To further preserve the wonderful cars housed inside of General Motors’ Heritage Collection, the automaker will 3D scan vehicles. The effort comes to further protect the special vehicles in case catastrophe were to strike, Automobile reported Wednesday.
The blue-light 3D scanning efforts began with the 1953 Firebird I gas turbine concept, which will be on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London next year. To ensure the car’s survival, the 3D scans will allow GM to completely recreate the car from the ground up, should something happen to the vehicle during its loan.
In total, the GM Heritage Center houses 600 vehicles with 150 of them on display.
“Mike Simcoe [design chief] challenged our organization to branch out into the documentation of the actual 3D objects that we have in our heritage collection,” Susan Skarsgard, a GM designer heading up the project told Automobile.
She also recalled a flood in the GM Design Center‘s basement years ago that nearly ruined an extensive photo archive.
“That collection was in the basement until almost nine months before we had the flood. So that whole collection would have been ruined if we hadn’t had the prescience to move it out,” Skarsgard added.
The process will ensure GM can replicate ever part and component found in any of the heritage cars, right down to the materials, paint colors and more.
Comments
Seems like a great idea—beyond just preservation. This should allow designers and engineers to quickly study all aspects of the collection, giving them further ideas and inspiration, and allowing them to draw on GM’s substantial heritage for future products. Ideas that were too far ahead of their time to put into production in the past might be perfect solutions to problems they need to solve today.
So they will take each car completely apart and scan each individual part? Then reassemble the car?
The alternative is just rolling a car into a booth and scanning the whole thing. Which, in my estimation, would only allow them to recreate the body at best.
Better yet build a the replica and send it on tour. Keep the original in the vault!
Why the hell would GM want to pay millions of dollars each year just to have a traveling roadshow of old cars they once built or never intended to build? Little trips down memory lane don’t pay the bills, and concept cars are for the autoshows.
Also, autoshows have concepts as the main draw…the main draw that then points the consumer towards the cars that are in production now.
Why GM hasn’t taken one of its shuttered factories and turned it into a GM heritage Museum years ago is beyond me. They could create a historic museum of GM automobiles, with several other exhibits, a theater, restaurant, gift shop, and, charge admission to help pay for the expense of the museum.
Look how many people go to Deerfield Village and other Ford Museums every year. Makes sense to me instead of just storing 600 vehicles permanently and lending a couple hundred out every year…
Well Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum is a long well established foundation with a long line of outside support. It is not a Ford owned Museum. The foundation is supported by the Ford family as well as many others.
GM stores the cars at a building on the Warren Proving grounds. They used to be split up around many shuttered GM buildings in Detroit.
The idea was to get them in a secure location and to keep the cost down as much as they can to be able to preserve their heritage for a later time a Museum that is available to the public is possible, Remember the collection came together when GM was going broke and is on hold till they get better secured.
Doing a Museum is not easy or cheap. Just look at the Chrysler Museum and how they did a world class collection but yet so few people visited it that they had to shut the doors. It could not support itself.
I believe GM would like to get a foundation set up like the Corvette Museum and display the cars in that fashion. to be honest expanding the Vette Museum would not be a bad idea and include much of their collection there. It is centrally located and you can tour the plant too.
GM does often open the doors for groups and you can often get in with these groups.
Actually I have often seen some of the best of the collection at the HF Museum. I saw the X. Y Jobs and the three Firebird turbine cars all there. They also had some of Harley Earls other great cars on loan.
I saw the Stingray in NYC in the GM building lobby and have been lucky enough to see some of the other cars at events around the country.
We are lucky to have these cars and that they did not end up at Warhoops Junk Yard like the Motorama cars.
the X and Y jobs were both slated for the crusher in the early 70′;s but were saved. The X and Y models are now worth tens of Millions.
GM can make money selling these scan as files for those who want to build a replica for a local museum. And maybe some of the scale model manufacturers, such as AMT, Revell-Monogram, Testors, and others, may use these scanned files for new kits.