Modern carmakers sure like to talk about how “sustainable” they are now. And, yes, that’s an admirable goal! It’s great to think about cars throughout their entire lifespan, from when they go from rolls of sheet steel into stamping machines at a factory, throughout their life of hauling you places and listening to all of the intimate conversations you have inside them, to eventually ending up rusting away in a junkyard before being melted down and turned into soup cans, if we’re lucky. There was one automaker that I can think of that was far, far ahead of the curve on this. They were the very first and perhaps only automaker ever to base a business model on the idea of upcycling, that is taking something already discarded and doing something new with it. What they took were entire chassis from junkyards, and then refurbished those chassis and used them as the basis to build new pickup trucks and a few SUVs. The company was Powell, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this company for days.
I think my interest in Powell was re-ignited when I found this post from the Petersen Museum archive that featured a number of pictures of Powell’s strange Compton, California factory that I’d never seen before. The Petersen gave me rights to use some of these photos, so I’m really excited to share them with you, because even though I’d heard or read how the business model of Powell was to comb Southern California junkyards for scrapped 1941 Plymouths, and use those chassis as the basis for their Powell Sport Wagon, which was a sort of confusing name, as it was a truck, not a station wagon. I guess a pickup is close to a wagon in the traditional, pulled-behind-a-little-kid sense of a wagon?
Look at that picture up there! You can see them pressure washing the zombie Plymouth chassis, in what looks like the first stages of refurbishment. There’s drums full of parts that could either be discards, or maybe evaluated/refurbished parts that could be installed on the chassis? They seem to be too organized for just scrap, as you can see in that big pile of A-arms there and some driveshafts behind them. But I’m just guessing.
What these pictures showed me was the meticulous process and preparation given to those junked chassis; they were completely disassembled and evaluated, with parts that didn’t meet Powell standards scrapped and replaced with service parts or other salvaged-but-good parts. Keep in mind, this is in the mid 1950s, so these chassis weren’t all that old, really, only about 16 to 18 years old. Plus, it was Southern California, so it’s not like rust was that big a deal, either. The Plymouth was a good choice, as it was known to be a robust, well-built and engineered chassis, and Chrysler sold over 500,000 of them in 1941, so supplies should have been plentiful.
Let’s just pause a second and think about this some more, because I think it’s worth it. Just imagine if an up-and-coming, lower-volume truck maker like Rivian or Canoo made an announcement that from now on they’re going to be building all their new EV trucks by buying all the junked 2007 Ford Crown Victorias they could find and using those chassis, after refurbishment. Everyone would lose their lettuce, but if you actually stop and think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense, especially if your goal is to make an affordable truck, which is precisely what Powell’s main goal was.
Channing and Hayward Powell, the Powell brothers, wanted to build what they said would be “America’s 1st car produced to sell below $1000,” and looking at ads of the era, they seemed to have pulled it off:
In today’s money, $998.87 equates to about $11,140.45, and for comparison, the average price of a pickup truck in America today is almost $60,000, so, yeah, I’d say the Powell Bros succeeded. Aside from starting with a salvaged chassis, Powells were designed with so many other cost-cutting measures in mind. Body panels were designed to have no compound curves (save for the roof) so no complex stamping machines were needed. Basic materials like diamond-plate steel were used for some panels, like the rear and the tailgate, early production bumpers were just planks of wood, and the bench seat was just foam, no decadent and expensive springs inside there. What are you, royalty, that you need your ass suspended on springs?
The front end was fiberglass, made by a nearby boat maker, and the instrument clusters seem to have been just whatever Plymouth salvage or service parts were cheap and available. I say this because on most pictures of Powells I’ve seen, they vary pretty wildly. Nothing was custom-made, if it could be helped. Grille chrome trim strips were actually door trim from a Ford. All the glass was flat, and the engines that made it all go were also salvaged and completely re-built inline-sixes from Plymouth (usually) as well.
