This Was Supposed to Be the Car of the Future
In 1958, American automakers were convinced almost anything was possible. Jet aircraft were shrinking the world, the Space Age was beginning and nuclear energy promised a future in which seemingly limitless power might replace gasoline. Ford famously imagined an atomic automobile called the Nucleon. Studebaker-Packard went considerably further. Its vision of the future looked less like a car than something that had accidentally fallen out of a science-fiction movie.
Called the Astral, the full-size concept was built in 1957 and publicly unveiled in South Bend, Indiana, in January 1958 before appearing at the Geneva Motor Show. Its most obvious oddity was underneath: instead of four wheels, the Astral was conceived around a single wheel that would theoretically use a gyroscope to keep the vehicle balanced. Its designers imagined the machine traveling not only on roads, but potentially over water and through the air as well.
Then there was the power source. Studebaker-Packard publicity suggested the Astral could use an atomic powerplant or an exotic “ionic” engine. Another proposal involved receiving energy beamed to the vehicle from a remote source. Concerns about crashing an atomic-powered one-wheeler were apparently addressed with another piece of imagined technology: a protective force field surrounding the vehicle. The Astral was less a prediction of the next Packard than an attempt to imagine transportation after nearly every limitation of the contemporary automobile had disappeared.
The Nuclear Car Never Actually Had a Nuclear Engine
Despite its extraordinary promises, the Astral was never a functioning atomic automobile. The surviving vehicle was essentially a full-size styling and engineering mock-up, and no miniature nuclear reactor was ever installed. The project had a much more practical purpose behind the scenes. Designed under Edward E. Herrmann, Studebaker-Packard’s director of interior design, the Astral gave the company’s designers an opportunity to experiment with glass-reinforced plastic while presenting the public with an outrageous vision of future transportation.
That distinction makes the Astral even more representative of the 1950s. Nuclear automobiles were being imagined at precisely the moment engineers were discovering just how difficult they would be to build. A reactor itself was only part of the problem. Shielding passengers from radiation added enormous weight, while putting nuclear material into a machine expected to travel through traffic and occasionally crash created problems that optimistic concept drawings could conveniently ignore. No American automaker ever produced a working nuclear-powered passenger car.
None of that stopped the Astral from looking spectacularly futuristic. After its early appearances, the strange machine reportedly toured Studebaker dealerships, giving customers a glimpse of a future that seemed just plausible enough during the atomic age. But Studebaker-Packard had much more immediate problems. Packard automobile production ended in 1958, and the corporation increasingly focused on survival rather than nuclear-powered dream cars. The Astral’s moment in the spotlight ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
Then the Astral Disappeared
After its promotional career ended, the Astral was placed into storage. As the years passed and Studebaker itself stopped building automobiles, the bizarre one-wheeled machine faded into obscurity. For roughly three decades it remained largely forgotten before being rediscovered, restored and eventually preserved by the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend. Unlike so many concept cars that were destroyed after their usefulness expired, the physical evidence of Studebaker-Packard’s atomic-age imagination survived.
That survival makes the Astral particularly fascinating today. The car looks almost impossibly optimistic from a modern perspective. Its creators imagined a world where nuclear energy could become small and safe enough to carry inside a passenger vehicle, gyroscopes could eliminate the need for four wheels, power could be transmitted through the air and an invisible shield might make collisions irrelevant. None of those ideas transformed the automobile in the way Studebaker-Packard imagined, but the thinking behind them captures an era when designers were encouraged to picture transportation without worrying too much about whether the necessary technology actually existed.
The Astral is rarely displayed, although the Studebaker National Museum brought it out of storage for its recent “Astral Visions: Vehicles of Tomorrow” exhibition devoted to the nuclear and Space Age transportation ideas of the 1950s. Nearly 70 years after its debut, the car that was supposed to preview an atomic-powered future has become something arguably more interesting: a surviving artifact from a moment when Detroit genuinely seemed to believe there were no limits to what the automobile might become.
