Cars today are designed by the laws of aerodynamics yielding a parabolic sameness to their profiles. In another time car designs were driven by other, sometimes fanciful, goals. There were home builts and customs and futuristic prototypes.
What is the most interesting car you have ever seen on the road?
For me it was the 1933 Dymaxion. I saw it every morning while waiting for my ride on E 14th in Oakland CA. It was probably Dymaxion number 3 that is rumored to have been scrapped in the 1950s. I saw it in 1951.
Not nearly as interesting as the Dymaxion, at least not in an of itself, but I recently moved to a university town in North Carolina. The first week we met with a couple of my wife’s new colleagues including her boss, who drove a restored Citroën DS with a green paint job. A few days later we were driving on the highway and ahead of us we see what from the rear looked very similar to the Citroën DS, but it was red, and was pulling a trailer with a sailing dinghy.
My wife says, is that professor NN?, and I said, it’s the wrong color, but it’s a weird coincidence still. Then my wife stepped on the gas, passed the car and … turns out the guy collects Citroëns.
Admittedly not as spectacularly different as a Dymaxion, but still distinct enough to pick out of a crowd.
Around the spring of 1980, I worked at a gas station/repair shop and one nice evening just as we were wrapping up and getting ready to close and go home, in comes a 4 people in an open Stanley Steamer. Yellow. Jaunty looking thing.
The 5 or six of us there flocked to it and the driver asked if we had a water hose he could fill its boiler with. We added lengths of it so as to make it long enough to reach. The driver/owner/passengers chatted with us and answered our very curious inquiries as the boiler filled. He explained the workings as we walked around it. Some of the yellow paint was browning in one area from the heat of the kerosene burner. A few hand strokes of the water pump filled the boiler from the reservoir. This pump only needed to be used when the car was sitting, as it and the other pumps were driven by the rear wheels, which were in turn spun by connecting rods from a piston on either side.
They thanked us and we bid them so long, and off they went. I’ll tell you what: that thing can get right down the road appreciably quick. As they started off, the pistons chuff-chuffed, and seconds after pulling out on to the main road it accelerated surprisingly quick to about 40-45 mph, as it snickety snickety snicketied off in to the distance.
I once saw a bright blue car out of the corner of my eye, and realized as I turned to look that it was the Ferrari Daytona that had been driven by Brock Yates and Dan Gurney when they set the Cannonball Run record in 1971.
The classroom I taught in looked out over a parking lot full of wienermobiles that were being repaired. Including a tiny one made from a Mini (with the license number “Lil Link”).
I went to see the Wienermobile at an event when I was a kid, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it on the road.
In Northern California, especially the Bay Area, you occasionally see expensive exotics on the road. McLarens seem to be the most popular, but sometimes you’ll see a Ferrari or Lamborghini. I suppose the one that stands out as “most interesting” was the first time I ever saw a Lamborghini on the road, which actually wasn’t in California, but in downtown Seattle.
This doesn’t count since I haven’t ever actually seen him in person, but I really hope to see the Big Banana Car someday. I follow him on Facebook, so once he resumes his travels after the pandemic I will know if he plans to visit anywhere near me. And if he does I fully intend to go out and see him.
I’ve seen The Jerrari on the roads long ago. It in a museum now. It’s a 1977 Jeep Wagoneer with a Ferrari V-12 wedged in under the hood. I don’t have any memory of the sound it made.
