 21st century smoking would be generally frowned upon and subject to rigorous federal and state regulations, but it is quite hilarious. He should have told the autopilot to avoid all the ghettos, and the shooting galleries, and the homeless. I'm surprised at the lack of hats. I thought everyone wore a hat anytime they left the house. I guess by the mid 50s that that was passe. This model firebird must not have included the optional rotisserie in the back seat to cook chicken on the fly. Even harder to believe that General Motors would have gone bankrupt except for the help from the government. I don't think anyone saw that one coming. My first car was a 1969 Pontiac Custom S station wagon with a 350 cubic inch motor and a turbo hydramatic 400 transmission. It was a road locomotive. I drove it for 18 years!
@@clivegetliff1293 I drove the Singer Chamois which was interesting, but of course it was by 1976 a 13 year old design that was running out before the Sunbeam. The Viva was still a mainstream Vauxhall offer running on till 1979 and drove very much like a 1960s car feeling noticeably more old fashioned than the Kadet based Chevette.
2:19 The controller is thinking, "I could be doing this in Twilight Zone or Outer Limits to guide a space crew to Mars, but instead I'm guiding a family to a motel in Arizona."
But what was more enlightening was the US car manufacturers total lack of vision when it comes to safety features. And as for suggesting almost empty roads - even back then, they knew better. It was in the first verse of the song. As for the on board ice-cream - I can only assume this was Nancy Pelosi’s dad. And I doubt that the screens were supposed to be LCD ones. They probably envisaged CRTs.
@@jimmymcjimmyvich9052 Yes, I recall digital watches from about then. My parents bank gave us a calculator with an LCD screen as a gift when they set up a new account, I recall (replacing free toasters, I suppose).
My old man bought a Firebird I new in 62' or 63' in Martian Red. Looks stunning from the pictures I saw. Though he said it was always in the shop and he could never get that rattle in the turbine while it was cold to go away. Drank jet fuel like a mall Santa on Dec. 26 and handled like one too. It was cool to see them run into one in that good of condition. Looks like the owner might not have gotten the high-speed autonomous lane compatibility upgrade. I was conceived in the back seat of one around the time this video takes place.
It only took 40 years to remove the middleman for us to do most of the things this video predicted, we now have Waze and Google Car, TV screens in our vehicles that are connected to the internet and probably someone out there has an ice cream machine in his/her car. The only missing thing is people singing expository songs while driving.The predigested food is already available. What a nice time to be alive.
+APPLBL00M Uh, yeah if you can afford an $80,000 car. Of course cheaper cars with the technology will come along in a few years. What will really be difficult is making autonomous and non-autonomous car culture co exist. It's like how the Internet age has left behind people who can't afford computers and internet. It will be rocky at some point.
manamaster6 I don't give those people a second thought. I'll bet all those people from the early 90s who dislike people who had cell phones have one now. Some people just love to be the contrary voice just to be disagreeable.
Mike Jordan Living in the south-eastern US, I come across backwards minded people all the time, especially older people. My guess is that most of them are either ignorant of how technology advances or they're just used to the way things are and don't like change, even if it makes things easier for them. I'll never understand those kinds of people.
It is always fun to watch the history of predictions of the future. As has been said: Jules Verne could forsee that some day man will be on the moon. But it was not possible then to forsee that the whole world would be watching on live TV. In this video: Automation of functions known could be forseen. But it is obvious that they could not forsee GPS. It is also funny to note that they seemed to forsee fewer cars on the road in 1976 than it was in 1956.
milosilic23 Then if we could train them to go to the grocery store, work, pick up kids from school and all the other mundane chores we could reserve our own driving to having some adventure on twisty roads instead of being stuck in traffic.
King Rose Archives That's exactly what's starting to happen today, with the shift towards genuine driverless cars. Only difference is that the cars are smart enough to function on their own, without the assistance of a remote routing and control system.
Reed Milewicz Welll... sort of. Google actually holds a patent on methods for determining when a driverless car has truly become "stuck" and needs to contact an "assistance" station for direction, especially on judgment issues in breaking its driving laws, like never driving on the shoulder. For example, if a stalled car is blocking its path on a single lane road, what does it do? A human in the assistance station may ultimately have to tell the car that incursion onto the shoulder is OK.
+milosilic23 No. There already exist cars that can drive by them self without assistance in traffic with human drivers. Tesla and Google have it, probably others too, don't know.
Now, don't you wish it was like this today? Going 30-40 mph in your brand new Firebird II on the freeway of tomorrow with little to no traffic! Aah the life.
they were quite accurate about the future like auto drive car,sattelite maps, voice command, digital display but it took quite a long time than expectation. I can say that they were fortune teller but not about the traffic.
Kent Freeland ain't that a damn shame? Greedy lazy ass corporate people in '76 at GM (and Chrysler, Ford and AMC, too!) giving us nothing but crap to drive , no kind of future technology, didn't they see this video lol ?
Today that stretch of Arizona is covered with cookie cutter suburbs and the traffic on the Superstition Freeway is a parking lot during rush hour. Not much has improved.
