Gordon Buehrig’s design vision wasn’t confined to Cords and Duesenbergs. In 1938 he created this ingenious economy car for the Budd Company called the Wowser.
Some years ago at Mac’s Motor City Garage, we featured an old silent movie produced by the Budd Company that provided a state-of-the-art look at the car design studio techniques of 1938. This work was performed under the direction of Gordon Buehrig, who’d moved to Budd when the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg operations wound down. (See the feature here.) Then only a few months ago, we rediscovered Buehrig’s wonderful 1975 book, Rolling Sculpture: A Designer and His Work. It includes a very informative section on the scale model featured in the film, an ingenious low-cost car for the masses called the Wowser. (The photos we’re using here are borrowed from the book with a little cleanup.)
Yes, there’s a bit of Buehrig’s Cord 810 in the Wowser’s front and rear end treatments. But for us, the the most fascinating feature is the unusual body construction, with the body shell stamped in two halves, split down the vertical centerline. The idea, of course, was to slash manufacturing cost. It brings to mind the desperate Brooks Stevens and Charles Sorensen plan to resurrect Studebaker (see our feature here.) However, this Budd proposal isn’t as far fetched as it might appear.
Buehrig was a seasoned body engineer whose experience reached back to the composite era, drafting bodies for Gotfredson and Dietrich. He didn’t just pull this out of his hat. Also, Budd was the most advanced stamping company in the world at the time, and it had used a similar approach in its “monopiece” construction for the 1928-29 Dodge Victory Six, in which the complete body side was a single stamping. For Budd the Wowser was feasible, given sufficient volume to justify the investment.
Buehrig also included this view of a Wowser interior mockup, revealing a cabin as sparse as can be—again, to cut manufacturing cost to the bone. Unfortunately, Budd management had no interest in manufacturing the vehicle or in pitching the car to its many automaker clients. Buehrig’s work was put on ice, even though Budd had just built a lavish design studio in Detroit, designed by Buehrig himself, that was intended to match the facilities at Briggs, Budd’s chief rival.
When Buehrig wrote to Edward G. Budd Jr. personally, protesting that the company was using none of his ideas, that they were wasting his time and their money, Budd took the information to heart and asked for his resignation. “The sales department never showed it [the Wowser] to any potential customers as they were afraid it might offend their engineering departments. If it had been shown we might have the Wowser today instead of the Volkswagen,” Buehrig mused.
At the end of the silent film we mentioned above, there’s a brief glimpse of what appears to be a deluxe four-door version of the Wowser. The image is almost too blurry to make out, so just for fun we asked several AI programs to restore and enhance it. ChatGPT came up with the most realistic rendering, which we are sharing below. After departing from Budd, Buehrig worked in the aircraft industry through World War II. His next stop in the automobile business was at Studebaker.
