The 1950s were an exciting time for concept cars. Ford’s radical X-100, which toured the United States and Europe, previewed styling cues that would see production in Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models. Chrysler displayed multiple sleek, luxurious Ghia-bodied coupes.
In January 1953, Chevrolet showed off several iterations of the Corvette, with the roadster version destined for production. At the 1954 Turin Auto Show, Fred Zeder Jr. displayed the Bertone-designed Storm Z-250. If you’re like us, you appreciate a European-bodied coupe paired with a pushrod V-8, and the Storm delivered with stunning proportions and Hemi power.
Those fortunate enough to have visited the Petersen Automotive Museum recently may have seen the Storm Z-250 in person as part of an exhibit featuring the designs of Strother MacMinn. You can also catch the Storm Z-250 in the latest season of the Amazon streaming series Fallout, created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet and starring Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins.
Fallout, like the video game franchise on which it’s based, is set in a cheerful world that resembles a mid-century vision of the future—or used to, before global war created a nuclear winter that ravaged everything and everyone not sheltered deep underground. The series uses flashbacks to the pre-war era, which bring the Googie architecture and retrofuturistic hovering cars from the game into the fantastic sets used for filming. There are also lots of finned ’50s and ’60s cars to be spotted in those flashback scenes. The first season of the show gave us peeks of the XNR concept as well as a Kaiser Darrin. The one-off Storm Z-250 was the perfect vehicle to help depict a version of America that didn’t actually exist, but seemed plausible.
The Storm Z-250 concept was envisioned as a dual-purpose machine that could wear the body you see here for normal duty, or switch to a stripped-down lightweight body for racing use. The concept’s chassis reportedly used just four bolts to secure the body, helping swap bodies that much faster. That said, when we spoke to the Petersen Automotive Museum’s chief historian, Leslie Kendall, he’s not sure the concept actually delivered on that promise.
Most of the credit for the car’s development is credited to Fred Zeder Jr., son of Frederick Zeder, one of the “Three Musketeers,” the engineering team comprising Zeder, Owen Ray Skelton, and Carl Breer, who left Studebaker to establish Chrysler.
Kendall told us that the car’s history has several gaps, but it appears it was only shown in public once or twice, including the Turin Auto Show in ’54. Giovanni Michelotti worked to develop the body from the initial sketches, and the mechanical bits were sourced from the Mopar parts bin. Despite its striking looks, execs at Chrysler weren’t keen on Storm Z-250, as it was more of a freelance concept and not an in-house project. Zeder wound up driving it for a couple of years before donating it to a school, which eventually gave it back to Zeder.
Thankfully, not a whole lot changed over the years. Zeder swapped from a three-speed column shift to a floor shifter, and someone swapped on steel wheels wearing hubcaps from a 1955 Dodge. Originally a light silver, the coupe was repainted blue, although that might have been an early change. In the mid-’90s, Zeder contacted Kendall to donate the car to the Petersen Automotive Museum, which has cared for the car ever since.
“We really do want to bring it back, eventually, to its original configuration,” said Kendall. Despite all of its changes, the interior remains intact. “The interior is kind of a conundrum because the rest of the car needs to be restored, but the interior is almost too nice to restore,” said Kendall. The major change that’s not readily apparent is a Mopar V-8 engine swap that Zeder did sometime in the ’60s. The original Hemi is long gone, replaced by a more modern wedge-head V-8.
Dodge’s version of the Hemi V-8, the Red Ram, debuted in 1953, the same year as this concept. Mopar developed three versions of this early hemispherical-head V-8, one for Chrysler and Imperial, one for Desoto, and one for Dodge, each one smaller than the last, in order of brand hierarchy. The Storm used the first Dodge Hemi, which displaced 241 cubic inches. In production trim, it was rather lackluster, with 7:1 compression and 140 hp, but the Storm used a hot-rodded version good for about 250 hp. Considering Corvette’s Blue Flame inline-six produced just 150 hp, the Storm would have been quite a formidable competitor.
We’ll happily skip the global-nuclear-war part, but we wouldn’t mind living in a world where the Storm Z-250 became a production reality. Even with the standard 140-hp Hemi, its looks alone would have carried it. Unfortunately, Dodge couldn’t budget enough money to get the project off the ground, and it seems as though corporate politics had doomed the project from the start. Just imagine if Dodge had built a gorgeous, powerful two-seat sports car more than 40 years before the Viper, battling the Corvette the whole way.
Report by Brandan Gillogly for hagerty.com