Can't even imagine how anyone in 1956 would want to go 20 years into the future. Driving stoned in a Pinto with Packard bumpers, getting your bell bottoms caught on the gas pedal and listening to Disco..and just feeling malaise and wanting to watch the Fonz on HAPPY DAYS.
Well, when we use technology, normally we think that they invented 3 years ago and later for sale. But many techn. advances come from 50 years of studies and evolution of original idea. Microwave ovens, as example, sold in 1980s, but was created early 40s. Greetings from Stgo., CL
How To Make Sushi it was the jet age, they cummed their pants for this kinda shit. Instead of a tower we have GPS and computer controlled auto pilots (at least in the Teslas).
jabbafo Lamentably, the remarks made by How to Make Sushi (above) were profane if not obscene and women and children should be warned. Very poor, How to Make Sushi.
Wonderful! I had seen a clip or two of this a number of times over the years, but this is the first time I have seen it available in its entirety. (Although I’m fairly certain that, even in the 50s, predigested food would NOT be something people could hardly wait for.)
Probably been watching reruns of "The Rifleman" way too long on Saturday mornings but the boy in the video played a couple of characters over the course of the TV series 5-year run. His name is Billy Hughes. Born in 1948, he passed on in 2005. As for the director Michael Kidd, if he is the famous actor-choreographer-director Michael Kidd, according to Wikipedia, "he was the first choreographer to win five Tony Awards, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1996 for advancing dance in film." If they are one and the same, this little 1956 GM promotional film must have been done just after making his screen acting debut, dancing with Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey in It's Always Fair Weather (1955). Finally, the "Tower Man" may actually be Michael Kidd since he looks very much like him.
+DC Copeland re: tower man as Michael Kidd, the voice is wrong. Also, though it's hard to tell for certain in the video, I think Tower Man may be a lot taller than Kidd was.
I think the boy in the video is Timmy Everett (his biggest screen credit is "The Music Man" in 1962), who was born in 1938 and would've been about 18. I looked up Billy Hughes and they look a lot alike, but Hughes would've only been 7 or 8 in 1956. The Tower Man looks somewhat like Kidd, but I agree with uucp concerning the voice and size of the gentleman.
The funny thing is, this video didn't give a hint as to how this driverless car worked. Was it computers or hidden tracks in the road or the dispatcher or something else? The video didn't say. An in-car ice cream dispenser is more important anyway!
I'm not entirely sure, but I think GM set up a demo track with magnetic rails under the pavement that guided the car. I know they did that with one or two of their future-50's cars, but I don't know if it was this specific one.
AmazingArends For consumers, not meant for skilled people to see this, housewife levels! Remember the V2, same tech 20 years prior to this, they did own this tech by then, only not able to make money on a system..... Fresh drinks are so normal now, only the fire bird jet engine never made it, back to electric cars we went!
@@lucasrem Except the V2 gauged its distance by contiously integrateing its velocity from a tiny propeller on the front. No wonder they chose the largest city in Europe to launch those cruise missiles. The sheer amount of compounding error and inaccuracy.
GM did NOT predict: 1) The price of Jet fuel for those turbines in 2020's. 2) Smoking was outlawed in the future. (so was disney-esque incestuous relationships). 3) Due to the nuclear wars, those who duck'd and cover'd experienced a rather uneventful trip 4) The intrusiveness of current ABS/DTC systems is still not as annoying as tower guy. 5) There are no minorities in 1976.
Even though the big objective here was automation, they presumed to give the driver about 6000% more responsibility than modern regulators would allow today. Now its all about taking as much thought out of driving as possible and making people into passive, idiotic passengers. Ah, the days when something was actually expected of the average person.
I love that "the key to the future" intro has the old school GM key! I have a set from my 1965 Electra! (Non factory replacements, Theyre solid aluminum!)
Richard Errington Right. If someone says, "Do you care if I do something" and you say, "No", that means "No, I don't care if you do that something". See, the wonderful air conditioning makes it so that she can't smell the cigar. If they didn't have the wonderful air conditioning, she would care if he smoked a cigar, but since they do have the wonderful air conditioning, she doesn't care if he smokes the cigar.
I've been working for automotive dealerships for many years. We are now finally have cars that are very similar to this technology if not much better than they even imagined.
Many of the concepts of the future are insightfully correct. They don’t have any idea about second-hand smoking - and the traffic control is like air-traffic not a computer - but they got the self-driving and info screen pretty well.
People were smoking inside of cars already anyway, and everywhere--at work, schools, malls, you name it. Perhaps that new rocket car had air filtration.
It's interesting that they envisioned fully autonomous driving back then. In just a few years, that vision will come true and will be even better because it won't require control towers, special strips, lanes, commands, or any of that. In fact, the Tesla Model S already has a feature called Autopilot that enables semi-autonomous driving with the flip of a switch. Even better, we'll have all-electric cars and won't have to rely on non-renewable gasoline.