I spoke with the curator of the Petersen Museum, Leslie Kendall, and he described the Powell factory as being an assembly line of sorts, but one that moved at a tempo of a truck going from one “station” to another at a pace measured in days instead of the usual minutes. Still, despite the leisurely rate, about 1,170 Powell Sport Wagons were built, with most being trucks, but about 200 were Wagoneer-like enclosed SUVs, and there was even a prototype camper built, with all kinds of flaps and swing-out and up sections:
What Powell Sport Wagons were best known for, I think, was an optional feature they had: tubes. Specifically, in the bedsides of the truck, you could specify one or two long, cylindrical drawers where you could store fishing poles or rifles or javelins or six-foot party subs or whatever long, narrow things you needed to carry. In our current era of under-bed storage lockers and inside-tailgate storage and all kinds of clever hidden truck compartments, Powell can be seen as a real pioneer.
In this photo you can clearly see that the rear is made up of no-skid diamond plate steel, and you can see the tube-like drawer extended; this truck only had one specified. Also interesting is the spare wheel compartment under the bed, accessible by removing that rectangular panel.
There’s around 109 surviving Powells , and while they’re not terribly well-known even among gearheads, I think they’re due for some newfound relevance. As really the only true example of automotive recycling on a significant scale, I feel like there’s lessons to be learned here, especially in our upcoming era of skateboard-chassis’d electric cars. Will there be a neo-Powell in 2055 that takes Tesla skateboards from the 2030s and 2040s, slaps in new batteries and a rugged, simple pickup truck body, and sells it for dirt cheap? Probably not, but a boy can dream.
I saw one of these in a junkyard/collection somewhere in the California desert many years ago and my mind was blown. The photos I took are still used in the Wikipedia article. It’s scruffy but imagine how easy it would be to restore one of these!
That would be the Motor Transport Museum in Campo CA which the owners on this site (or any serious gearheads) need to go and see. Check schedule for open dates.
Jaguar Land Rover still do this sort of thing to this day. They launched a flash restomod old school Defender just the other day… well over a quarter of a million dollars though.
Forget frames and stuff, someone needs to start doing this at scale with EV batteries. A proper operation at scale would be much better at matchmaking all the pouches and modules that talk to each other, load balance, etc.
In the 70s people would make all sorts of cars out of old VWs.
I’m hopeful that someone makes a sports car from an old EV kit soon,
Good shit! Even being a super gearhead and trying to cram all automotive knowledge into my head especially from the past, I love finding new stuff like this!
I honestly a startup manufacturer could take a crown vic or panther chassis 1980-2011 or so and make a affordable rebuilt truck or wagon.
Solid chassis, reliable drivetrains…just make a simple no frils cab and bed .
Plenty of people use them for chasis swaps allready, I think it would be a no brainier to make an economical body to put on it… Hell just offer the body cheap to consumers.
This should’ve been a thing ever since we started making cars. I love cars, but it makes me feel bad to think of how resource and energy intensive the industry has been since day 1, and how much of its output ends in landfills and junkyards (only relatively recently have we seen real industry-wide efforts towards recycling as much components as possible).
Upcycling old chassis and bodies, or just generally repairing junked cars and getting them back on the road is something that should’ve been standard practice since forever, and instead there’s actual regulation to make sure cars can’t ever escape junkyards in most places, even if they’re fully functional and roadworthy. It’s one of the many hypocrisies of governments when it comes to green policies: they just seem designed to become another way to transfer capital from the bottom to the top, rather than being centered on actual environmental concern.
Take EVs: governments all around the world seem invested in a quick, full transition; no one’s subsidizing retrofitting, which is very much the quickest, cheapest way to mass adoption. It just doesn’t generate as much profit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve had this thought as well at times when I’ve realized that every single part I sell, is an old part ending up in a landfill somewhere. The only exception is remanufactured parts like starters, alternators and calipers, but even there the industry seems to be moving to new because in many cases it’s actually cheaper to produce new than it is to remanufacture.
It’s not just automotive though, it’s everything. It baffles me the technology humans have advanced and yet the best we can come up with for our old stuff is to bury it in the ground.
