Two days ago Eric Lewis did a diary about old 4-wheel drive vehicles which triggered my memory about an interesting story I have about old vehicles. When I lived in Santa Cruz I worked with a woman for several years. We became good friends and we had something in common. We were both from Colorado. She grew up in Colorado Springs before it became taken over by James Dobson and the Mega-Church crowd. I grew up in Denver.
Eventually, she met a man she would later marry. His last name was Tucker. It turned out his grandfather was Preston Tucker who’d created the Tucker Car Company which made a grand total of 51 completed vehicles in 1947-48. Boy oh boy, did this guy have a charge about his granddad getting royally screwed! It turned out the Tucker Torpedo was really far ahead of its time.
Preston Tucker had designed an armored car for the military and made money building gun turrets for aircraft in a small shop next to his home in Ypsilanti, Michigan
Tucker’s car had headlights that moved to follow the direction of the steering wheel which made for a superior night-time driving experience. It had a flat-six horizontally opposed engine that was in the back of the vehicle providing far superior handling compared to other cars built at the time. Horizontally opposed engines themselves are superior in efficiency and longevity compared to V-8 or V-6 engines. Today Subaru only uses horizontally opposed engines in their cars. They call them “Boxer Engines.”
The Tucker Torpedo had ahead-of-it’s-time aerodynamics and a comparitively low center of gravity for safe driving and good gas mileage. It came with disc brakes and independent suspension. It had a water-cooled aluminum engine to reduce weight and had fuel injection, seat belts plus a padded dashboard. Preston Tucker built this car for safety. All of these things eventually became standard for cars decades later.
This was definitely a superior vehicle compared to what other car manufacturers were making after the end of WWII. The other car companies, along with the help of Michigan Governor Homer S. Ferguson colluded to ruin Tucker who’d gotten seed money for his company by selling stock to eager investors. They got the media to write negative stories about the car and got the SEC involved for “stock fraud.” This turned out to be completely baseless but was all too much for a new car company just trying to get going from scratch.
In a speech to the jurors on how capitalism in the United States is harmed by efforts of large corporations against small entrepreneurs like himself, Tucker is acquitted on all charges. Nevertheless, his company falls into bankruptcy and Preston Tucker died of lung cancer seven years later, never able to realize his dream of producing a state-of-the-art automobile.
Preston Tucker closed the company down in 1949. en.wikipedia.org/...
There was a movie made in 1988 about Tucker and his car titled Tucker: The Man and His Dream. There were so many things that doomed the Tucker Car Company including the board of directors who basically took over because they were concerned about all the new technology. They wanted to get rid of much of it and make a “more conventional car.” The Big Three hadn’t created new models since 1941 and felt quite threatened by the brand new Tucker Torpedo. Studebaker, however, did create new models after the war but they were nothing like Tucker cars. en.wikipedia.org/...
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