+Elvis S Where will you get that electricity from? Unless you're gonna coat the entire country in solar panels and wind turbines it'll be pretty hard to power every car on Earth without a coal burning plant.
Spoods The Milkman That's a good point and one that definitely will have to be addressed. Fortunately, though, there are many sources of energy other than coal, so I'm optimistic that things will work out somehow. In any case, it will be better than having gasoline powered cars using up oil and releasing emissions into the air.
garyp4205 Renewable? Correct me if I'm wrong, but while oil is organic, it comes from fossilized material that died thousands or millions of years ago. It is also pumped out of the ground from cavities that we can't just refill. I wouldn't call that renewable. Also, even if we have enough reserves, it will only last so long. We will eventually have to resort to alternative sources of energy.
styldsteel1 shale is harder to get oil from. that gasoline will be more expensive. Even if it weren't, oil is dirty. Oil pollutes. It served us well in our infancy as a species, but now we must move to renewable sources. It may take time and innovation, but we must begin to produce electricity from better sources. Even if we had an infinite source of oil, we should begin the transition.
1976 was nothing like this, and thank the universe for that! And as far the Firebird lets be happy they did not look like this car This was so funny to watch
Wow, I can't wait until 1976!
It's going to be great.
1997 s10 front wheel dr ..replacement driveshaft
On that train all graphite and glitter... Undersea by rail.... Ninety minutes from New York to Paris Well, by '76 we'll be A.O.K.... :)
56
ShaneD3488
They were able to build this back then, only no way it would make them any money back then!
If they were able to do V2 rockets in WWII, this was an option too, how to make money on it??????? The only question !
I love how the car in close-ups looks like it’s going maybe 20 miles an hour but it has a sound effect of a jet flying.
It's just taxiing for take off.🌞
Gas turbine powered car. Make jet engine sound when turbine is started. There is turbine rpm reading when switching to autopilot.
My harleys like that
They predicted CVT
I am most impressed by the cabin noise suppression that lets you sit inside a jet engine yet have audible conversations with the control tower without any need for a headset.
But luckily, there were no other cars on the road, so the control tower immediately knew who they were talking to.
And everybody was some young, fit and handsome. Despite sitting in cars for hours on end doing nothing but pushing buttons and eating ice cream.
But best of all - multi-generational harmony. What drugs were they all on?
those traffic controllers would go insane when they had to talk to every car on the highway's these day's
But kind of like Siri, GPS, OnStar, Waz and other services we take for granted. Of course, today you'd get a recording asking you to push various buttons and just when you were getting through to a human it would disconnect.
Yeah that's what I thought, it would sure be a friggin busy old place in the control tower on any freeway today.
They would not only have to be multilingual they would also need to be multi religious lol
@@shadowbanned5164 all they need is sherrif buffort T justice. "take the next exit sombitch, or else i'm gonna punch your mama in the mouth!"
Did she say predigested food
Used to be so much simpler driving in 1976... it a shame government fired all those tower control people. .
Thanks Raegan
@@kenetickups6146 wouldn't it be jimmy carter
Hurricane Furia Could be, was going off reagan because he was in the 80s so after the 70s
@@hurricanefury439 No, Reagan!
@@walterweddle7644 jimmy carter was president in 1976 and was president until 1980 so if the towers were gone by the 80s then it would be because of jimmy carter.
I am old enough to being told this was the future-highways with electric strips that allowed for autopilot. In 1956 the Interstate Highway System was still legislation making its way through Congress. I would like to see an alternative version of this where the son turns the radio dial to 1976 and the family finds themselves stuck in a Chevette....
Or a huge 1976 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser "clamshell" wagon, the last year for the GM behemoths! 455 cubic inches under the hood!
or any of the really craptastic cars of the 70s.
@@cameronjournal Gremlin
O yes, seeing this family waiting in lines at the gas station on their certain day to fill up during the gas crunch.
@@dw3403 Or getting caught in the traffic jams of the real 1976, because all those fantastic highways they wanted to build were cancelled by the various freeway revolts.
This is amazing. Seeing the past's view of the future is trippy as hell
We're seeing the future, in the future from the past
Actually, it quite sad since electric cars had been killed off by oil barons and today is 40 years behind because of it.
It is interesting to see how they imagined their version of connected google maps. One thing they got completely wrong though is the number of cars on the road.
@@FirstLastOne NUNCA DEIXAREI OS CARROS ELÉTRICOS EXISTIREM
@@RRfandubs thats working out well
I went to the Motorama exhibit in 1956 when I was 10 and thought it would be like this in the far off 1976.
Saw the Firebird II there and later saw the Firebird III at the Seattle worlds fair in 62
I actually did see one of the Chrysler turbines driving into a A and W stand in 64 it came in and every guy there went over to look at it.
Everything seemed possible back then
I got to ride in a Chrysler turbine at the Kennedy Space Center in 1976. It wasn't the one with the "concept car" body from the '60s, it just had a stock-looking '74-ish full-size Chrysler body. But it hauled, and was smooth, and made that recognizable turbine sound.
