Concept car? Custom? the Dodge Deora is both. It started as an idea for one of the most radical, cutting-edge customs ever made and became a concept vehicle shown by Chrysler. Built over two years and at a cost of $10,000, the Dodge Deora would stun the custom-car world and become an automotive icon that transcended the niche world of the chop-'n'-channel crowd. You probably have never seen the Deora in the metal; but if you were a car-crazy kid in the late 1960s, chances are you built the plastic, scale-model kit or loop-the-looped the Hot Wheels version in your living room.
Detroit-based customizers Mike and Larry Alexander rightly take the credit for painstakingly crafting the Deora. But the radical cab-forward styling is actually the work of a former GM designer and Art Center lecturer, Harry Bentley Bradley. The Alexander brothers first noticed Bradley while he was still studying automotive design at New York's Pratt Institute. Bradley was a regular contributor to the sketchpad pages of magazines that specialized in customizing, such as Rodding and Re-styling, Customs Illustrated, and Rod & Custom. Within weeks of his arrival at GM Design Staff in 1962, he and the Alexanders had forged a relationship that would result in more than 10 Bradley-designed custom cars over the next eight years. The Deora is the most famous by far.
The Deora project started in 1964 when the Detroit-based Alexander brothers decided they wanted to build a custom pickup based on one of Detroit's new cab-over pickups. They asked Harry Bradley to design a vehicle based on Chrysler's recently launched A100, figuring they'd get the company to supply them with a truck if they liked what they saw. But if Chrysler wouldn't play, the Alexanders had a back-up plan: They would approach cross-town rival Ford, which had its own cab-over pickup, the Econoline. "Of the three cab-forward pickups on the market at the time, the Dodge was unquestionably the homeliest," Bradley recalls.
"What I wanted to do was get rid of that phone-booth cab and integrate the upper with the lower," he says. There would be no doors. "I didn't want cutlines. We were always told at GM to play down cutlines. If cutlines were wonderful, Ferraris would have them running all down their sides. I always thought of it as a conceptual proposal, rather than a customizing solution." To actually get passengers inside, Bradley proposed a front-opening hatch built using the lift-up rear window from a 1960 Ford station wagon.