Think of the most beautiful kit cars of all times. Not the replicas, the originals. Kits designed to stand on their own merits, not the strengths (real or imagined) of the classics from which they were copied. The exotic Cimbria comes immediately to mind, as does the sexy Sterling with its lift-up top. More recently the Fiero-based Scorpion and the radical Attack from Slovakia have set a high bar for styling efforts. One of the hottest-looking kits of all time was manufactured by no less than three companies, built for almost 10 years, and yet there are only a handful of completed cars to show for it. That car was the Piranha.
In the early '60s, a small Michigan-based company, Centaur Engineering, got into the automotive prototype business. The idea was to design neat cars, then convince someone else to actually build them. Their first effort was the CRV, a small sports car intended to be built from plastic! Not fiberglass, but Cycolac, a type of ABS plastic used in thousands of industrial and commercial applications (think telephones and beer coolers). Cycolac is a nifty plastic, being both strong and long-lasting, and the company that made Cycolac, the Marbon Chemical Division of Borg-Warner, liked the design so much they bought Centaur and their little sports car, the CRV (which stood for Cycolac Research Vehicle).
Marbon had no plans to build the CRV in volume production. They wanted to showcase the possibilities of using Cycolac in automotive applications for the benefit of high-volume manufacturers in Detroit and abroad. The estimated cost of tooling for Cycolac body production was a tenth of the cost of fiberglass, and way below that of those produced via steel presses. The two body panels (top and bottom) were vacuum-formed like hot tubs are today. And Marbon was not the only company working on this idea; the limited-production Cord 8/10 was built of Royalite, a plastic made by a competitor, the U.S. Rubber Co. of the same name.
A total of five CRV prototypes were built. The first, CRV-1, had a Sunbeam Imp four-cylinder engine and a chrome-moly space frame chassis. Subsequent CRVs had Corvair engines and a molded fiberglass chassis sandwiched between two Cycolac outer shells, and metal subframes were used where the running gear mounted to the chassis. The body, designed by Dann Deaver, Centaur's director of design and development, was a graceful roadster design with covered headlights in the front fenders. The two body halves attached to each other clamshell-style with a flange that ran around the middle of the car, which was then covered with a strip of molding. Even the trim parts were made of chrome-plated Cycolac.
The body on the Corvair-powered CRV-II was cleaned up from the first prototype. Gone were large air inlets behind the cockpit area to feed the Sunbeam engine. It was also set up as a road racing car, to get more publicity and try the new chassis concept in a more stressful environment. It worked, with Centaur engineer Trant Jarman winning an SCCA divisional class championship in 1965. The third prototype was destroyed in crash tests. The fourth and fifth prototypes were lovely coupes and very close to production designs. The doors were two-piece, with the door window panels opening upwards (gullwing style) and conventional doors in the sides as well. The window panels could be removed for ventilation, as there was no provision for wind-up glass.