Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

1948 Tucker Torpedo surfaces in Jay Leno's Garage

The story of the Tucker Car Corporation is a tragic one. Its sole model, the 1948 Tucker Sedan, had a huge number of innovations, with a particular focus on passenger safety, but a catastrophic debut and the ensuing media firestorm it created caused severe problems for the brand. Other issues followed, with an SEC investigation and rumors of troublemaking on the part of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Only 51 Tuckers were completed before the company went bust, making the three-eyed sedans some of the rarest American cars ever produced. With a unique, tail, complete with six exhaust pipes, a Tucker went for $2.915 million at a 2012 auction.

Martyn Donaldson takes Jay Leno's Garage through a brief tour of his Tucker, chassis number 1003, explaining just what was so innovative about these vehicles, along with what drew him to the rare cars in the first place.


http://www.autoblog.com/2013/07/26/1...-lenos-garage/

mmarshall

The original Tucker Torpedo was killed by a combination of three things. First, Preston Tucker getting in over his head by simply not having the resources to compete with larger companies. Second, a smear-campaign aganst him and his company by much of Detroit and well-known reporter Drew Pearson. Third, the public simply wasn't ready for the remarkable safety advancements on that car in an age when safety didn't sell.....swiveling "Cyclops" center-headlight, safety-glass, disc brakes, padded dash, collapsing steering column, seat belts, and others. Last, the original rear-mounted air-cooled flat-six (some 12 years before GM tried a smaller one in the Corvair) was unreliable, and its rear-weight and swing-axle suspension made handling tricky. later models used a gas-powered helicopter engine converted for automotive use.

Here's an interesting list of ten cars that should have made it in America and didn't....in the author's opinion, the Torpedo was #1. I disagree, though, with the Corvair and the Merkur XR4Ti. The Merkur was poorly-built, and even the 2Gen Corvair had significant engine/chassis problems.

http://jalopnik.com/ten-failed-cars-...sful-295808764

Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

What was the smear campaign regarding the Detroit 3, why were they so threatened by Mr. Tucker's small company?

Gotta hand it too Tucker for all that safety innovation despite the flop

mmarshall

Detroit, in those days, was more than just the "3". Studebaker, Packard, Hudson, ******, Crosley, and what would (later) become Rambler/American Motors were also significant players. Their campaign, as I understood it, centered more on the car's many safety-advancements than on Tucker himself (the SEC later went after Tucker himself on stock-charges, and he lost control of the company). Obviously, the advances that Tucker made in his car (I forgot to add mechanical fuel-injection in my first post), were relatively expensive to produce compared to the way most American cars were built at the time, and other companies didn't want to have to adopt these money-costing features to their own products yet (they would, of course, in due time, partially from new safety-regulations). So, instead, their PR people portrayed the Tucker as simply having too many new and untested systems which could (?) prove unreliable in actual use....something that the public at least partially believed. With no Internet/blogs and 24/7 conversation like we have around the clock on forums today like CAR CHAT, and with little else besides newspapers, radio and the then-brand-new television broadcasting, most people simply had little knowledge of what was going on in the auto industry outside of what they were spoon-fed by the media, corporations, and government. Reporter Drew Pearson, one of America's most powerful journalists at the time, never liked Tucker or his car, making some claims against it that were true and some that were simply fabricated.

Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

Interesting facts. Thanks for the history lesson