The Scenicruiser became an icon of the American way of life due to its presence throughout the United States in cities and along highways and popularity with the traveling public.

The high-level design concept of Scenicruiser resembles some of the rolling stock of the passenger-carrying railroads of the United States and Canada, particularly their popular stainless steel dome cars.

This type of two-level motorcoach body was common in the late 1940s in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where it was known as Observation coach.

[1] The concept of two-level monocoque body had been used earlier in the Spanish Pegaso Z-403 two-axle coach, designed in 1949 and entered production in 1951.

Originally conceived as a 35-foot (10.67 m) bus, Greyhound later used a tandem-axle 40-foot (12.19 m) prototype by Loewy called the GX-2 to lobby for the lifting of length restrictions of buses longer than 35 feet in most states at the time.

It was soon decided that a split-level design would be better because the GX-1 was too tall for many Greyhound garages and lacked luggage space for 50 people.

There were some problems when the coaches were new because all of Greyhound's other models had four-speed manual transmissions that shifted differently than those in the Scenicruiser.

This installation proved to be less than successful, and the 979 buses remaining in 1961-62 were rebuilt with 8V-71 engines and four-speed manual Spicer transmissions by the Marmon-Herrington Company.

They had a less obvious "second level" which ran most of the length of the coach, side windows from GMC's line of transit coaches and a smaller upper scenic windshield in the front because second passenger seats were positioned higher than the driver and first row passenger seats.

As introduced, the Scenicruiser had some significant problems, particularly the drivetrain and cracking of the frame structure around the side windows in the rear quarter of the coach.

Beck also built twelve 40-foot Scenicruiser lookalikes in 1955 powered by the 300 HP Cummins NHRBS Diesel engine.

Mack Truck and Bus also produced a single model MV-620-D prototype in 1957 that was also 40 feet long, but it found no takers, even though Greyhound leased it for several months.

Other two-level models introduced after the Scenicruiser were the Western Flyer T-36-2L, and the impressive four-axle twin-steer Sultana Crucero Imperial.

In 1958 The Greyhound Corporation acquired a controlling interest in Motor Coach Industries (MCI), Limited, of Canada and by 1961 had full ownership of it.

No American operators in the country wanted to take on the additional complexity and fuel consumption of this dual engine model.

[4] The coaches of the Aerotrain, which GM's Electro-Motive Division introduced in 1955, had bodies that resembled parts of the Scenicruiser.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, includes many obsessively sarcastic references by his main character to a trip in a Scenicruiser coach, which he recounts as a traumatic ordeal.

Country singer Hoyt Axton (1938–1999) used a remodeled 1955 Scenicruiser, purchased from Commander Cody, as his tour bus in the 1970s and '80's.

Scenicruiser 472, a 1955 model, gained regional fame as the tour bus for the Mission Mountain Wood Band from the mid-1970s to 1987.