There was a short article in today’s Hot Rod mail on a barn-find ‘69 Barracuda that was an early pilot car for the factory manual. Serial number was 26. If you’re an early ‘Cuda fan you might want to take a look.
There is a difference between a prototype car and a pilot car...
Prototype cars are used by design engineering to develop and test the components for the new models coming up... Each design group makes modifications to their "prototype" cars to develop and test the different components and systems to get them ready for production... Many of the parts on these cars are special machined using general machine shop tools - hand built... Protype or development cars are not to be sold to the public, but get destroyed/scrapped at the end of the year...
Pilot cars are early builds on the production manufacturing line with production parts.... There is usually a pilot run of the new model cars done at the manufacturing plants in May, about 6 weeks before production launch... Most if not all of the pilot cars get sent to design engineering for testing... Each design group gets some to validate their designs and production tooling are ready for the public... Then they send some to the proving grounds to get driven and put as many miles on them as possible to catch any problems...
A pilot car is basically the first production models... Same as they sell to the public...
It is possible that a pilot car can be sold to the public... A prototype car - hell no... There is too much liability in selling a prototype car to the public... If any of the modifications make the structure of the car weaker and a citizen gets in an accident and injured, the manufacturer can be held liable - that is why they all get scrapped at the end of the year....