Wow! Nice story, nowadays we're thinking about electric cars and drones in 20 more years
It was possible, but there was no money in the car. The public was told the car was unsafe because the exhaust would melt the car behind them. However, in 1968 a turbine powered car competed in the Indianapolis 500. The car was in the lead until a bearing burned out with three laps to go. The exhaust was not too hot to be dangerous to the other drivers either.
I also saw Motorama, but in Los Angeles. So, here we are old men wondering what happened the future
we thought was ours.
@@ronalds.658
The future is here with electric cars and I bet within 10years it will be the dominant car I won't be here but my kids will and it will be better
Que ótimo!
Eu nasci em 1956....
Você tem 10 anos a mais...
Gosto de ver esses vídeos antigos!
Parabéns 👏👏👏
The cigar really made it futuristic.
+John K 1/10 no mouth fedora
Who was that woman singing at the end?
John K cigar, in a closed in car, THE FUTURE AWAITS!
Actually, people did still smoke cigars in 1976...
John K
The Space age, Nazi freakness, they needed that in the US back then, why?
Good that we went back to electric now! fck the future!
I'll force my wife and daughters to sing along in every road trip, whether they like them or not.
I want my future.
and make them sit in the back too!
@@trance_trousers and smoke cigar in the car. wait weeds are now legal.
Only if youre twice your wife's age.
@@sharksport01 I thought
they looked like the children (adults really) grandparents.
The family that sings together stays together.
I love how they seriously thought everyone would have the patience or the time to have a ten minute verbal conversation every time they wanted to choose which road to drive on.
Yeah, anyone who has ever talked to a busy approach controller knows how curt they can be.
You had me at pre-digested food cooked by infrared. I love how the future always turns out to be 300% less awesome than we thought it was going to be.
Frankly, I'm happy to digest my own food!
We have infrared cookers, but microwave cookers are more efficient
Kindly disagree. This seems like hell.
considering how we have microwaved frozen tv dinners, its basically pre-digested with how processed it is
Pre-digested food is basically vomit
Navigation systems, cars that drive themselves, just pure science fiction.
@AmateurThespian wrong
@AmateurThespian It's in it's infancy still, but it IS absolutely a real thing now. No sci-fi could have seen where things were going quite as they did back then.
Level 5 self driving for the masses is way off still. Some engineers even say decades away.
be hanno sbagliato previsione Di almeno 50Anni
SELF DRIVING CARS ARE STILL IN THE CRASH GET KILLED AND LEARN FROM IT MODE!! SCREW THE SELF DRIVING CARS!! NO WAY WILL I TRUST THAT SYSTEM UNTIL IT IS 100% PROVEN SAFE! TOO MANY THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG. RELIABILITY IS PROVEN TO BE IN SIMPLICITY OF A SYSTEM. HUMANS ARE BETTER AT DRIVING CARS UNLESS YOU ARE IMPAIRED FROM ALCOHOL, DRUGS OR TEXTING AND SURFING THE INTERNET WHILE YOU ARE DRIVING. IN THIS CASE OF IMPAIRMENT THE AUTO-PILOT WOULD BE SAFER.
I think all the rigamarole with getting the car ready to be "automatic control" is hilarious. It took them forever to talk about the amount of fuel and stuff they had... Not to mention that it was like an airplane taking off.
Love the part where dad asks if he can smoke his cigar...
Your description of the PreFlight check out checklist is right on point! I couldn't wait until the guy lights that big turd (El Stinko) of a cigar and then stinks up the inside of the car forever. And spends the next hour coughing up a lung. I was one year old when this was made so I guess I have to accept the fact that no one ever realized that by the 21st century smoking would be generally frowned upon and subject to rigorous federal and state regulations, but it is quite hilarious. He should have told the autopilot to avoid all the ghettos, and the shooting galleries, and the homeless. I'm surprised at the lack of hats. I thought everyone wore a hat anytime they left the house. I guess by the mid 50s that that was passe. This model firebird must not have included the optional rotisserie in the back seat to cook chicken on the fly. Even harder to believe that General Motors would have gone bankrupt except for the help from the government. I don't think anyone saw that one coming. My first car was a 1969 Pontiac Custom S station wagon with a 350 cubic inch motor and a turbo hydramatic 400 transmission. It was a road locomotive. I drove it for 18 years!
@@jpsilvashy thank you for your post and pointing out the truth that things aren't what they used to be.
Some very accurate predictions. Such as on star, super cruise and car pool lanes.
Would love to be in 1976 meeting the guys at GM who made this film in 1956 and asking them when it's coming!
Yes, and explain why reality is a Vauxhall Viva!
@@grahamariss2111 Or a Hillman Imp !!!
@@clivegetliff1293 True, but the Imp was not a GM product.
@@grahamariss2111 I know, it was Chrysler....but have you ever driven one??
@@clivegetliff1293 I drove the Singer Chamois which was interesting, but of course it was by 1976 a 13 year old design that was running out before the Sunbeam. The Viva was still a mainstream Vauxhall offer running on till 1979 and drove very much like a 1960s car feeling noticeably more old fashioned than the Kadet based Chevette.
