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StarLight Garage presents the second Bosley, the Bosley Interstate Mark II from 1960. Actually a car from 1956 was used as a donor for this "science-fiction", so that's why I choose for the year 1956.
This one-off coupe sportscar is a piece of art and car history as well, if you liked or not it's up to you as always.
Enjoy!
The arrival of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s brought about many dreams of how the network would directly influence American automobiles, some rather straightforward and some borrowed from science fiction. Yet for all those dreams, only one car was ever built expressly to cruise the interstates, the Bosley Mark II Interstate.
Richard Bosley of Mentor, Ohio, might have been a horticulturist by trade, but he didn't limit his interests to flowers alone. A Jaguar XK120 owner fascinated by the Ferraris he'd see in the automotive magazines of the day, he set about building his first sports car in the early 1950s, using parts from Ford, Mercury and Chrysler swathed under a swoopy fiberglass body of his own design and manufacture. Though he never entered production with what would become known as the Bosley Mark I, as he intended, he did put it on the road as his personal car and accumulated 100,000 miles with it over the next decade or so.
Most stories on Bosley end there, but Bosley wasn't done yet. Sometime in the early to mid-1960s, he traded the Mark I for a Chevrolet Corvette SR-2—one of three that Chevrolet built for racing and for GM executives in 1956—stripped the body off of it and began work on a follow-up car.
According to Bosley’s own spec sheet for the Mark II—which he would call the Interstate for its intended driving medium—his stated purpose for the car was for “driving in comfort and safety over the interstate highways and for the aesthetic pleasure of good automotive design.”
The list of safety devices he planned to incorporate in the car (“seat belts, head rest, reclining seats, tempered side windows, smoke colored rear window, air horns, powerful engine, good visibility front and rear, special interior lighting, added lighting features on front and rear including driving light and signal bar, strengthened frame, unit-construction fiberglass body, anti lift windshield wipers, built in roll bar”) appears rather forward thinking for the mid-1960s, a time when few of those items could be found as standard equipment in production cars.
“There are many other details—all based on what Bosley was trying to accomplish with this car,” said Jason Wenig, owner of The Creative Workshop, which has been tasked with the Interstate’s restoration. “Like some form of dash-mounted ‘heads up display,’ a pod in the rear window that has turn signals and a third brake light (this is 1966, remember), lights in weird places, et cetera. It really is a ‘concept’ of what a car should be. He built the car specifically for comfortable, prolonged, high speed interstate travel.”
According to the spec sheet, Bosley fitted the Interstate with a 345 hp Pontiac V-8, a four-speed manual transmission, a 35-gallon fuel tank, magnesium center lock wheels, and a full stainless-steel exhaust system, along with Marchal Fulgor air horns and Marchal Optique headlamps.
Sorry, for the crappy pictures, but I couldn't find better ones.
THE OTHER BOSLEY IS HERE
