History We ALL Love a DARE! PIX of TRULY Extinct Makes?

A fellow Hamber just forwarded this to me;

From 9/28/2010:

This 1937 Cord 812 project just hit Craigslist about 30 minutes ago. These big front drivers are very impressive when restored, and we have never come across one in this condition. Find it here on Craigslist in Oceano, California for $21k. Special thanks to BaT reader Tucker F. for this submission!

9/28/2010 PM Update:

Never underestimate the BaT audience. Reader JP saw the car several months ago and took photos of the car and the sign in the window. And yes, that is a huge wooden Indian in the interior.

 

Oh, if V-Bulletin only had a "Make EXTINCT" feature!
We could send it to Auto Pergatory with the Pontiac
Aztec. LOL (This car just seems to pop back up every
few months!)



(Seriously, though, a chop and a more trad front-end treatment would save it, right?)

 

One of ten 1937 GMC Streamlines produced for Rainier. Only one still exists and was recently on ebay.

 

Hey that's my car! At least one of them. I am the author of "The Autoette Project" a blog devoted to these cars - thanks for mentioning me and my Wikipedia entry. If anyone is interested in these cars and their amazing history check out my blog at: autoette.blogspot.com. There is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. I just got back from the West coast doing some more research on these amazing little cars.


Larry Fisher's 1961 Electra King by LFisher160, on Flickr


Larry Fisher's 1961 Mobilette by LFisher160, on Flickr



Cheers,

Larry Fisher

 

Larry, WELCOMEto this thread, man! The longevity of the Autoette speaks for itself ... BUT, it surely doesn't hurt to have a champion, like you, to keep the flame alive. Seems to me that many low-cost, BTVs like this and the King Midget died simply BECAUSE of EPA and over-done safety regs around 1970.

I have long thought that -- for local and short-haul -- we are going to see a STRONG resurgence in the decades ahead of very small, light, approriately powered and task-built personal cars. HAMBers may remember that the so-called, tiny "cycle-cars" of the WWI era were a SUPER, low-cost option for people who couldn't afford a conventional car (Henry Ford squelched that). But, in the future, I feel we'll see lots of families' second car (maybe even ONLY car) being of the "micro" ilk !!!

THANKS for your post, Larry. Come again ANY tme, man!

 

Here's a shot -- not on this thread before -- of the LaBatt's Art Deco streamliner in 1936 when it was NEW, THANKS to HubGarage.com! If memory serves, I think these were done as early as 1930; somebody correct me. The OTHER shots of this Quebec beer hauler are in COLOR of the restored truck -- and worth doing the SEARCH function at top of this page.

 

Fate of the 1946 Beechcraft Plainsman Concept Car

<!-- dtl_id=470332 //-->The fate of the 1946 Beechcraft Plainsman concept car wasn't a sad one, not for Beech, at least.

Beech did go so far as to set a price for a production version of the 1946 Beechcraft Plainsman: $4,000-$5,000. That was lofty for 1946, and would surely have meant few sales. That kind of money bought a Cadillac limousine in 1946, but the sum might have come down to more realistic levels with really high-volume production, which Beech certainly could have managed.


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Once military aircraft orders started flowing in again, Beech had no need to try the car business, so it abandoned the Plainsman by late 1946.
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Postwar upstart Kaiser-Frazer may have grabbed the world's largest factory when it leased the wartime Ford bomber plant in Willow Run, Michigan, but the Beech complex in Wichita wasn't much smaller at almost a million square feet total, with about three-fourths of it dedicated solely to manufacturing.

Ultimately, of course, Beech had no need to build the Plainsman or any other automobile. By late 1947 it was flying high again on $22.5 million in new government orders prompted by the onset of the Cold War and political crises in Berlin, Palestine, India, and China.

With that, Beech abandoned its automaking ambitions and apparently never looked back. It was just as well. Within three years the Tucker was a bad dream, Kaiser-Frazer was struggling to recover from management blunders, and even established independents were showing signs of distress.

