The Story Behind The Mysterious Oldsmobile Toronado Airstream The Internet Is Obsessed With (Updated)

For many years, there has been a mystery that I have been wanting answers about. Decades ago, someone saw an Oldsmobile Toronado and an Airstream Globe Trotter then came to the conclusion that they needed to be paired together. Now, years after the camper first caught my interest and the rig has been shared all over the internet, I think I’ve come closer to solving this mystery. If documents sent to me are to be believed, this is the work of an Oldsmobile engineer that felt the GMC Motorhome should have been an Oldsmobile.

I still remember the first time that I saw this thing. I was in high school in 2010 and back then, pretty much all of my time on the internet was spent looking at cars. My favorite sites were places like America’s Smart forum, the old lighting site, and eventually, I’d become a part of the awesome Opposite-Lock community. I can’t quite place my finger on when or where, but I remember seeing a picture of a baffling camper shared. In this image–which had to have a resolution no greater than 400×300–there was an Airstream camper, but there was the front end of the car sticking out. I remember speculation that this had to be a Photoshop because it just can’t be real.

It’s funny to think that I spent the better half of my teenage years knowing about this thing, but, like everyone else, I had no idea who did it or why. Over all of those years, the camper continued to get shared on various blogs and forums. Pictures of this creation have resurfaced yet again on Reddit and Facebook, and this time we have a story explaining how it was created.

I spoke with Mike, the Power of Attorney for the actual owner of the camper, his mother-in-law. Mike tells me that a lot of work has gone into restoring the camper. The work was carried out by Michael Greene, the former President of Sierra Motor Corp., a company that built horse trailers with living quarters before it was sold to Lakota Horse Trailers. Mike, along with the trailer’s previous owners, has been trying to piece together the camper’s story. It’s a custom build, but one that was apparently done well.

There’s a story about how this camper was created that’s been passed down from owner to owner. We haven’t been able to confirm any of it, so keep that in mind. Take it as more of a fun story than something concrete.

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In the documents sent to me, the previous owners called it the Aironado, which is a fitting name. As the story goes, an unnamed General Motors fabricator was upset about the GMC Motorhome. First produced in 1972 for the 1973 model year, the GMC Motorhome marked an innovative moment in RV history. The typical motorhome of the day rode high on a truck chassis, and an engine mounted up front drove the rear wheels. The design worked, but it made for large, ungainly vehicles with crude designs.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how GM flipped the RV construction script and in doing so created one of the coolest motorhomes ever. The GMC Motorhome first did things differently with front-wheel-drive. Powering the Motorhome was Oldsmobile’s Unitized Power Package (UPP). This system compacted the entirety of a vehicle’s powertrain into one unit and was famously used on the Oldsmobile Toronado.

In the UPP you got a longitudinally mounted 265 HP 455-cubic inch Rocket V8 and a TurboHydramatic 425 three-speed automatic. Later Motorhomes would get the 185 HP 403-cubic inch Oldsmobile V8 after the former engine’s discontinuation in 1977.

Using the Oldsmobile UPP meant that the GMC Motorhome’s floor could sit just 14 inches above ground. It also allowed the Motorhome to get the sleek, wind tunnel-tested profile that it was known for. An aluminum body frame extruded from the steel ladder frame. From it, fiberglass panels made up the lower portion with more aluminum on top.

Combined with its air-ride suspension, vast windows, and modern interior, the GMC Motorhome remains a high-water mark in RV design.

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And that brings us back to the Aironado. The alleged General Motors engineer is said to have felt that since the Oldsmobile UPP was so central to the Motorhome, it should have been branded an Oldsmobile. As any mad scientist would, the engineer then decided to make their own Oldsmobile-branded camper.

The fabricator started with a 1969 Oldsmobile Toronado with a 455-cubic inch V8. As Hemmings notes, the standard V8 put out 375 HP. However, checking the W-34 option bumped that power up to 400 HP. The documentation sent to me by the seller states that it’s a W-34 code engine. Now remember, these are juicy gross ratings, not the more realistic net ratings.

The front end of this car, including its gauges, was welded into the front end of a 1967 Airstream Globe Trotter Land Yacht. As I’ve said before in another piece on Airstream history, the Globe Trotter launched as a camper that could “go anywhere an automobile can go and still have the facilities of comfortable living.” 

Land Yacht was the highest trim level of an Airstream of the day. You can still buy a Globe Trotter new, today, though the name is now just “Globetrotter.”

The documents go on to say that the builder added stainless steel panels that were through-bolted to the trailer’s frame. An aluminum cowling was also made to smooth out the transition between camper and Oldsmobile. That cowling houses a windshield from a 1953 Ford truck.

