What will a handful of Harley Earl's motoramic masterpieces (modern works of art) be worth once they are auctioned off in 2010? The Y-Job, LeSabre and Firebird trio I, II and III are priceless national treasures. Early pre-auction estimates of the fabulous five Harley Earl dream cars are sky high. Find out why: 

Hirst with The Golden Calf  and motoramic Le Sabre masterpiece with Earl 

Motoramic Crown Jewels of America

Will Harley Earl's Le Sabre be a better investment five years from now in dollars, euros, pounds, yen, etc...than Hirst's The Golden Calf that sold in September, 2008 for $18.6 million? The following description on Earl's work of art by the American Pulitzer Prize winning writer, David Halberstam, allows people to have a more realistic idea of Le Sabre's true identity today. Inside Halberstam's national best-selling non-fiction book titled, The Fifties, he wrote the following, "Other GM execs drove Cadillacs, but Earl drove the Le Sabre, a highly futuristic car he himself designed; the cost to the company of building this prototype was estimated at roughly $7-million." Well, adjusted for inflation and taking into account the insurance cost to replace this motoramic masterpiece today, $7-mill for Le Sebre back in 1951 translates into being over $35 million in 2009 dollars.

Costing millions of dollars to build over a four year period leading up to its 1951 introduction, this website exposes a trove of source evidence on LeSabre that's finally surfaced; historical records, authenticity and the proper provenance. All establish how this supercar is perhaps the most influential automobile of the Twentieth Century. For example, simply watch a GM Design employee in 2002 inadvertently let this information out on the  astronomical high dollar cost to make this one vehicle, directly below, and also examine three historical 1951 newspaper stories, probing into Le Sabre's value, by scrolling further down at this section of the website.

GM's current leaders are at the wall and have to venture in entirely new direction now on account of the debauched GM financial treasury office CEOs who spent the last fifty years cooking the company's history books on everything Earl had a hand in designing / creating regarding this company's amazingly successful Design/Styling Leadership engineering legacy. "The recent string of GM's CEOs dating back to Roger Smith, kept Earl's leadership role and true essence of what he really did in the modern car world swept under the rug and never wanted it to ever escape out of Detroit" said Julie L. Long senior librarian at GM Design on August 13, 2009 who went on to say, "so it's an ideal time for the leaders behind the 'new GM' to finally let the secrets behind Harley Earl's hidden story and filter out into our American society and culture." 

Harley Earl with four of his one-of-a-kind dream cars

Why is it a good idea for the new GM to quickly get behind Harley Earl? For one, Earl created priceless works of art on a massive volume production scale and all the while fostered the rise of Detroit's Dependency on Design that literally cemented GM near a fifty percent market share for decades of time. Not Alfred Sloan, but Harley Earl was the principal business architect of turning "'Design' into the No. 1 reason for car sales in the 20th century!" That's one reason, here's a couple more: Once the historians boil down on each one of Earl's major milestones, they will see he was a Herculean task master and auto-innovator that GM's primary leaders of the last fifty years completely turned a blind eye to and/or kept under wraps, and that's one of the big reasons they went bankrupt. After all, when all of GM's CEOs since 1959 went counter opposite Harley Earl's original ways to gain market share for GM in order to build their own failed auto legacies. Almost anyone today can recognize why all these CEOs of this time period would go to such an extreme to malign Harley Earl's design legacy...doing so, was the easiest way for these leaders to cover up their poor abilities of leading this corporation forward. On a positive note, maybe the New GM and its current CEO, Fritz Henderson, has a chance to finally change this corporation in every degree -- starting with correcting its Design Legacy -- and thus begin a rising sun scenario to happen in a beaten-down-to-the-floor GM and Detroit. 

On the other hand, maybe it's just too late for Motown since they have screwed things up so badly? If that's the case, Earl's significant rolling sculptures should be relocated in America where they will be properly appreciated. It certainly seems to us at the Official Harley Earl website that Detroit's auto world might of completely lost "all" its soul, and no longer respects these top cars as "important contemporary works of art" and therefore has no appreciation to their high monetary value and reach in our American society and culture.

Above BW article breaks down powerful acceleration & current value of lesser work of art by Earl.

A couple of straight forward opinions up on YouTube detailing how modern German auto maker build cars: 1.) "Now I know why GM went bankrupt in Detroit. All the money they were making went into the pockets of management and unions with no thought of the future." 2.) "It's a shame the American auto biz CEOs were too greedy to ever consider building this type of factory." Note, over 1-million people have viewed it. 

See how the following newspaper article shows how GM's CEOs were able to hoodwink the auto journalistic community on importance of this art work by Harley Earl built for GM.

This January, 1987 Detroit News article not only shows how sad the state of affairs were over 20-years ago in Detroit; a time when GM gave one of its greatest works of art to the Ford Museum because the current GM CEO, Roger Smith, wanted to have Le Sabre destroyed because it cost too much money to insure and Smith said GM didn't have a place to store such  expensive vehicles like it. What a total lack of respect to not only what the car stands for, but also to its inventor, Harley Earl, who also first discovered the world-changing design ingredients (a sales weapon) of creating the "art of making cars." 

In September, 2008 there was an interesting divergence going on. Damien Hirst's works of art was trumping ever other form of art. All the while, Detroit's auto world, it's history and art works from motordom's greatest era were all taking a huge hits. Is everyone in this country just going to let Earl's masterful mid-twentieth century art works slip down the rabbit hole and in a decade from now all Americans will not recognize that Detroit ever created any impressive art forms?

Earl always knew his modern works of art were special because they were on a level of other renowned sculptures and painter's works, (plus Harley Earl wrote about this aspect, too) like Picasso or Pollock. He also knew he could step into his original masterpiece, where the other great masters couldn't do that with their sculptures and paintings and drive away in them. 

As one can clearly see evidence below,the media shot-in-the-dark trying to land true dollar figure of Le Sabre's high cost. Using his typical mystique, Earl alerted his team never to reveal it. There were other important business reasons why Earl didn't ever want anyone to find out the sky high number, too. 

GM footed the bill for all the millions that went into his building the car and then there were the jealous higher ups inside GM at the time who were livid Earl didn't ever have to account for where all the money was going in his department. Back then, everyone knew though that Earl had a unique mandate to spend anything he wanted since he was most responsible for gaining GM market share via how his Design ingredients had revolutionized entire mid-twentieth century auto world. 

Newspaper reports, like the New York Daily News printed Le Sabre's value "cost some $350,000" and then a Scottish newspaper said Earl's ride was "a million dollar car." These amounts didn't even come close to covering the development cost of the revolutionary new Le Sabre wrap-around panoramic windshield that was among the many "technological firsts" on this supercar.