The roads do not seem very busy in 1976. How would that guy in the tower handle 10,000 cars competing for his attention.
I'd love to splice this movie with the REAL traffic of 1976.
2:19 The controller is thinking, "I could be doing this in Twilight Zone or Outer Limits to guide a space crew to Mars, but instead I'm guiding a family to a motel in Arizona."
I had this on VHS somewhere and I've been looking for this video for almost 20 years! Thanks for uploading
It was a very crappy film xfer for sure
love the "LCD display" inside the future car. They a least got that right ,but not for 1976.
But what was more enlightening was the US car manufacturers total lack of vision when it comes to safety features.
And as for suggesting almost empty roads - even back then, they knew better. It was in the first verse of the song.
As for the on board ice-cream - I can only assume this was Nancy Pelosi’s dad.
And I doubt that the screens were supposed to be LCD ones. They probably envisaged CRTs.
I think digital watches existed in 76. Were they not lcd?
@@jimmymcjimmyvich9052 Yes, I recall digital watches from about then. My parents bank gave us a calculator with an LCD screen as a gift when they set up a new account, I recall (replacing free toasters, I suppose).
This is an accurate portrayal of life in 1976.
Exactly how I remembered it.
King Rose Archives me to
1976 Predicted in 1956: cars will be better than ever before!
1976 in reality: 7 liter engine pumping out an earth shattering 170 hp
My old man bought a Firebird I new in 62' or 63' in Martian Red. Looks stunning from the pictures I saw. Though he said it was always in the shop and he could never get that rattle in the turbine while it was cold to go away. Drank jet fuel like a mall Santa on Dec. 26 and handled like one too.
It was cool to see them run into one in that good of condition. Looks like the owner might not have gotten the high-speed autonomous lane compatibility upgrade. I was conceived in the back seat of one around the time this video takes place.
A Sci-fi Musical Comedy. GM had it all!
Have you checked out DESIGN FOR DREAMING?
Directed by the greatest name in cinema, Michael Kidd!
@@brianarbenz7206 Highly respected and acclaimed...not necessarily in that field.
@@tomservo56954 I'm sure. The industrial and in-house film industry is an unheralded but quite good genre.
@@brianarbenz7206 There are a couple of books on the subject...BATHTUBS OVER BROADWAY and EVERYTHING'S COMING UP PROFITS.
It only took 40 years to remove the middleman for us to do most of the things this video predicted, we now have Waze and Google Car, TV screens in our vehicles that are connected to the internet and probably someone out there has an ice cream machine in his/her car. The only missing thing is people singing expository songs while driving.The predigested food is already available. What a nice time to be alive.
+manamaster6 We also have semi-autonomous driving with the Tesla Model S and Autopilot.
+APPLBL00M Uh, yeah if you can afford an $80,000 car. Of course cheaper cars with the technology will come along in a few years. What will really be difficult is making autonomous and non-autonomous car culture co exist. It's like how the Internet age has left behind people who can't afford computers and internet. It will be rocky at some point.
Mike Jordan
For a moment I thought you were referring to the people who dislike and usually verbally attack those who drive an automatic car.
manamaster6 I don't give those people a second thought. I'll bet all those people from the early 90s who dislike people who had cell phones have one now. Some people just love to be the contrary voice just to be disagreeable.
Mike Jordan Living in the south-eastern US, I come across backwards minded people all the time, especially older people. My guess is that most of them are either ignorant of how technology advances or they're just used to the way things are and don't like change, even if it makes things easier for them. I'll never understand those kinds of people.
It is always fun to watch the history of predictions of the future. As has been said: Jules Verne could forsee that some day man will be on the moon. But it was not possible then to forsee that the whole world would be watching on live TV. In this video: Automation of functions known could be forseen. But it is obvious that they could not forsee GPS. It is also funny to note that they seemed to forsee fewer cars on the road in 1976 than it was in 1956.
Olav Torvund Maybe only the elites could afford them.
Those Firebird concept cars are kept at the GM Heritage museum in Sterling Heights Michigan
To be honest, this is actually a great idea! TO have a lane where cars would drive themselves.
milosilic23 Then if we could train them to go to the grocery store, work, pick up kids from school and all the other mundane chores we could reserve our own driving to having some adventure on twisty roads instead of being stuck in traffic.
milosilic23 Only for the 60s and 70, today our autopilots are much more effective and can take control on every road, not just prepared.
King Rose Archives That's exactly what's starting to happen today, with the shift towards genuine driverless cars. Only difference is that the cars are smart enough to function on their own, without the assistance of a remote routing and control system.
Reed Milewicz Welll... sort of. Google actually holds a patent on methods for determining when a driverless car has truly become "stuck" and needs to contact an "assistance" station for direction, especially on judgment issues in breaking its driving laws, like never driving on the shoulder. For example, if a stalled car is blocking its path on a single lane road, what does it do? A human in the assistance station may ultimately have to tell the car that incursion onto the shoulder is OK.
