GMC Once Made A Work Truck That Looked Like A Zombie

You know what pareidolia is, right? Sure you do. It’s when you see faces in things, inanimate things like cars and trucks. This is something I do all the time! If you’d like to stop me, good luck, because you can’t, you can’t stop me from seeing faces in cars because I can’t stop me from doing it either! And, relatedly, this goes back to my fiercely held belief that the headlights are the eyes of a car’s face. Some cars have hidden headlights, and sure, that changes how the face is processed, but it can still work, somehow, and not seem unsettling. But you know what does seem unsettling? Deeply so? The GMC 7000 series of trucks!

And do you know why these trucks feel so unsettling, from a pareidolic persepective? It has to do with the way the headlight “eyes” are handled. Or, really, not handled. Let me walk you through this.

First, let’s look at the kinds of trucks these particular GMC 7000s are based on, the other, somewhat less heavy-duty members of the GMC 7000 family:

Okay, so we have the GMC 7000 on the left there, in a lovely shade of scarlet. As you can see, it has a very face-like grille and headlight setup, giving it a sort of friendly-rugged kind of visage, square of jaw and round of eye, the face of a competent and helpful partner for your worksite.

Next to it, in a ravishing indigo, is a Top Kick series of truck sporting a detail that will become important in a moment: those low-set headlamps, below the grille.

You see, these huge work trucks still need to shine light on the road, so at some point lights set high into the grille will just be too high to be properly useful, hence why big trucks like these tend to mount their lights as low as possible.

So, when GMC decided to make a heavier-duty version of the 7000 series, this is how they solved the headlight position issue:

Oh, what the hell, GMC? Look how they solved the headlight problem: they re-mounted the headlights into the bumper face, which, okay, works fine. Maybe the headlights are a little vulnerable there, but, whatever, sealed beams are cheap. No, the weird part is what they did with the old headlight sockets:

Nothing.

They just left them empty! They didn’t bother to make a new plastic grille molding with no headlight sockets or even some cheap plastic plugs for the holes! They just left those empty, yawning sockets there, which is why I think these trucks have a creepy, undead, zombie-like look to them.

Some emergency vehicles took advantage of these empty sockets by fitting some sort of warning or identification lamps in them, like the red lights you can see on this ex-fire service truck. That helps a bit, though running red headlight-like lights in the front at night carries its own confusion, and we can’t forget that this does also give the truck a certain Mothman menacing-like quality:

Even with the glowing Mothman eyes, I think that’s still an improvement over the empty socket look, which, again, makes these things look like brain-hungry zombies, or whatever the automotive equivalent is (which I hinted at in the top image for this story, and I hope that joke scans).

These trucks weren’t cheap back in the day; a dump truck from around this time – say, 1985 or so – would have cost at least $25,000 to $30,000. That’s a lot of money to spend on something that just looks so…unfinished. If I was a bigshot, say, gravel company owner back in 1985, in my lavish trailer-office decked out in framed Nagel prints, I’d have felt pretty sour when my brand-new dump trucks came rolling up with those horrible gouged-out-eyes look.

I mean, would it have killed GMC to even just do something like this?

A couple of cheap plastic covers that snap into the sockets, that’s all. Cheap and quick, and GMC could even make some money selling replacement ones when they inevitably cracked or got knocked out and lost. They don’t look amazing, but they at least look intentional and not like your brand-new truck is already abandoned in a corner of a junkyard.

Man, GM bean counters were really monsters back in the day. They didn’t give a single, lonely fudge about any of this. And on some level, I get it – does it really matter if this work truck looks kinda weird or creepy in the face? Probably not.

But, then again, all other things being relatively equal, if given a choice between one of these eyeless freaks or a Ford F650 that didn’t look like the undead in the face, which would I have picked? Probably the Ford, because even when we’re talking about utility vehicles, cars are still, fundamentally, not rational.