Yesterday's Tomorrow

April 04, 2025Newsletter Archives

Over the course of two decades in the mid 20th-century, General Motors brought the latest innovations in science, technology, and industry to the American heartland through a program called the Parade of Progress. Building on exhibits first created for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, GM created a caravan of buses, trucks and cars, going from town to town across the country, a cutting-edge museum on wheels.  

The first edition – which hit the road in 1936 – included eight modified GMC Streamliner buses. But for the second version – which launched in 1941 – GM created a fleet of 12 all-new behemoths, the GM Futurliners. Shiny red with chrome accents, the Futurliners simply screamed “the future.” With a bold art deco GM logo on the nose, and a glass cockpit for the driver high above the road, the Futurliner looked like a rocket ship on wheels.

The Futurliner was massive, 33 feet long, 9 feet wide and more than 11 feet tall, weighing 15 tons. The Futurliners also had 16-foot-long clam shell doors on either side to form stages and display areas. Also part of the experience was a portable tent – which GM called “the Aer-O-Dome”– that could seat up to 1,500 people, without any internal supporting poles, for lectures and demos of the latest scientific wonders. GM called it “the tent of tomorrow.”

The 1941 Parade of Progress came to an abrupt end after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as the nation’s focus turned to the war, and the Futurliners were mothballed for more than a decade. But GM refurbished the Futurliners, and they returned to the road in 1953 for a third and final edition of the Parade. By the time the last Parade of Progress ended in 1956, the world had become a more sophisticated place – television, among other things, gave Americans a new option for their leisure time. And GM sold off the Futurliners.

For now, the only Futurliner on public display is in the National Auto & Truck Museum, in Auburn, Indiana, a little north of Fort Wayne.  Another Futurliner, originally restored by the owners of Massachusetts-based Peter Pan Bus Lines, was sold in 2024 to a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur and vehicle collector. He’s renovating his Futurliner – again - and plans to put it on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles starting in December 2025. 

The Futurliner and the Parade of Progress, born out of the desperation of the Great Depression and the determination of World War II, told the story of American innovation in a way that inspired millions. Maybe we should do it all again. 

-- Eric Savitz, editor-in-chief, GM News