The famous Buick Y-Job has seen a few twists and turns in its long and illustrious career. For example: When it was silver, not black, and when it wasn’t called the Y-Job.

The auto industry’s first concept car and arguably the most famous, the 1938 Buick Y-Job must be one of the most recognizable cars in the world. So it’s always been a source of fascination for us that the Y-Job wasn’t always the familiar vehicle everyone knows today. For instance, it hasn’t always been black. For a relatively brief but important interval in its career, the car was a metallic silver-gray. And it wasn’t always called the Y-Job, either.

Built on a modified Buick production car chassis but with wild and forward-looking bodywork, the Y-Job wore a lustrous coat of black lacquer for its 1938 introduction, and it was black when it appeared in a parade in the streets of Flint, Michigan, Buick’s home town, in August of 1940. But barely a few months later at the New York Auto Show in October of that year, it was sporting a new silver-gray paint job for its starring appearance in the General Motors and Buick exhibits. While the reason for the paint change was not officially reported as far as we know, we presume it must have been with the approval of GM styling boss Harley Earl. The Y-Job was Earl’s pet project and he treated it as pretty much his own personal vehicle.

Even more jarring, perhaps, the car wasn’t billed as the Y-Job at the show. Note the front license plate in the news photo above, which says “Fireball.” In its caption accompanying the same photo, Motor Age reported, “One of the crowd catchers at the New York Auto Show was this ‘car of the future’ called the Buick Fireball.” (The magazine also misspelled Earl’s name as “Earle.”) Of course, Fireball was also the new name for Buick’s signature straight 8 engine starting in the 1941 model year. (See our feature on the Buick straight 8 here.)

We don’t know exactly when the Y-Job reverted to its original jet black paint, or when the name Y-Job became its permanent handle. We note that in every postwar photo we’ve ever seen, the car is black. And in the Buick brochure for the 1951 XP-300 dream car, the Y-Job is repeatedly referred to as the Y-Job, as if it had always worn that name. Dressed in black lacquer and wearing Y-Job license plates, Buick’s fabulous car of the future now resides in the permanent collection of the GM Heritage Collection in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

Noted author and historian Terry Boyce was of invaluable assistance in preparing this story.