Javi Martin
Sometimes it's not enough to have good intentions, means are needed, skills are needed to carry things out and also, although it is something that not everyone appreciates, advice and a lot of luck are needed. Anyway, in the end, even if you manage to get where you want, even if you have tried your best, there will always be someone who criticizes you, who tries to destroy what you have achieved and you could even see how those who helped you turn against you.
At first, all this that we have just said may not make any sense, but it is a summary of what Alfredo Juliano, an ordained Catholic priest in the Congregation of the Holy Spirit in Ridgefield, Pennsylvania (United States), suffered. Now, perhaps, you are wondering what interest the life of a priest can have, of a congregation that you have never heard of. Well, curiously, this priest, father Alfredo Juliano, has an interesting relationship with the automobile world being, in addition, quite a visionary.
Father Alfredo Juliano designed and manufactured what is considered one of the ugliest cars in history: the Aurora, back in 1957. But staying here shows a clear ignorance and no interest in knowing what motivated a Catholic priest to build a car, with his own hands and using money from different sources. And, certainly, it is, to say the least, curious: security.
A PRIEST WHO DESIGNED CARS
Today the safety of vehicles is something that is taken for granted, there are very strict regulations and organizations that analyze the vehicles that are sold, to know the level of safety they offer (Euro NCAP and the American NHTSA). But in the 50s and 60s, these issues were minor and as if that were not enough, there was a very wrong concept, because it was thought that the more rigid the structure of a car, the better for the passengers in the event of an accident. Just the opposite of what is thought, or rather, what has been proven, today: a very rigid vehicle is dangerous because the energy generated in the impact is not dissipated and reaches the passengers completely.
But let's put that aside and return to Father Alfredo, who cared for the souls of his parishioners, but also for his earthly body. Although this was near the end of our story. At the beginning of the story we meet a very bright and clever boy, interested in industrial design. At the age of 13, he was already projecting on paper ideas about cars and airplanes, reaching the attention of very important people from General Motors. They offered him a place in the "School for Creative Young Designers", an offer that Alfredo rejected because he had already been ordained a priest. Not everyone can boast of having been “invited” to study at the “Young Designers College for Creativity”, but even fewer can boast of turning down the offer, if this can be considered something to brag about.
He chose life in the Church instead of designing cars, although he did not stop drawing and shaping his ideas for that. He was an atypical priest, a lover of car design, which had an idea in mind that is currently the norm for all manufacturers: it wanted to create a vehicle that would be very safe both for its occupants and for other road users. He wanted to design something more than just a means of transportation. And he finally did, though things didn't turn out the way he expected.
THE AURORA, THE SAFEST CAR IN THE WORLD, IS BORN
Alfredo was not an engineer, nor did he have studies in mechanics or design, simply, had the conviction of being able to create a vehicle that would be very safe for road users and its occupants. So in his spare time, he started working on the project. It took him two years to design the car and then another three years to build it. He made it with his own hands and with what he could find.
E.g., Father Juliano used donations to the Church, some loans, and his own funds to found the Aurora Motor Company, to be able to create the vehicle and show it to potential customers and later offer it with a Chrysler, Cadillac or Lincoln engine, on a Buick chassis.
In the first and only prototype built, the Buick chassis was the only thing Father Juliano could keep, as the budget was limited and all he had to do was convince customers and potential stakeholders of its feasibility. Buick's 1953 chassis rescued him from a scrapyard on which he built a wood frame and fiberglass body. For the windows he did not use glass because breaking can be dangerous, he used a very resistant, almost unbreakable plastic and mounted a roof with internal adjustable metal shutters. I wanted it to be resistant to dents, rust and corrosion.
He installed seat belts, a frame-reinforcing roll cage, body-color padded bumpers, a padded dashboard, crumple zones, and a collapsible telescopic steering (now considered one of the greatest advances in safety). The windshield, comically deformed, was designed so that the occupants could not hit it in the event of an accident By increasing the distance that separated them and between the curiosities, it had seats that, in the event of an accident, rotated 180 degrees to place the occupant on his back and thus avoid serious injuries to both the neck and other parts of the body.
The bodywork, one of the most striking parts of the car and guilty of its lack of acceptance, was a compendium of good ideas. There were no edges, everything was curved to avoid creating serious injuries in the event of an accident. The front part, with an oversized fender, was designed to “pick up” the pedestrian in the event of being run over. In other words, instead of throwing the pedestrian into the air or crashing him to the ground, Alfredo thought that after the impact, the car itself would pick up the pedestrian, avoiding further injuries.
IT ALL STARTED BAD FROM THE BEGINNING
However, although it was all good ideas and good intentions, everything went wrong from the beginning. The Buick chassis, which Father Alfredo did not inspect when he purchased, was disassembled several times in its first public appearanceIn addition, everyone focused on the design of the Aurora and forgot everything in it for the sake of safety. Furthermore, the car cost Alfredo about $30.000, when he had estimated that he would not need more than $12.000. This caused him not to receive a single order, and the Aurora Motor Company declared bankruptcy.
Behind this, the priest Alfredo Juliano was investigated for fraud, because he was denounced for embezzlement of money from the Church. The car was entered into a workshop as collateral for unpaid bills and ended up forgotten there until 1993, when Andy Saunders, a British designer who is considered something like "the Banksy of the automobile". The car was in a deplorable state, abandoned in a Connecticut wasteland, where its wooden structure and fiberglass were rotted and almost completely destroyed.
Surprisingly, Andy managed to recover the car and return it to its original condition, with an extensive restoration carried out in the UK. His determination to recover it came, according to him, because he had been bewitched by its ugliness and needed to have it. He showed it to the public in 2004, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and then exhibited it at the Beaulieu Motor Museum (Hampshire, England). The Aurora, also known as the Aurora Safety Car, is still in the possession of Andy Saunders.