+milosilic23 No. There already exist cars that can drive by them self without assistance in traffic with human drivers. Tesla and Google have it, probably others too, don't know.
This is a retrofuture I could DEFINITELY live in.
Yep! Nothing but white people in that video.
@@michaelwhalen5058 👍
This was amazing! Its EXACTLY how 1976 turned out 😑
Now, don't you wish it was like this today? Going 30-40 mph in your brand new Firebird II on the freeway of tomorrow with little to no traffic! Aah the life.
80 mph is the recommended standard speed here on German Autobahns, sometimes there are speed limits, but mostly not.. 😎🏁
Wow, the future of yesterday looks awesome!
The future ain't what it used to be... A. C. Clarke.
Miniature city with slot car track is super cool.
It's a "Jetsonsmobile", even the Jetsons came on TV in 1962, but this video was taken in late 1955 or early 1956.
they were quite accurate about the future like auto drive car,sattelite maps, voice command, digital display but it took quite a long time than expectation. I can say that they were fortune teller but not about the traffic.
+Md. Rifat They never liked to show rush hour traffic and car commercials and promos still emphasize the wide, open road. If only.
“-Do you mind if I smoke a cigar? -Not with this good air conditioning” lol 😂
Boy I can hardly wait till 1976...! I will be able to sing!
Naw, in 1976 GM gave us the Vega instead.
With that fabulous aluminum head.
Kent Freeland ain't that a damn shame? Greedy lazy ass corporate people in '76 at GM (and Chrysler, Ford and AMC, too!) giving us nothing but crap to drive , no kind of future technology, didn't they see this video lol ?
And Ford gave us the Pinto 🤔
Terrific production... Thank you for posting.
Tower Man ," I think I'll drive these people into Lake Michigan just to teach them a lesson."
The really bad tower man would send them to the Grand Canyon, the 405, or Chicago!
Wow the 70's sure look great!
Casting director-"Yes- we need a Bing Crosby who is actually not Bing Crosby".
He would have not been seen in something so stupid as this film reel.
@@clemsonbloke Jesus I don't even remember making this comment.
I’ve have that same stunner experience on old UA-cam threads @DeepGreenForest
@@brianarbenz1329 I think I am in a rut. I'm trying to remember the reply from two years ago.
@@DeepGreenForest You mean you are trying to remember what you said two years ago about what you had said six years ago, which is now eight years ago?
Is is 1976 yet, or is it still a few more years?
60s
+adam kendrick This is 1956
+rogifish it is filmed in 1956 but it is in 1976
Salty Viper we still have a few more years to go
Backwards
Salty Viper
Yes we went back to electric cars, you do linear time only? This 1976 was in the past or is this a future 1976?
Today that stretch of Arizona is covered with cookie cutter suburbs and the traffic on the Superstition Freeway is a parking lot during rush hour. Not much has improved.
Can't even imagine how anyone in 1956 would want to go 20 years into the future. Driving stoned in a Pinto with Packard bumpers, getting your bell bottoms caught on the gas pedal and listening to Disco..and just feeling malaise and wanting to watch the Fonz on HAPPY DAYS.
Wow, 1976 sure had a lot of singing.
FractalBoy amen to that.
56
IronPiedmont1996 watch the video; they travel to the future.
I like the 600 mile long Kentucky Derby guardrail.
Pre-Digested Food cooked in Infrared? umpf..
OMG I would have loved to hear the “I want to speak with your manager “ ballad….
Thanks for posting this it was awesome!
Kinseydsp Thanks for your comment.
I remember those cars in 1976.
They predicted the GPS Navigator already 60 years ago! Amazing!
+Jourwalis - And autonomous driving.
+King Rose Archives And digital screens.
Well, when we use technology, normally we think that they invented 3 years ago and later for sale. But many techn. advances come from 50 years of studies and evolution of original idea. Microwave ovens, as example, sold in 1980s, but was created early 40s. Greetings from Stgo., CL
But they didn't predict cars would be butt-ugly.
Where do you see somthing that really performs like gps?
Second-hand smoke... The good old days!
I remember back in ‘76, we had an ice cream maker in our glove box too!!
The future turned out to be even stranger... my glovebox is cooled. I mean, what automotive designer thought to cool the junk-drawer?
what a wacky idea to have every car communicate with a control tower to engage the autopilot, and then have so much procedure
How To Make Sushi it was the jet age, they cummed their pants for this kinda shit. Instead of a tower we have GPS and computer controlled auto pilots (at least in the Teslas).
jabbafo Lamentably, the remarks made by How to Make Sushi (above) were profane if not obscene and women and children should be warned. Very poor, How to Make Sushi.
How To Make Sushi
the hair styles too, all wacky.
That's how we did it back then, ports, airports, same deal...
Fairfaxcat lolwut
I like how everybody in this video is Caucasian.
Wonderful! I had seen a clip or two of this a number of times over the years, but this is the first time I have seen it available in its entirety. (Although I’m fairly certain that, even in the 50s, predigested food would NOT be something people could hardly wait for.)
