1954 Pontiac Bonneville - Special & 1953 Buick Wildcat. The Future Is Now - Feature Classic

Gleaming Chevys, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Cadillacs sitting atop flying turntables above the audience spiraled downward over a reflecting pool. Full orchestras played as glamorous models blinded the audience with Pepsodent smiles and ran white-gloved hands along dashboards and steering-wheel rims. Harley Earl's latest brainchild, the four-city 1953 Motorama, cost General Motors a rumored $1 million-plus in long-legged Eisenhower-era dollars. It was so much more than a car show: Motorama was a display of GM's and, by extension, the American automobile industry's supremacy at just about everything. By 1956, there were 125 trucks, some equipped with early mobile phones, hauling around more than $5 million worth of shiny cars, futuristic Frigidaire appliances, and other accoutrements, not to mention futuristic show stages as outrageous and lavish as could be designed at the time.

One idea car from January 1953 was rushed into July production. It was called the Corvette, an anomaly in the Alfred Sloan stepped-brand doctrine of "a car for every purse and purpose," a six-cylinder Chevrolet that cost as much as a Buick Roadmaster convertible. What would Buick, Pontiac, or Olds have done had they gotten a crack at a car based on a two-seat chassis and a fiberglass body?

At the same four-city 1953 Motorama, Buick showed its own fiberglass-bodied sports car, the Wildcat. A year later, Pontiac and Olds each introduced idea machines similar to the Corvette in size and styling. The Olds F-88 looked like an upscale Corvette convertible with a high-compression OHV V-8. The Pontiac Bonneville Special was a fierce-looking, bubble-topped two-seater with a 268-cubic-inch inline-eight and a "Continental kit" fared in to resemble a fighter-jet afterburner. Hey, it was the 1950s. Remember?

Fiberglass was becoming the favored material of boat builders and sports-car designers. GM described the Wildcat as an experimental car "designed and built primarily to test the use of fiberglass in automobile body building." These models weren't intended for production, but reflected each division's distinct personality and place in the Sloan hierarchy and Harley Earl's acute understanding of what each brand was. Further, they were limited to components available to each virtually autonomous division, and they were running cars with real turning radii, unlike today's taped-up concepts built to top out at 30 mph in a straight line for action photography.

Two decades ago, Chicago restaurateur Joe Bortz bought one of two Bonneville-Specials to complement his one-off Buick Wildcat and launched a collector's trend that's far from having peaked. Last year, Barrett-Jackson auctioned the one-off F-88 for $3.24 million, and this year, it gaveled down $3.02 million for the second of the two Bonnevilles. They're rarer than the rarest musclecar or sports exotic of the last 60 years, and they say as much about the time in which they were built. You can bet the value of such cars has only one direction to go.