In the vast landscape of car culture, some vehicles never see a production line but still manage to become immortal icons. Like that one gleaming Hot Wheels car tucked in the corner of your childhood bedroom—the weird-looking, futuristic shape that somehow became your favorite. For many of us, that little car was the Dodge Deora.
The first time I saw the Deora wasn’t at a car show. It was on my eighth birthday, tucked inside a Hot Wheels gift pack my mom got me. There it was, this sleek, shiny, strange-looking little thing that didn’t look like any “normal” car I’d ever seen. Years later, I was stunned to discover it was real—not a toy company’s invention, but an actual, hand-built concept car with a story more wild than any plastic racetrack it ever raced on.
That story begins in 1964, at the height of custom car culture. Detroit wasn’t just the Motor City—it was a playground for dreamers with blowtorches. Mike and Larry Alexander, better known as the Alexander Brothers, were legends in the custom scene. Skilled, fearless, and imaginative, they had a gift for transforming the ugly into the unforgettable.
Their muse was Dodge’s new A100 compact pickup, a quirky cab-forward truck that Harry Bentley Bradley, the Deora’s designer, once called “the homeliest of the three cab-forward pickups on the market.” It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was the perfect canvas for radical reinvention.
Bradley, a former GM designer and design instructor at ArtCenter, envisioned something futuristic—a surfboard on wheels. His idea? Eliminate the doors entirely. Instead, build a front-hatch entry system using the rear window from a 1960 Ford station wagon. No seams, no cutlines—just a smooth, unified form. The result looked more like a spacecraft than a pickup, a low-slung sculpture that barely resembled the truck it was built on.
The Alexanders turned this audacious concept into reality, one bold fabrication at a time. They lowered the roof until it nearly touched the steering column. To get in and out, the driver would swing the steering assembly sideways. Inputs were relayed by chain to a vertical shaft embedded in the body—a complex feat of engineering more at home in a race car or airplane.
The mechanical wizardry didn’t stop there. They moved the slant-six engine 15 inches rearward into the bed, relocated the radiator to in front of the rear axle, and mounted electric fans underneath. The fuel tank was shifted behind the cab. None of this made practical sense for hauling cargo—but practicality was never the point.
What really stunned people, though, was how beautiful it all looked. Though it was a Chrysler show car, many of its parts were borrowed from Ford vehicles: Mustang taillight bezels for exhaust vents, a Thunderbird’s sequential turn signals, and that unmistakable Ford wagon window up front. Ironically, Chrysler never noticed.
The Deora made its public debut at the 1967 Detroit Autorama, where it swept nine awards, including the prestigious Ridler Award. It was driveable—thanks to the Alexanders’ craftsmanship—but it was also pure spectacle. A rolling dream.
Then came its second life. In 1968, when Harry Bradley joined Mattel after leaving GM, he brought the Deora with him—sort of. It became one of the original 16 Hot Wheels cars, and suddenly, every kid in America had it in their toy box. “At one point, Mattel figured out that the average American child owned 1.3 Hot Wheels cars,” Bradley recalled. That meant a lot of Deoras—though few knew it was based on a real vehicle.
After Chrysler’s promotional lease ended, the Deora was sold to car enthusiast Al Davis, whose son Al Jr. still owns it. It sat in storage after Davis Sr.’s death in 1970, but was revived in the early ’80s and again in 1998, when Davis and Bradley worked to restore it to its original glory. Some parts had to be recreated from scratch—Firestone even rediscovered the original tire blueprints, though the molds were long gone.
In 2002, the Deora returned to Detroit for the 50th anniversary of the Autorama, where it was met with the same awe it inspired decades earlier. And yet, one person still hasn’t seen the finished truck: Bradley himself. “Building a custom is more engrossing than owning one,” he says.
The Deora wasn’t built to haul lumber or tools. It was built to challenge convention, to reimagine what a vehicle could be. It’s a symbol of unrestrained creativity—a product of an era when ideas mattered more than practicality.
And for millions of kids who launched a miniature Deora down a plastic loop, it was the coolest skateboard on wheels. Now we know—it wasn’t just a toy. It was a legend.