It wasn’t always that way. The good old-fashioned rewind shop is a dying breed. When I was a kid it was a regular thing–actually preferred–to take your dead alternators, electric motors, etc. to a rewind shop and have them rebuilt them. If it was a common item they probably already had one on the shelf and you could be back on the road the same day.
I don’t think I bought a new alternator until I was on my third or fourth car, and that was only because it was an import and there wasn’t a rewind available.
I miss the days when I could yank a starter off a parts car, clean it well, and tell the man, “No paint: just slap it together for a couple more years’ service, please.” They were cheap & quick and (usually) good-humored.
Pike’s Generator Service is missed around here
Those still exist, I used this one for my 911 alternator and it came back beautiful, way cheaper than buying a 911 alternator online:
https://www.fondyautoelectric.com/
As a young person, I only learned these shops exist because I couldn’t find an aftermarket replacement for a “dead” window motor in my 66 Thunderbird. I found one of these shops that was local, and was shocked at how cheap and easy it was for them to fix my old motor and make it as good as new. Far cheaper than any of the questionable newer replacements I was looking at, and certainly better quality. I’ll be going to them for any other electronics I need rebuilt for the foreseeable future, it’s awesome to be able to save and reuse good-quality old parts like that!
I won’t replace a dead alternator or starter motor unless my specialist tells me there’s absolutely no way he can rebuild it (which is something that’s never happened).
As a classic car enthusiast, I’ve found that it’s almost universally better in the long run to remanufacture/refurbish/rebuild old parts instead of replacing them, because not only is it better for the environment, but part of the reason new parts are so cheap is that they’re lower quality. It’s cheaper for the factories making them to have no quality control and just replace the part under warranty if you get a dud, but that means sometimes a new part works just long enough to become a problem on a road trip when you’re not expecting it.
So yeah, it’s cheap and convenient to just replace something with a new part, but I’d rather use a rebuilt original any day because at least I know it’s built to factory specs. The phrase “they just don’t build them like they used to” is getting truer every day, at least in terms of quality control. So yeah, don’t throw old parts away, if they can be mended and reused at all it’s worth the extra time to do so.
Bingo! A lot of the times, refurbished/repaired parts for older cars are simply a better choice when it comes to quality. And more often than not they’re cheaper than brand new, lower quality ones.
It’s a great idea for its time, though I seriously doubt a vehicle built like that could pass even the least stringent of today’s safety regs.
Well, the same can be said of most crap cans people buy out of craigslist, and some people actually finish their projects with remarkable results. If there was an actual industry implementing good, evolving practices and safety standards in car refurbishing I’m sure that would not be a concern nowadays.
Good point. Still, I see more than a few highly modified cars on the street that I’m pretty sure are death traps. Home-built rebuilds and modifications aren’t given the same level of scrutiny as factory-built cars receive.
To build a new car out of scrap parts, meet all of today’s safety standards, and bring it to market seems to be too big a leap.
Oh, absolutely, I was hypothesizing what could’ve happened if this had become an actual industry back then. Even within the confines of my hypothesis, I understand the perception would still be that such cars would be less safe than brand new ones. But still, probably better than the clapped-out Craigslist beaters people often have to settle for.
The transition to EVs could be a way to introduce this mindset if there were incentives for such an industry to exist and start salvaging all sorts of reusable parts before they start to rot out in u-pull junkyards.
There are already specialty shops converting classic cars into EVs, though they don’t have a lot of range. I saw one a few Saturday mornings back on The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation that restored the cars (mostly VWs) and then mated motors from wrecked EVs to the existing drivetrains. They were cool, but pricey.
I’m guessing the industry will continue to grow and prices will come down to the point where we plebes will be able to afford to convert our rides to electric and save the planet.
Great stuff Torch!
The idea of this scratches a profound itch- I spent way too much time at the PullAPart imagining “how hard would it be to fix this straight but non-running” car. Sort of a much milder version of Tracyitis.
