GM got into the RV market for a few years in the seventies. The powertrain was the front wheel drive Toronado unit. About 12,900 were made in total, approximately ten percent were the short wheelbase unit shown here.
It's estimated that seven to nine thousand of the fibreglass and aluminum vehicles are still operational today.
7 comments:
Those must have been the bee's knees when they came out. Somebody's been trying to sell one on our local craigslist and I thought the "fwd" was a typo...thanks for clearing that up.
One of the selling points was that the FWD and dual rear axles (vs dual wheels on a single rear axle) allowed a wider, flatter floor.
The design definitely seems to be a different league than other RVs.
Definitely a slick and handsome thing. I wonder if anybody in particular is associated with its design. Also a fair question to wonder whether it worked worth a dang.
September 25 was GMC Motorhome Day in Pontiac, Michigan, where the motorhomes were built.
https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2023/09/today-in-pontiac-michigan-its-gmc.html
Wow, that was a coincidence!!!
I understand that the reason it went out of production is because GM (Garbage Machine) is such a big dumb company that one division doesn't have the sense to communicate with another, & the poor RV guys didn't realise that they'd designed the powertrain around an engine that was being phased out of production in a dedicated Plant that was being shut down permanently!
Apparently there was no easy way to retrofit another GM engine into the beast, the best that could be done was at the last minute when the RV division realised that their engine orders weren't going to be filled, Headquarters intervened just in time to keep the engine plant going a little longer to build up an inventory of the engine in advance of future RV demand. Apparently, it was a great RV, very advanced & all that; but production stopped when the limited number of engines were finally used up. I think a couple of years later...
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