Tucker Torpedo–Model 48

Was Preston Tucker a visionary or a charlatan, a promoter or a huckster, a sinner or a saint?  Five decades after he introduced his great car upon an unsuspecting public, those questions are impossible to answer. But the fact is, he was possibly all of these things and more, for the story of Tucker and his Torpedo is the story of America in the wonderful, dreadful aftermath of World War II. It’s the story of hoping against hope and daring to be different and,finally, the story of failure either unfairly thrust upon him or richly deserved.

Auto maker was brash and confident

If Preston Tucker had been a fictional character,  Sinclair Lewis would have produced  him. He was the epitome of all that was bad and goodabout the American businessman in the middle of this century. He was confident, he was brash, and he didn’t know the word quit. Similar to Billy Durant before him, he had big dreams, dreams of turning the American car industry on its collective ear, and he believed as no one else believed that he had the stuff to do it.

Not surprisingly, Tucker was once a car salesman, and his period on the retail side of the business gave him a feeling that what the customer wanted was far different from what the “suits” in their ivory towers thought he wanted. He was convinced that the man-on-the-street didn’t just want transportation, a mundane way of getting from dull home to boring job and back again. He was convinced those flannel-clad guys wanted to buy a dream. Soon after,  he set out to give it to them.

The post-World War II 1940s proved the perfect era for him. It was an age filled with  rising expectations and pent-up demand. The GIs who had returned from the Far East and  Europe were proud of the past and believed in the future. They were ready to settle down and bring up their families in an era when consumption wasn’t frowned upon or legislated against, but, instead,  looked forward to as their natural birthright.

Period of opportunity

The late Forties was also a time  that cried out for opportunism. Many  factories had turned their efforts from making consumer goods to producing war supplies soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So consumers who had gone without for so many years were all ready, willing and able to buy. Not only that, but factories that had been constructed as part of the war effort were available a bargain-basement prices  to the plucky entrepreneur who could put a business plan together.

Of course, Tucker, was a man with a plan. And his plan, at the core  of it, was rather simple: he would build a car so advanced, so good, so special that the newly wealthy would abandon the pre-war junk from the Big Three and flock to his dealerships like there was no tomorrow.

At first, his strategy seemed to go forward with the ease of a scalpel through soft tissue. After abandoning a notion to build a rear-engined sports car with the help of legendary race car designer Harry Miller, Tucker settled on the concept  of building a family sedan (yeah, that’s the ticket) with the realization that a helluva lot more family sedans than sports cars were sold each year.

Altered helicopter engines for car

The heart of every great car is a great engine, but Tucker didn’t want to waste  money and the time  to develop his own, especially when there were a bunch of Army surplus helicopter engines lying around that could be had for a song. With a little warbling, Tucker lined up a supply of horizontally opposed six cylinder engines from Air-Cooled Motors, a descendant of the old Franklin brand. On the other side of the pond, of course, an engineer named Ferdinand Porsche was also fiddling around with horizontally opposed, air-cooled engines for Volkswagen and for the car company that carried his name.

But, Tucker was no engineer, in contrast to Porsche,  and the helicopter engine was no VW engine. Big and bulky, particularly after it was changed to water cooling, the military surplus powerplant displaced a serious 334 cubic inches (5.5 liters) and produced 165 horsepower at 3200 rpm. In an era in which the Chevrolet “stovebolt” six was churning out 90 horsepower, this was heady stuff, but what could have been sublime turned ridiculous when Tucker decided to locate this substantial mass above and behind the rear wheels.

Of course, Tucker’s reason was to put the weight over the driving wheels for better traction. It makes sense, on the face of it,  and Tucker did have distinguished company. Czechoslovakia’s Tatra 77 had utilized a very similar arrangement in 1935, with its air-cooled V-8 behind the rear axle, and one doesn’t have to mention that Ferdinand Porsche was a proponent of the rear-engine configuration.

Cars’ rear ends tend to slide

However, time and physics have shown,  that a large, heavy object like an automobile (or helicopter) engine placed in the rear of a vehicle will often cause the rear end to try to overtake the front end, particularly in turns or under hard braking. So,  in placing the engine in the rear Tucker was both ahead of his time and well behind it.

That didn’t stop him from moving forward with his scheme. He commissioned well-known and well-respected car stylist Alex Tremulis to draw up a body for the Tucker sedan, based on Tucker’s notions, and the fruit of his labor was a  4-door that looks like several early-Fifties designs but for its center headlight. In other words, it was, to some extent,  advanced for its day, but hardly a leap forward.

However, the design did  incorporate some features that were precursors of items the auto world would see farther down the road. The interior was designed for “protection.” No, seat belts weren’t standard, but much of the interior was carpeted or otherwise padded so presumably you and your family’s heads would bounce off  unharmed  in a collision. A better idea was the windshield that was designed to pop out in a collision.  And that middle  headlight did turn with the wheels, a take-off on the “pilot ray” headlamps of the Twenties and Thirties.

Stakeholders were fussy

On the strength of the sketches and a prototype, Tucker did the American thing and went public. Some 44,000 stakeholders bought into his dream by putting up their hard-earned cash. Tucker went to work lining up dealers to sell the car, a factory to assemble the car and vendors to supply parts. But the public who had at first been so taken with Tucker and his dream, quickly turned on him when, fueled by the press, they began to believe that actual assembly was taking too long to ramp up.

With publicity turning against him, Tucker went on a blitz to build  a total of 51 cars.  The weight is more than two tons and sporting a 128-inch wheelbase, the production Tucker was capable of 110 miles per hour, but was far from an agile piece. It’s vacuum-operated transmission linkage and  4-speed transmission, which were to be substituted  by an automatic in series production, were also troublesome, but, at $2,450, the Tucker Torpedo was an incredible value in advanced technology.

Sadly, the Feds did not like him

Unfortunately, the federal authorities were more interested in potential securities fraud violations than technological  accomplishment. Tucker was indicted, went to trial and was actually  found not guilty.  However, the trial  ruined what remaining feeble chances he had of success.

When all was said and done, Tucker’s story and his car confirmed  the twin truths that dreams can come true and dreams are fleeting. For Tucker, the dream was gone before it really started.

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