“Just imagine if an up-and-coming, lower-volume truck maker like Rivian or Canoo made an announcement that from now on they’re going to be building all their new EV trucks by buying all the junked 2007 Ford Crown Victorias they could find and using those chassis, after refurbishment. Everyone would lose their lettuce, but if you actually stop and think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense,”
Actually, this makes zero sense. Using a chassis designed for a combustion vehicle several decades ago would be great for one thing, putting yourself out of business and becoming a national laughing stock. Ok, that’s two things.
I strongly suspect a purposed designed electric vehicle chassis built at scale has a lower carbon count than a recovery/refurbishing operation that couldn’t scale. And, it would be a whole lot safer and lighter.
Great piece about Powell, but this suggestion almost made me shoot milk out my nose. Or at least, it would’ve made made me shoot milk out my nose had I actually been drinking milk, which I wasn’t.
*shrug emoji
Unkie herb!
https://frinkiac.com/video/S03E24/1N9UdQyxUj2RJCDbRLJbG8TkYWg=.gif
This is some fascinating truck-trivia. I think I would’ve guessed International if I saw one at a show. For something that is literally cobbled together, they look surprisingly clean. I’m definitely going to need one parked next to my Corvair Rampside out in the dream garage.
“…pulled-behind-a-little-kid sense of a wagon…” Or, before that, pulled by animals. And adults.
Right? I suspect he was just being funny though…
I’m pretty sure that in 2023, legal liability would see this business concept strangled in the cradle. Which is a shame, because it’s a damn good idea if done right.
Restomods. EV conversions.
There’s been a Powell for sale on Hemmings for about a month now. They are asking a lot for it but when’s the last time you saw one?
1956 Powell Other Powhatan, Virginia | Hemmings.com
It comes with a matching Powell which I’d guess is a whole ‘nother story in itself.
No need to wait around you can already buy a work vehicle made in part from junkyard Tesla parts. https://www.maxwellvehicles.com/
Don’t tell Tesla or they’ll find a way to brick every component like John Deere!
I love it! American ingenuity at it’s finest.
Another great post BTW. I eat this shit up. It beats the hell out of doom scrolling.
This is the kind of old, obscure, and ultimately useless information I come to the Autopian for.
Keep it coming guys!
For those of you that would like a mini version for your desk, Matchbox released a lovely version of the truck in 2020. Still reasonably priced on eBay <3 You are welcome.
I came here to mention the same thing. I actually prefer the red Powell recolor that came out in ‘22, but both are nice little toy trucks.
I’m still looking for the red one, but I’m happy anyway. My loose model is on my display next to the AMC Eagle wagon Matchbox released this year.
It’s another reason why Matchbox is and will always be better than Hot Wheels.
Thank you, looking at the pics the crude detail on the 1:1 version seems to scale down well. May have to get one.
This is sort of like YouTubers buying cars from a Copart auction. Or maybe Roadkill grange…
Wow this is fascinating, definitely would like to see more on this subject.
Such as how Cubans kept all the 40’s & 50’s cars running without available spare parts.
When Obama reopened Cuba there were all kinds of people who thought there would be a deluge of beautiful old American cars returning to our shores but it turned out that they’re all so cobbled together with whatever they could find that they pretty much hold little to no monetary value. Most of them had Russian diesels or Lada engines, floorboards made from roadsigns and janky rust repairs made out of everything from drywall plaster to papier mache. This is probably for the best because those cars should stay in Cuba where their beauty can be most appreciated as opposed to being restored to original and squirreled away in some rich guy’s garage or sold for profit.
Also, the Cuban government prohibits export of cars off the island
A friend of mine traveled there a few years ago and said he was surprised to learn that one of the things Cuban car folks were the most excited about importing to the island during that time was good quality automotive paint.
A few years ago, a show called Cuban Chrome featured Cuban car culture. These guys were living proof that necessity is the mother of invention. The real pros used lead for their bodywork, but many also used plaster and anything else they could get their hands on.
