The fabulous Detroit dream car era brought a flood of coupe, sedan, and convertible concepts, while station wagons were relatively rare. Ford took an interesting stab at the category with the 1964 Aurora show car. 

Introduced at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where the 1965 Mustang also made its famous debut, the Aurora show car was designed to show consumers what a station wagon of the near future might be like. A rolling “luxury lounge,” in the words of Ford design vice-president Gene Bordinat, the Aurora was loaded with forward-looking comfort and convenience ideas—23 in all, according to the Dearborn automaker.

Ford, a traditional industry leader in the station wagon category, was losing ground to General Motors and Chrysler by the early ’60s, a problem the Aurora was intended to address. One noteworthy design wrinkle was the clamshell rear tailgate, employing a carpeted lower section that doubled as a booster stair for tiny passengers (top photo and above). The generous 131-inch wheelbase allowed for plenty of interior volume, which was  thematically divided into three sections: a rearmost area (with glass partition) for children, a mobile lounge in the center, and the driver cockpit in the front. A single rear-passenger door was located on the right side.

Many of the Aurora’s novel features were found in its greenhouse, above. The front section of the roof incorporated a power-operated polarizing glass panel, while the rear portion housed a flow-through ventilation system, and the halo bar between them was designed to provide rollover protection. Exterior lighting was electroluminescent throughout (“cold light” in the lingo of the day) with a band of one-inch sealed-beam units providing the headlamp array.

Easily the most dramatic feature on the Aurora wagon was its wraparound, lounge-style seating arrangement, below. The pedestal-mounted front passenger bucket could be turned around to face the boomerang sofa in the second row, with a communications and entertainment console located directly behind the pilot’s seat. Driver aids included an aircraft-type steering wheel and an analog navigation system with a rolling map built into the instrument panel.

While the supper-club seating layout never made it into production—for the obvious safety and packaging reasons, we presume—the theme was duplicated on the Aurora II, a 1969 Ford concept based on a standard LTD Country Squire wagon. And in more modest, practical form, of course, the wraparound rear-seat styling was used to striking effect on the production 1964 Thunderbird.