Devoted to remembering the lost automakers - great and not so great - of the last seventy-five years
Dedicated to remembering the lost car makers, the orphaned brands that are such a rich and entertaining piece of American automobile history.
While “Let's get small” was probably the genius comedian Steve Martin’s greatest routine, getting small didn’t work out so well for the Chrysler Corporation and its new full sized cars of 1962. It was still funny, though in a different sort of way, watching a multi-billion dollar car company slip on a banana peel.
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The 1962 El Tiburon Roadster (The Shark) was created by Henry Covington, an engineer at American Fibre Craft of Cupertino, CA. Most fiberglass sportscars of the day were Volkswagen-powered. But Sharks were motivated by the 845cc OHC engine used in the Renault Dauphine Gordini. This made them a bit less reliable than the Dub-based cars, but considerably more interesting.
While the smooth road hugging shape and extraordinarily advanced underbody ground effects are more reminiscent of a catfish than a shark, naming it after the latter rather than the was probably the smarter marketing move. Even so, only about two dozen of this breed of Shark ever saw life on land.
The man behind the Guanci SSJ was John Guanci, a Chicago businessman and certified Car Guy. When in the mid-1970s Guanci surveyed the landscape of high performance cars, he decided that America could do a whole lot better. Even though the 3rd generation Chevrolet Corvette was now 8 years old, a new mid-engined, rotary powered Vette had just been shelved. There was no replacement in the pipeline. The title of America’s Sports Car looked to be up for grabs.
Read MoreWhile most cars end their lives in a junk yard, the Erickson Streamliner’s journey began in one. Anton F. Erickson built this aluminum egg of a machine in his Dayton, Ohio garage during the closing months of WW2. The Streamliner is thought to be based on a design the fame futurist Buckminster Fuller did in 1934 as a smaller version of his famed Dymaxion.
Read MoreThe Dale automobile was revealed to the world in late 1973, and the world was interested. It was a time when the U.S. car industry was in turmoil, struggling to absorb the triple wallops of fuel shortages, new emission and safety regulations and a brutal recession… and doing it all quite clumsily. Things got so bad that industry observers had begun wondering aloud if America’s Big 3 dinosaurs would even survive. The time was surely ripe for a new way of approaching the automobile. On cue, a colorful collection of salesmen, dreamers, and scalawags were lining up to make their pitch. Malcolm Bricklin’s gull-winged safety sports car had potential. If Bricklin had been as good at making cars as he was selling them, he might have made it. Bob Beaumont’s electric powered CitiCar might have single-handedly saved the nation from a couple of energy crises, had only period battery technology been up to the task. But the most interesting of them all may have been Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, president of the 20th Century Motor Car Company. She promised a space-aged plastic 3-wheeler called the Dale, that got 70mpg and cost just $2000. As it would turn out, the car, the company, and their creator, were not quite what they appeared to be.
Read MoreAs we close the books on the second decade of the twenty-first century, electricity’s role in personal transportation seems assured. The market share of electric vehicles in the industrialized world approaches 5% in some regions, and is expected only to rise from there. This was far from the case 20 years ago when the electric powered Corbin Sparrow made its debut. Then, EV sales were lucky to register in the hundreds annually. But this was also the height of the dot.com frenzy. Entrepreneurs everywhere were promoting their vision of what lies ahead. It seemed quite reasonable then, that this tiny one-seat electric pod might one day carry us toward a utopian future of personal transportation. Like countless other brainchildren of that age, the Sparrow’s flight was as brief as it was bright.
Read MoreChalk up the Leata Cabalero as one of those ideas that seemed pretty good at the time. This car’s main problem lay in the fact that its time was the 1970s, when few cars or ideas were much good. That is the right spelling by the way, even though it isn’t. But then, little about the Cabalero is right. Beginning with the car it started out as.
Read MoreThe Stearman micro vehicle was a diversification idea from Stearman Aircraft of Wichita KS. Wichita had never been a hotbed of automotive production before the Stearman made the scene. Nor was it after. Only 3 were ever made.
Read MoreDedicated to remembering the lost carmakers, the orphan brands, that are such a rich part of the history of the American automobile