Almost all of them used house paint which faded quickly in the Caribbean sun. One episode focused on a guy preparing his ’50s Cadillac to serve in a wedding. He wanted the car to be pink eventually, so he mixed the paint to a reddish coral hue to account for the fade. He said reaching the color he wanted would take about a year. He’d end up repainting the car a year or two after that.
https://www.pilgrimmediagroup.com/shows/cuban-chrome/
Powell deserves credit for pioneering the Ram Box, and for demonstrating “intermediate technology” like the various “third world” utility vehicles from the 1970s especially the 2CV based Afrikar.
The use of flat panels and glass with only simple curves is exactly how the Land Rover was engineered to minimize tooling
“…the very first and perhaps only automaker ever to base a business model on the idea of upcycling…”
Well, there were the junkyard Cord transmissions that were refurbished and installed in some Tucker 48s but I don’t know that this should be called a business model so much as an act of desperation.
Indeed. I’m pretty sure Tucker resorted to using the old Cord trannys after the Big Three used their influence to scare off his suppliers.
No, it was because they wasted too much time and money trying to make his Tuckermatic direct-drive torque converter idea work before throwing in the towel and looking around for a quick and easy replacement that would still offer some sort of automated shifting. GM wasn’t yet selling Hydramatics to outside customers, but the Cord preselector was pretty solidly the most technologically sophisticated American transmission before the Hydramatic and was readily available in junkyards. At the time Tucker went under, they were working with Bendix Corporation, Cord’s original supplier, on a series of improvement ideas with the goal of putting the transmission back in production
That makes sense. Even though the Cord transmissions weren’t automatics in the modern sense, they were certainly more sophisticated than a three on the tree.
There was still internal dissent within Tucker Corp though, the decision of what transmission the production car would have wasn’t totally settled – one faction wanted the Bendix preselector, Preston Tucker still had a preference for something in-house if possible, and I think there was also some interest in a new automatic Borg Warner had under development
That might have had more to do with needing an appropriate front-wheel-drive transmission to work with the rear-engined Tucker configuration.
Supposedly, they stopped production when supplies of decent ’41 Plymouths in Southern California junkyards started to run thin (presumably, they weren’t going to go running hours out of their way to pick one or two cars out of a distant yard, they needed a high concentration in convenient locations near their factory, and buying good cars at retail or auction would have killed the budget).
Always seemed to me like it shouldn’t have been all that difficult to re-engineer the Powell body to mount on another chassis, like a 1942-first half 1949 Plymouth, which were different, but not insanely so? Probably more to the story, like not making enough money at it
You are correct. 1957 was supposed to be a big year for Powell, but they ran out of donors. According to history, Powells were marketed mainly west of the Rocky Mountains.
Had they expanded their search outside Southern California or, as you suggested, used a different model year chassis, Powell would have earned a much larger presence.
I think about something like this every time I pass a salvage yard and see all of the “retired” rolling stock. It all seems such a waste. That’s when I wish I had a Star Trek replicator that could reduce raw material to component atoms and recombine them into new, useful forms. That’s going to be a real thing soon, right?
Recycled 3D printer filaments are probably the closest existing thing.
I’m thinking there’s got to be plenty of decent F-150 truck frames in junkyards that could surely be used for something… Might have to sell it as a kit car to get around safety regulations, but even as far as far as engines go, crate engines are a thing, so just find an emissions-compliant whatever and put it under the hood. I also wonder if safety could be worked around by using the unibody of an existing car and perhaps making new body panels and putting a new reliable engine in it. There are all kinds of VW Golfs and assorted Audis for example in junkyards because they were unreliable and no longer worth repairing, so what if you pulled them out, refurbished them with new interiors and some different body panels and put a Honda or Toyota engine under the hood?
That’s sensational, and for farm use I can see the advantages for sure.
Some farmers here I know have some of the usual Hiluxes and Landcruisers, but the real rough-and-tumble work is done by their fleet of Mahindras.
Can nearly buy two for the price of a Hilux, and they’re tough as nails!