67-72 Suburban Development/Concept Photos

[hewittca]

Hi everyone. If you happen to be like myself, you mainly stick to the board that most suits your truck and you don't wander over to the other boards very often. If so, you may have missed the thread I started on the 67-72 pickups board sharing a chronological pictorial summary of the development of the 67-72 GM pickups (linked here for reference). I have also been working on filling in photos for all the pickup variants, which brings me to my first post here on the Suburban/Panels board. I have decided to post these photos here to remain consistent with the board indexing. These photos are actually Part 5 in the series of photos I am sharing on the 67-72 development, which explains the title. I hope you enjoy these photos showing a glimpse into the development of these trucks!

Part 5, Suburbans and Panels

The development of the Suburbans and Panels did not reach the clay stage until the overall shape of the pickup was decided upon, clearly because they were to be based on the pickup platform. The Suburbans/Panels were developed in tandem with the GMC during a one year period after the overall design of the Chevrolet pickup was decided upon. About one week before the presentation of this preproduction ready design of the '67 C10 in November '64, GM had the first proposed Suburban shape in clay and on display in the auditorium. This is where we start off in the photo collection for the Suburbans/Panels.

-October 1964
As you can see, the overall shape of the Suburban is basically completed in this first clay model and very little refinement would be done to the overall design. Note that this proposal had 4 doors. Also note that this clay model doesn't even have a fully completed nose as the focus here was the shape of the Suburban. If you looked through the GMC photos, you already know that this Suburban would be the full scale clay model used to experiment with GMC grill proposals.








-January 1965
As mentioned above, the Suburban clay model also doubled as the full scale GMC nose proposal model. Here is the completed Suburban proposal with initial GMC grill design.




-October 1965
By October, they had the clay model out on the patio for outdoor presentation. Note that not much has changed on the model since the beginning of the year.






-November 1965
The final production ready design is complete. Note that the rear window has a removable center divider to illustrate the difference between the suburban and panel rearend. They were also using the panel buck to experiment with seating arrangements, as seen in the last two photos. Note that it also appears to have a cloth top, but I'm not sure if this was a proposed option or just used for easier rearrangement of the interior.








-February 1966
By early '66 the overall design of the Suburban was finalized, but as you can see here they were still experimenting with a few trim options. Note the revised taillight design compared to the Nov '65 design.






-January 1969
Flash forward three years to early '69. No significant changes were made to the Suburban/Panel specific features of these designs leading to the gap in photos between initial development and now. At this point, GM experimented with this "Custom" trim package for the '70 Suburban, but ultimately abandoned it.






-February 1969
These last two photos show more detailed views of the proposed "Custom" trim package for the Suburban.




After opting to not put into production this proposed Custom trim package, GM chose not to do any further development on the Suburbans. From this point on, yearly updates come directly from the grill updates used on the pickups.