Introduced in 1955, GMC’s L’Universelle dream truck foreshadowed the Motor City’s minivan movement by more than 25 years. 

When it was rolled out onto the show floor at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in New York on January 20, 1955, L’Universelle was a rarity among Motorama show vehicles. Typically, the General Motors passenger car brands—Cadillac, Buick, Olds, Pontiac, and Chevy—got all the Motorama glory. But with L’Universelle, the GMC Truck & Coach division was granted a moment in the show-biz spotlight.

With hindsight, it’s interesting to note that while the GMC dream truck wasn’t a minivan per se (the term and the concept wouldn’t be invented for a few more decades, to be honest) we can see that it shared a number of the minivan’s key elements. Front-wheel drive and a low roof height, to name two.

Like many GM Motorama showpieces, L’Universelle wasn’t a functional road vehicle but merely a fiberglass glider, a pushmobile. But back at the GMC truck division shops in Michigan, there were actual running prototypes, including the ungainly test mule shown above that sports a rear body section from a ’55 Buick.

Under the jury-rigged sheet metal was a carefully thought-out chassis, which featured a Pontiac/GMC V8 turned around backward to drive the front wheels through an inverted GM Hydra-Matic transmission. Inboard drum brakes, longitudinal torsion bars, and a radiator mounted behind the driver were used to address the formidable packaging issues.  An alternative chassis design for the dream truck used a transverse Pontiac V8 coupled to a GMC bus angle-drive system, also turned around to drive the front wheels.

Harley Earl’s GM styling studios envisioned L’Universelle as both a commercial delivery vehicle and a station wagon. (Earl and GM took out a patent on the design.) To that end, in order to reduce the cargo floor height as much as possible the designers called for 13-inch wheels and tires, as shown below. As we can well imagine, the tiny rolling stock reportedly gave the GMC truck engineers some cause for concern.

On the Motorama show vehicle, the large cargo doors employed an elaborate gullwing-style opening system. This jackknife setup, another Earl pet idea, was more cumbersome and expensive, we’re thinking, than the sliding-door configuration found on production minivans a quarter-century later. We don’t know how much L’Universelle actually contributed to the minivan revolution of  the early 1980s, but it’s another interesting Motor City what-if.