Inspired by the same Motorama concept that spawned the Chevy Nomad, Pontiac’s 1955 Safari carried the brand’s highest price tag and its lowest production numbers, just 3,760 built. Find out how a flagship wagon became one of the rarest Pontiacs of its era, and what made its shared Nomad tooling such a bold move for GM.
The Safari wagon was introduced for the 1954 model year and to save tooling costs the wagon shares body components with Chevy’s Nomad wagon. The uptown trimmed Safari was the lowest production vehicle in the Pontiac lineup in ’55 with 3,760 units produced
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GM’s Motorama show cars usually stayed exactly that – showpieces that toured the country, wowed crowds, and then quietly disappeared. The Safari broke that pattern. Inspired directly by the Chevrolet Corvette Nomad concept that dazzled the very same Motorama circuit, Pontiac and Chevrolet split the tooling costs and actually put a two-door hardtop wagon into production for 1955, a genuinely bold move for a company not exactly known for taking risks. It launched on January 31, 1955, wearing Pontiac’s most expensive price tag as the brand’s flagship wagon. Despite that lofty positioning, or maybe because of it, this ended up being the rarest Pontiac built that entire model year. How does a flagship model become the lowest-production car in the whole lineup?
From Motorama Dream to Showroom Reality
The story starts with the Chevrolet Corvette Nomad concept, a two-door wagon so striking that GM decided it deserved a production life, and rather than build the tooling twice from scratch, Pontiac and Chevy shared it to justify the cost, resulting in both the Chevy Nomad and Pontiac Safari launching essentially side by side. Pontiac’s version rode on the 122-inch wheelbase shared with the full Chieftain lineup and borrowed Star Chief rear fenders and luxury-grade interior trim to set it apart from anything else on a Chevy lot.
Rare by Design, Not by Accident
At $2,962, the Safari carried Pontiac’s highest price tag for 1955, appropriate for a flagship, but it also meant most buyers walked past it toward cheaper sedans and coupes. The result: just 3,760 Safaris were built that year, making it the lowest-production Pontiac of the entire model year. Under the hood sat a 287-cubic-inch V8 offered in two states of tune, 180 horsepower with a two-barrel carburetor or 200 horsepower with a four-barrel, plenty for a wagon that was as much about style as substance, with its slanted tailgate and side-to-side grooved roofline making it instantly recognizable at any car show today.
Pontiac Wasn’t the Only Division Chasing Motorama Glamour
Chevrolet’s Nomad got the shared tooling and most of the magazine coverage, but Pontiac wasn’t alone in borrowing the Motorama wagon formula either — Oldsmobile built its own version, the Fiesta, and Buick offered the Century Riviera, each dressed in its own division’s trim and interior appointments atop very similar two-door wagon architecture. Of that entire family of GM halo wagons, the Safari’s rock-bottom production number still stands out, which says as much about how narrow the buyer pool was for a $2,962 two-door wagon in 1955 as it does about Pontiac’s specific styling choices.
From Showroom Glamour to Modern Resto Rod
The car pictured here has clearly moved a long way from its factory-stock 1955 configuration. The two-tone orange-over-white paint scheme, deeply dropped ride height, and multi-spoke billet wheels are all hallmarks of a modern resto-rod build rather than a numbers-matching restoration. This is a common path for rare 1950s wagons: rather than chase an expensive concours-correct restoration, owners drop in a modern chassis, brakes, and suspension setup so the car can be driven and enjoyed on today’s roads while keeping the original body’s unmistakable Motorama-era silhouette intact.
What the Cargo Area Still Gives Away
Inside, the wagon’s fold-flat rear seatback and the flat load floor behind it are unmistakably wagon-specific details that no two-door hardtop or sedan of the era shared. Even heavily customized, that rear cargo architecture — the ribbed floor panels, the tie-down hardware, the low load height over the bumper — is original wagon engineering, not something a builder would bother recreating on a car that started life as something else. It’s one of the clearest tells that separates a genuine Safari-bodied car from a wagon-look conversion.
Why Collectors Chase the Underdog Wagon
Because the Chevrolet Nomad shared so much structure with the Safari and sold in far greater numbers, it has long overshadowed its Pontiac sibling in collector-market attention and pricing. That’s slowly changing. As more buyers learn just how limited Pontiac’s production run actually was against the Nomad’s, clean Safari wagons — whether restored to stock or built as resto rods like this one — have started closing the value gap with their more famous cousin, rewarding owners who held onto a car that was never the flashiest name at the show, just the rarest one.
A Three-Year Experiment GM Didn’t Repeat
Pontiac, along with Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and Buick, only built this generation of two-door Motorama-inspired wagon for a few model years before quietly folding the concept back into standard four-door wagon lineups. The senior-trim, two-door sport wagon format never returned to GM’s regular catalog in the same form, which is part of why cars like this one read today as artifacts of a very specific, very short-lived moment in Detroit design — when GM’s studios briefly let show-car flair outrank practicality on the factory floor.
The Chrome Details That Signal Pontiac, Not Chevrolet
Even under a full custom repaint, the trim pieces borrowed from the senior Star Chief line are still visible in the wide taillight bezels, the heavier front bumper guards, and the extra brightwork running along the beltline — details a Nomad from the same model year never wore. Those specific trim choices are exactly what let a knowledgeable enthusiast identify a Safari at a glance even after decades of customization have changed everything else about the car’s paint, wheels, and ride height.
A Wheel and Stance Choice That Wasn’t Available in 1955
The multi-spoke aftermarket wheels and dropped ride height seen here weren’t factory options Pontiac ever offered on the Safari, but they’re consistent with how modern builders approach a rare wagon like this one — keep the unmistakable Motorama-era body and greenhouse intact while modernizing everything that touches the road, so the car drives like something built decades later even while still reading unmistakably as a 1955 Pontiac from any angle.
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