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And in what will be the first of interesting engineering quirks here, the documents say that the windshield has its own set of shock absorbers so that bumps don’t break the glass.

Behind that glass is the Oldsmobile’s full set of gauges mounted onto a dashboard so well made that it almost looks like a factory job. The sheet notes that those gauges include amperage, oil pressure, oil temperature, water temp, and tachometer; all good things to have in an RV.

Another thing noted to be an innovation is the addition of a bathroom heater. This heater takes a supply and return hose from the heater core to radiate coolant heat into the bathroom.

Our Jason Torchinsky scratched his head at that one, asking if the bathroom is up front near the engine. It isn’t, and the build sheet says that the hose runs along the side of the trailer to the bathroom then back. This hose is also said to pass through the sleeping area behind the driver seat, providing the person sleeping there with a heated bed. So this thing has a huge cooling loop.

The documentation concludes that it took the engineer until 1982 to finish the project, spending some 4,000 hours building the thing. But it didn’t stick around for too long, as the project was already on its third owner when the fourth owner picked it up in 2000. It’s unclear how many more owners it’s been through to get to the current one.

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As with most projects, different owners added their own touches, like the semi-tractor exhaust stacks turned sideways that dump under the camper. Someone also carried a Harley-Davidson Sprint on the back. One of the previous owners is said to have owned 60 Oldsmobiles, including 22 Toronados. Sounds like me, with Oldsmobiles.

Aside from the build itself, which the seller says really does feature crazy stuff like the really long cooling loop, we haven’t been able to confirm the story. And we aren’t the only ones searching. RV history site Tin Can Tourists has been trying to find the engineer since at least 2005. It looks like they hit a dead end, too. The car was said to have been written about in Car Craft Magazine in the 1980s, but I’ve yet to find the issue. Car and Driver wrote about it in 2007, but only in a single sentence blip.

Mike tells me that while he doesn’t own the rig, he has driven it. And at 55 mph it’s surprisingly smooth with almost no rattles. After owning several motorhomes, he didn’t expect it to be that solid. Remember, this is just a trailer with half of an Oldsmobile sticking out of the front. But it holds its own. He also says that he’s had it appraised and inspected, and those people are said to have been impressed with the craftsmanship.

But he, like us, is still missing that piece of the puzzle of who exactly built the thing. As I mentioned before, Mike is selling the camper. It’s located in lower Michigan and he’s looking to get $49,900 for it. More information can be had by texting the number on the windshield.

Much like that Chevy S-10 conversion van from earlier this week, if you have any information on this Aironado, I’d love to read about it!

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Hat tip to Adam!

Update, January 3, 2023: Tim Atkins, the son of the builder, Wendell Atkins, has given us the camper’s full story:

To answer your question “Who Built this”, His name was Wendell Atkins and he was my Dad. He was an incredible engineer but did not have a college degree. He was a journeyman tool maker for GM at the Grand Blanc stamping plant affectionately known as the Tank Plant by locals. Just outside of Flint Mi.

A couple of corrections, both the car and the trailer are 1969s. The windshield is actually two Chevy pickup windshields (brand new at the time) about 3/4 of each, left/right sides. Sorry, no window shock absorbers. When making the housing for the windshield he made a wooden mock-up of the front curve of the trailer in our basement, placed the glass on the mold and put to much pressure on one spot that left a tiny crack in the bottom corner, probably still there. The seam between the two halfs is just a piece of rubber window seal sandwiched between two pieces of aluminum strips. He got the car cheap because the engine had been damaged by fire. He had to re-wire the the whole thing along with all of the vacuum hoses (that drove him nuts). My mom hated traveling in it because, well it rode like crap.

He never got around to improving the suspension on the trailer and when ever they stopped it always drew a crowd, dad ate it up. I was still in high school and for a couple of months I had the badest go-cart on the planet. Before the car and trailer were attached the car consisted of the front end, dashboard about 3 feet of floor board and the frame back to an axle he made to move it around. He had the gas can for the lawnmower sitting on the floor board with a rubber hose going the fuel pump and milk carton to sit on. No windshield. Let me tell you, a 455 is a monster with only half a car to move. I’m guessing he knew what I was doing but never said anything.

He loved to build things. I wish I could up load pictures of one of the pontoon boats he made (he made two). The pontoons were on arm’s that swung up for on the road (with a hand crank) and down for the water. Adding 5 feet of width. The permanently attached wheels had a hydraulic hand pump that made them operate like airplane landing gear. No trailer needed. This also drew a crowd when we went to the lake. Took about 45 minutes to prepare for the water.

I will write a follow-up to this article detailing further new information that we’ve learned about this camper.