This provocative teaser on the cover of a 1956 car magazine was so intriguing we had to go find a copy ourselves and check it out. 

As you might imagine, here at Mac’s Motor City Garage we spend many hours searching the internet for items of interest in automotive history, and we find plenty—some great, some mundane, some just weird. When we discovered this cover from the August 1956 issue of Auto Age magazine (hat tip to Simon Roffey) with its strange cover blurb declaring “the unit-construction hoax in 1957 cars,” it left us scratching out heads. What’s their beef with unit construction, we wondered.

Change is a constant in the auto industry, and so is resistance to it. When four-wheel braking was introduced in the ’20s, campaigns were launched against it. Here in more recent times we’ve seen considerable pushback against airbags and electric vehicles, to name two. And we saw that when tradtional body-on-frame passenger cars were being phased out in favor of fully unitized chassis construction, there were plenty of complaints about that, too (especially in the USA). Opponents said unit bodies were structurally unsound, prone to corrosion, couldn’t be repaired in a crash, and so on. Some of that thinking persists to this day.

We figured the objections in this Auto Age “hoax” story would most likely be along those same lines. (Auto Age was irregularly published in New York from 1953 to 1956, and at one point John Bentley served as editor.) However, while our library includes some Auto Age issues, we didn’t have this one. And our curiosity was killing us. We had to see the article and learn what this so-called “hoax” was all about. Thanks to eBay, ten bucks later a copy was on its way to our mailbox.

When we got a copy in our hands (above) we were a little surprised, and maybe a little disappointed. Turns out the article, penned by technical editor Eric Nielssen, had no quarrel at all with unit construction per se. In fact, he was a big fan of the development. Rather, the author objected to the auto industry describing unit construction as “new” when it was nothing of the kind. And Nielssen was absolutely correct. In one form or another, unit bodies are nearly as old as the automobile. He cites numerous precedents to state his case, from the 1903 Vauxhall to the 1934 Citroen to the 1955 Hudson—below is an illustration of the Hudson from the story.

Of course, there is nothing new about the Motor CIty carmakers taking old ideas like, say, unit construction, recycling and updating them, and then presenting them to the car-buying public as “new.” They’ve been doing that forever. Is that a hoax, really, or just good old-fashioned Detroit PR? WIth the cover teaser calling unit construction a “hoax,” Auto Age employed a little marketing gimmick of its own, hoping that the provocative wording would lure people in and seduce them into buying the magazine. And it sure worked on us.