The Tucker Torpedo automobile had many innovative features when it was introduced in 1948 by Preston Tucker, the same guy who invented the ball turret for aircraft.
The most famous feature was "the Cyclop's eye" third headlight in the center which would swivel to illuminate the road when the car was making a turn. This device was illegal in 17 states, and Tucker made a metal dish to cover the headlight in these jurisdictions.
The car was powered by a flat helicopter engine in the rear. It was designed so that the engine and transmission (known to gearheads as the "drive train") could be removed and replaced in 15 minutes, with the idea that the owner could leave them at the dealer for service while using a loaner engine and transmission.
At a time when safety considerations were totally ignored, the car had seat belts, a frame surrounding the vehicle to protect it in crashes, a padded dash, a windshield designed to pop out in a wreck, a roll bar in the roof, and a special shielded compartment under the dashboard where the occupants of the front seat could leap into and be protected in a crash (how you reconcile this feature with wearing a seat belt is an issue for which I do not have a ready answer).
It had other cute features such as doors which extended into the roof for ease in entering and exiting and a parking brake which you could lock with a key as a theft-protection device. The front and rear seats were intentionally made identical and could be switched with each other to spread out the wear. It had a four-wheel rubber-based independent suspension.
Tucker was also considering magnesium wheels, disc brakes, an automatic transmission, self-sealing tubeless tires, and fuel injection, but these features were dropped from the final product due to cost and lack of time.
The car was extremely streamlined and had a drag coefficient of 0.27, which rivals most vehicles of today and certainly was vastly superior to other cars of its era. The car was originally named the "Tucker Torpedo" but was changed to "Tucker 48" due to the fact that many persons in World War II had unpleasant experiences with torpedoes. However, the "Torpedo" name is the one which stuck in the public's mind.
The company built 51 cars before it was shut down as a result of negative publicity, an SEC investigation, and criminal indictments for fraud against Tucker and his myrmidons. Tucker was eventually exonerated, but the damage had already been done. According to the 1988 movie Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Tucker's legal problems were instigated by the major automobile companies who were afraid of the superiority of his product. I personally gainsay the veracity of this hypothesis, as the established auto companies actually provided assistance to Tucker (for example, all of the steering wheels were surplus donated by Ford to Tucker when Ford no longer needed them for its Lincoln Zephyr production). It also seems illogical that the big car companies, who were still instantly selling every auto they could produce to a public who had been car-starved during World War II, would feel threatened by someone who made only fifty vehicles in a year and who further did not have the ability to purchase steel and other raw materials at the bulk discount prices enjoyed by the major car manufacturers.
With the exception of the first prototype, the Tuckers in fact were extremely well-built and were years ahead of their time. If you had bought one in 1970 for $5,000 and sold it today, you would probably make a profit of $995,000 or even more (in fact, one sold in 2012 for $2.91 million). Most of the cars produced are still in existence.
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| By Thomas (originally posted to Flickr as Tucker) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
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