Nothing looks cooler than what people thought the future was going to look like in the 40's and 50's.
Wow! 45mph in the fast lane!
At that rate, they should get from Phoenix to Chicago in, oh, about a week.
Love it. It's been about 50 years since I've seen this
Oh so close! They predicted the 4 tires and concrete correctly. LOL
I've had a refrigerator in my cars since 1996. Sometimes it was a factory option, other times we did a custom job.
and there is lots of space to pull over when you get a flat.... love those one lane guard rails.
I cant wait for 1976!
Wow haha! This is awesome! I want a Firebird 2!
What a lovely time that was !
Probably been watching reruns of "The Rifleman" way too long on Saturday mornings but the boy in the video played a couple of characters over the course of the TV series 5-year run. His name is Billy Hughes. Born in 1948, he passed on in 2005. As for the director Michael Kidd, if he is the famous actor-choreographer-director Michael Kidd, according to Wikipedia, "he was the first choreographer to win five Tony Awards, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1996 for advancing dance in film." If they are one and the same, this little 1956 GM promotional film must have been done just after making his screen acting debut, dancing with Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey in It's Always Fair Weather (1955). Finally, the "Tower Man" may actually be Michael Kidd since he looks very much like him.
+DC Copeland re: tower man as Michael Kidd, the voice is wrong. Also, though it's hard to tell for certain in the video, I think Tower Man may be a lot taller than Kidd was.
I think the boy in the video is Timmy Everett (his biggest screen credit is "The Music Man" in 1962), who was born in 1938 and would've been about 18. I looked up Billy Hughes and they look a lot alike, but Hughes would've only been 7 or 8 in 1956. The Tower Man looks somewhat like Kidd, but I agree with uucp concerning the voice and size of the gentleman.
Don't forget SMILE
"And that girl...had a wooden leg"
@@slc2466 Who was the young blonde singer/actress?
@@megamond I'm stumped, sorry. I searched for more info on this short, specifically a cast list, to no avail.
What a treat this glimpse into the future was! And in Color!
The funny thing is, this video didn't give a hint as to how this driverless car worked. Was it computers or hidden tracks in the road or the dispatcher or something else? The video didn't say. An in-car ice cream dispenser is more important anyway!
I'm not entirely sure, but I think GM set up a demo track with magnetic rails under the pavement that guided the car. I know they did that with one or two of their future-50's cars, but I don't know if it was this specific one.
AmazingArends
For consumers, not meant for skilled people to see this, housewife levels!
Remember the V2, same tech 20 years prior to this, they did own this tech by then, only not able to make money on a system.....
Fresh drinks are so normal now, only the fire bird jet engine never made it, back to electric cars we went!
@@lucasrem Except the V2 gauged its distance by contiously integrateing its velocity from a tiny propeller on the front.
No wonder they chose the largest city in Europe to launch those cruise missiles. The sheer amount of compounding error and inaccuracy.
"405. You'll never arrive." This really hits home for SoCal drivers. 😂
Pretty much as they envisioned, only about 49 years later than expected.
I remember seeing this at the 1958 Autorama in LA...lol!
Pre-digested food, and the wimmen folk in the back seat. That's real progress!
ghd67ik2887218 Oh, sorry, did my user name offend your delicate beliefs? Too bad.
ghd67ik2887218 Apparently, you do. Either that, or you have no sense of humor, take your pick.
+ghd67ik2887218 Man you are hilarious
+HappyToBeReligionFree at least they're allowed to ride in the car.
***** "one of those..." what's THAT supposed to mean?
This is the US 2077, just before the War!
agree!
Zehcnas89 IKR
I'll be 78 😂
I feel like the Jetsons theme song should go in here somewhere....
I love how the men have to be up front to manage all the technology.
Of course they also predicted the WW3, that's why there are only 3 cars in the highway.
Nuclear disaster
+Jim Nguyen Bingo
Or they predicted HL3
bouxesas is that why Chicago was a dessert?
Mom and Judy Jetson are diddling in the back seat! George Jetson and Elroy are peaking at the fun back there! WOW!!!!
Best slot cars track ever👌
GM did NOT predict:
1) The price of Jet fuel for those turbines in 2020's.
2) Smoking was outlawed in the future. (so was disney-esque incestuous relationships).
3) Due to the nuclear wars, those who duck'd and cover'd experienced a rather uneventful trip
4) The intrusiveness of current ABS/DTC systems is still not as annoying as tower guy.
5) There are no minorities in 1976.
1976 NEVER LOOKED like that EVER.....and I was only 12 yrs old!
So you're a year older than me.
Somewhere on those roads as the bandit, tearing it up in his Trans Am
Please tell me someone still has that slot car track!
Very accurate I had that car in 1976 it was awesome fun to drive.
Even though the big objective here was automation, they presumed to give the driver about 6000% more responsibility than modern regulators would allow today. Now its all about taking as much thought out of driving as possible and making people into passive, idiotic passengers.
