Prototype Cars That Should Have Made It

…cough…George Barris…

Cadillac 16 is a great looking car. And it would only cost $250,000.00 in production. I could get a couple of them. :smiley:

And Tuckerfan, your namesake wasn’t bad looking either. A bit dated now, but it had many advanced features. Too bad it never went into production (51 built).

Bob

I’ll see your Dymaxion and raise you one Stout Scarab.

I saw one at a car show a couple of years ago. Weird, but cool.

It’s not that dated, Lexus has only just introduced an SUV with headlights that turn with the wheels. Give 'em another 50 or so years, and maybe they’ll match the other safety features the Tucker had (most of which were not mentioned in the film!).:wink:

The Volkswagen 1-Litre Car. As in 1 litre per 100 km (282 miles per gallon).

Wow!

Anybody remember the Cizeta Moroder? Massive V-16, styling by Marcello Gandini, engineering by the best that Ferrari and Lambo had to offer, but killed by the recession in the early 90’s… http://www.giorgiomorodergallery.com/moroder/cizeta.html

oh and at 204 mph, it would have been (briefly) the fastest production car in the world.

Incidentally… anyone ever seen the Callaway Corvette Sledgehammer?

Panther 6 wheeler. I saw it at the Birmingham Motor Show many years ago.
http://www.webbpages2.com/cgi-bin/supercarworld/showgeneral.cgi?035

has the only image I can find.

See also http://www.webbpages2.com/supercarworld/history.html for a history of supercars

…is in production, once again! The factory is somewhere in Georgia. I always loved this car…but the fact was, Raymond Lowey didn’t have a lot of money to work with…and the design suffered as a consequence. By the time the car was designed, Studebaker was almost bankrupt, and they had to make do with what they had. Which explains the bored-out V-8 (the Granatelli brothers developed this engine from the standard Study V-8-they bored the thing out to the limit!).
All in all, the design has stood the test of time-I hope the car continues to be made.
Incidentally, an old curmudgeon down the street has an old Studebaker “LARK”-he must be dememnted if he thinks that ugly heap is worth anything!

Audi Steppenwolf

Best looking SUV I’ve seen so far…

Buick XP-300 and the Corvette-based Nomad, as originally designed. Imagine if they had kept going with that!
link

I have hungered for a Dymaxion for years now.

The Scarab is really cool.

But, I wonder what Teleki was thinking when he designed BubblePuppy
BTW-This is one of the most depressing threads I’ve ever read. Nothing but fantastic cars we’ll never even see irl.

Another nomination: the Merces Lifejet. I like three-wheelers.

Everything Harley Earl built in the '40s and '50s. Well, maybe not everything; some of 'em were downright hideous (all those wingless-jet-fighter-plane cars were his, as was this monstrousity), but I wouldn’t mind having a Y-Job (the first concept car!) or a '53 Wildcat 1 (back) (the monstrousity mentioned above is the '54 Wildcat 2), or a '51 Le Sabre (way ahead of its time). Too bad they were all so far ahead of their time it wasn’t possible to mass-produce 'em.

And, unlike modern concept cars which sometimes don’t even have engines, he kept the Y-job and drove it every day.

Are you absolutely sure that they aren’t one and the same?
:smiley:

On a serious note (and one that Tuckerfan might like), 1) What was the car that Preston Tucker was working on at the time of his death like (on a design level), and, 2) Wasn’t the Tucker line supposed to have more designs than the Torpedo?

The car was called the “Carioca” and I’ve not been able to find too many details on it, however GQ, I have to thank you for asking, because I did a search for images of the car to link to, and I discovered the following images that I’d never seen before: teaser, front view, rear view. I have to say, that’s got to be one of the finest looking automobiles I have ever seen! If only he’d gotten to build them…

The technical details of the Carioca that I do have, are pretty limited, because Tucker was cagey about what the car was going to include. His papers on the car might still exist somewhere, but the last time I checked, even the folks at the Tucker Club didn’t have copies of them. The car was going to have four wheel independent suspension (Packard was the only American car company to have it on all their models at the time, IIRC.), have a 12-volt electrical system, one size bolt and cap screw (meaning you only had to have one tool to tear the car apart), disk brakes, flat-four air cooled engine, and all of the safety features of the original Tucker. Plus, the car design was going to be configurable so that it could easily converted into a pick up truck or a panel truck. The problem Tucker had was that he couldn’t get the financing he wanted for the car. He could have built them in Brazil, but he preferred to keep the cars 100% American and died while trying to find investors in the US.

As for your second question, the answer is no. The car that Tucker produced was simply called the “Tucker 48.” The car referred to as the “Tucker Torpedo” was the original prototype design that only existed on paper (until recently, but more on that later). The Tucker 48 line was supposed to include another car, a two door sedan called the “Talisman.” There were two different proposed designs for it, unfortunately, I can’t find any pictures of them on the web. One was designed by Alex Tremulis, and it looked like a 1972 Buick Rivera with the front of the Tucker 48 grafted on to it. The other, was designed by Philip Egan, and is kind of difficult to describe. If you take the Tucker 48, make it a two door, and give it the same kind of line treatment that the modern Cadillac’s have, you’ll have a good idea of what the car was supposed to look like. It has a definite 1950s feel to the car. I’ve no idea of which version of the car Tucker preferred. (Egan’s not too clear on the subject, and he’s somewhat touchy about the whole matter of Preston Tucker for some reason.) The were also plans for a Tucker 48 convertable, and one may exist shortly, if it doesn’t already. There’s a guy out there claiming to have the prototype of the Tucker 48 convertable for sale, and a few people have seen it and claim it’s legit, but there’s been no photos of the car published, and the people who actually worked for Tucker, say that no such car ever existed. You can read about the heated debate on the matter here. The rollover car (like in the movie, one of the cars flipped over at high speed during testing) #1027 recently resurfaced in the collection of a car collector in Detroit, and his plans are to turn the car into a convertable, since it’s pretty much a basket case in it’s current condition.

Now, as to the Tucker Torpedo, one of Preston Tucker’s sons (IIRC, it might be his grandson) has built a Tucker Torpedo. The car’s built on a Buick Rivera body, and I’ve not seen any photos of it, however, the original design was not that pretty of a car, IMHO. However, if you’re ever in Ypsilanti , Michigan stop by Tucker’s Café/Espresso, it’s ran by Preston Tucker’s grandson and you can order one there. (It’s a sandwich, BTW.)

Looks like a re-desinged '51 XP-300, also from Harley Earl.

That '54 Wildcat 2 looks like it’s trying to hard to be a '53 Corvette.

How about a Blackhawk Eight?

The 1965 Packard. The prototypes were built and driven in 1963, but unfortunately (with exception of the Avanti) Studebaker-Packard closed their doors in 1964.

This baby featured an aluminum V12 engine with all of the accessories internally driven. The retractable hardtop could be fully removed, or set in a landau configuration. This was similar to the Ford concept, except when it was stowed there was still room in the trunk for luggage. It had a torsion-level chassis with no traditional coil or leaf springs but dual sets of shock absorbers. Switches were flush rocker type and located overhead.

I can’t link to any pictures, but you can read about this car in the August 2002 issue of Turning Wheels Magazine. The fate and/or location of the three prototypes is unknown.

More like a '53 Corvette that choked on a a decaying carcass of a '49 Buick…