Cool Cars: Home-built Utah camper featured in Popular Mechanics is probably one-of-a-kind

LOGAN — If you see something going down the road that looks like a camper fell onto an old Chrysler, you're looking at some of Utah's best home engineering, called "the almost perfect camper-automobile combination — the vehicle of the future" by the real estate broker who built it.

In the early 1960s, Logan real estate agent Sterling Weber wanted a camper with all the luxury features of the day, but he didn't want a "bread wagon" or something that rode on a truck. So, he designed and built one himself. He said he had been a journeyman electrician, electronics technician and a welder.

Weber started with a 1957 Chrysler Imperial sedan, one of the biggest cars of the day. He designed, blueprinted, cut and welded. He installed a sink, a propane-powered stove and a refrigerator. He used the rear window of the sedan as the rear window of the camper — preserving the Chrysler's tailfins. He named it the "Cozy Cruiser." He considered other campers of the day "as outdated and outmoded as the Model T in comparison," adding it could park in "the swankiest part of town."

It was featured in a 1971 issue of Popular Mechanics. The article gave Weber's West Center Street address, offering plans to build a Cozy Cruiser for $25. Weber wrote to Popular Mechanics, saying, "Because of the torsion bar suspension, big engine and only 352 pounds added weight, it still rides and handles like the luxury automobile that it is." He told them he had built two of them and was selling one for $5,000.

He took his wife Marian and five kids camping in the Cozy Cruiser on trips in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. When the couple became empty-nesters in the mid-1970s, they kept camping in it.

Weber died in 2009. When his wife died in 2013, their five kids divided up the couple's 12 cars — mostly big luxury cars. The Cozy Cruiser was no one's first pick because it needed work and was so big it would be hard to park in a typical garage. Weber and his wife had wanted the homebuilt vehicle donated to a museum. During the COVID-19 pandemic, son-in-law Ron Wiley could not find a museum to take it, so he built a garage for it, which also houses his son's trailer.

Wiley put about $4,000 of repairs into the cruiser, and he and his son Corey show it at Utah car shows, opening it up for people to walk through.

If you see it, take a look. Not knowing how many plans Weber sold, it's still probably one-of-a-kind — unless those customers and the owner of the one Weber sold built garages big enough to store one.

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