Ah, the days when something was actually expected of the average person.
Your average person is a fucking retard. cant do much about that.
Simplemente ..... Exelsior's ..... desde Quito - Ecuador , muchisimas gracias , bye - bye .......
7:55
Automatic sleep control, predigested food cooked by infrared?
are we sure this isn't a dystopia?
The Traffic Controller was very Militaristic in his fashion...
Watching this as a child, I was ready and eager for a far different future than the one I got...
"405, you'll never arrive!" Some things never change.
I’m imagining a dozen things that could go wrong in this scenario, and a singing traffic control officer is at the top of the list.
The daughter is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen! !
One way ticket.
One stand night. 🙂
Too bad she’s like 80 years old today if she’s even still alive
well yeah she was a model, you would expect a model to be attractive, nothing unusual there !
I think the guy is cute!
LMAOROFL! Oh gawd, how those old "futuristic" films were just hysterical!!
I love that "the key to the future" intro has the old school GM key! I have a set from my 1965 Electra! (Non factory replacements, Theyre solid aluminum!)
OH yeah, aluminum is SOOOOO tough.
I didn't say they were "tough" I said "solid"....There aluminum presumably for light weight carry like in the once common key pouches in a wallet.
I have the original 2 keys for my 1957 chevy.
The ones I've had were plated brass, and were made here in Milwaukee by Briggs and Stratton.
"Mind if I smoke a cigar?" Not at all, mind if I crack farts all day long in our plexiglass bubble?
NO cigars dad we'll all suffocate in this bubble .
この当時に自動操縦やナビゲーションの発想があった事が凄いと感じます。
同じ頃、日本ではスバル３６０でした。(３６０ｃｃの車)
Причём навигация без применения спутников))
We're happy to report the young girl is now a 80 year old lady recovering from lung cancer in a acute rest home.
Jesse Sanchez Recovering?! Haha! That’s a good one. 😉
Anybody else hear the music and in your head . . ."Meet George Jetson"?
"Care if I light a cigar?"
"Oh no, not with this wonderful air conditioning."
Proceeds to light cigar anyway.
Richard Errington Right. If someone says, "Do you care if I do something" and you say, "No", that means "No, I don't care if you do that something". See, the wonderful air conditioning makes it so that she can't smell the cigar. If they didn't have the wonderful air conditioning, she would care if he smoked a cigar, but since they do have the wonderful air conditioning, she doesn't care if he smokes the cigar.
ChannelZ Dont know if Richard Errington sounds "native speaker" or not. :)
Richard Errington You obviously don't understand English very well...
Richard Errington lol fail comment
ChannelZ I think the patriarchy is why he did it
WOW WHAT A FUN PLACE! I WISH I WENT WHEN I WAS A CHILD! BLESSINGS!
I've been working for automotive dealerships for many years. We are now finally have cars that are very similar to this technology if not much better than they even imagined.
They have been building garbage the last 5 years.
But no ice cream dispenser.
🥺
No, not really. Things diverged a great deal from this.
Elon Musk please read this….@@JohnShinn1960
Many of the concepts of the future are insightfully correct. They don’t have any idea about second-hand smoking - and the traffic control is like air-traffic not a computer - but they got the self-driving and info screen pretty well.
People were smoking inside of cars already anyway, and everywhere--at work, schools, malls, you name it. Perhaps that new rocket car had air filtration.
It's interesting that they envisioned fully autonomous driving back then. In just a few years, that vision will come true and will be even better because it won't require control towers, special strips, lanes, commands, or any of that. In fact, the Tesla Model S already has a feature called Autopilot that enables semi-autonomous driving with the flip of a switch. Even better, we'll have all-electric cars and won't have to rely on non-renewable gasoline.
+Elvis S Where will you get that electricity from? Unless you're gonna coat the entire country in solar panels and wind turbines it'll be pretty hard to power every car on Earth without a coal burning plant.
Spoods The Milkman That's a good point and one that definitely will have to be addressed. Fortunately, though, there are many sources of energy other than coal, so I'm optimistic that things will work out somehow. In any case, it will be better than having gasoline powered cars using up oil and releasing emissions into the air.
garyp4205 Renewable? Correct me if I'm wrong, but while oil is organic, it comes from fossilized material that died thousands or millions of years ago. It is also pumped out of the ground from cavities that we can't just refill. I wouldn't call that renewable. Also, even if we have enough reserves, it will only last so long. We will eventually have to resort to alternative sources of energy.
Elvis S We current have around 5 - 600 years supply of sweet crude, then we haven't even tapped onto the shale yet.
styldsteel1 shale is harder to get oil from. that gasoline will be more expensive. Even if it weren't, oil is dirty. Oil pollutes. It served us well in our infancy as a species, but now we must move to renewable sources. It may take time and innovation, but we must begin to produce electricity from better sources. Even if we had an infinite source of oil, we should begin the transition.
1976 was nothing like this, and thank the universe for that! And as far the Firebird lets be happy they did not look like this car
This was so funny to watch