In the end, Beech was lucky that events turned as they did. Innovative though it was, the 1946 Beechcraft Plainsman concept car might have developed into a major corporate headache had it gone into production. After all, the aircraft business involves war only part of the time, while the car business is almost always hell on wheels. Just ask your friendly local Edsel dealer.

copy and paste

 

I have a picture of that one at the 1986 Worlds Fair in Vancouver.

 

McVictim64, welcome to the thread. Those pix are welcome
whenever you run across them, friend!

Here's a British Royal Air Mail streamlined "van," taken in 1935.
Though the air mail service used Morris vans since 1930, I do
not know for certain what the make of this streamlined job is.
It was designed by one Maurice Lambert, and front resembles
the lines of the DeSoto and Chrysler Airflow models of the time.
The one-off streamliner seems to have been more for public
relations than for any practical purpose, and it was apparently
modified or destroyed in late 1938. THANKS go to the British
Postal Museum and Archive!

 

And for something REALLY aerodynamic, here's one from the "Never-Wuz" category! This GM "Car of the Future," was as envisioned in 1962 for the Seattle World's Fair. Thanks for this visual retrospective go to a fantastic site called Paleo-Future!

 

So the Firebird III, above was how GM saw the future when the '60s
actually came 'round. BUT, how did they envision the car of 1960?
Above in 1940, Miss Futurama, Betty Crain, wears a dress as projected
fashion of 1960. She is shown presenting Harvey Gibson, chairman of
the board of the New York World's Fair, with the General Motors stream-
lined car of 1960. Thanks for this visual retrospective go to a fantastic
site called Paleo-Future!

Did everybody note the SHAPE of that car model held by Miss Crain???
Surely looks to me like the majority of the "teardrop" streamliner cars
of the '30s!

 

Hey Jimi; Scroll up to post 3851. I posted that picture here yesterday too ... LOL Here's a couple more [FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=+1]Streamlined Vintage Beer Trucks[/SIZE][/FONT]

One on the left is a 1930's GMC

One on the right is an unknown Tractor with A Fruehauf Trailer

 

Thanks for the heads-up, SunRoof. I'll delete thatdupe. Sometimes I miss things when I watch so many diff threads, ya know? 's-all good!

 

I saw this one too but this time at Pebble Beach. Only pic I have on hand, you can see it to the right.

 

OK! well here it is.


By the way, thanks for the welcome but if you go way back you'll see it's not my first time here. I think I posted the first day this one started.

 

After seeing the Morris Streamline 15cwt Van brought this to mind:



http://www.aqpl43.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/comprair/comprair.htm


Did any of the "quick delivery" "motor carriers" ever see the light of day?

 

There was a French team at Bonneville this year with a "Compressed Air" vehical, didn't pay much attention to it though.

 

Compressed air! Wow. Amazing that someone is still working on that. The French idd SERIOUS work 80-90 years ago on that. And the main problem was the same as electricity. You have to go to SOME sort of station for recharging. You can have a working car, but you have to have the means of propulsion, right?

THANKS, everybody, for all the continued input, as this thread has evloved! After all, it is a DISCUSSION forum. Wouldn't be much of a forum if people didn't provide input, argument, new facts, PIX. It's been a joy and exciting!

THANKS again!

 

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top width=385 colSpan=5 rowSpan=10>Only a few hundred of the futuristic streamlined
Czech TATRA T77 were made from 1933-38.
Thanks for these rare historical glimpses go
to the International Streamlines Tatra site!





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Just a quick streamline reprise here: the Bergholt
streamliner of 1932, built by Minneapolis native Fred
Bergholt who wanted a car as aerodynamic as an
airplane. He did just that with his one-off car.
Thanks again to fellow Minnesotan SunRoofCord.

 

A while back, we touched on New Yorker social cartoonist Peter
Arno's one-off 1939 speedster, the Albatross 173-K, BUT we had
NO photo and we did not know with certainty if the car even
survived -- only a rumor that it was somewhere in the midwest.

I'm tickled to note a very RECENT article by well-respected auto
journalist Daniel Strohl at Hemmings Autoblog, July 2010.
He did a recap, or update, on what is actually known about the
car, also known as "The Black Dragon." The latter name seems
to fit the elegant speedster far better than Albatross, which
actually has some negative connotation -- especially for anyone
at all familiar with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner"! LOL

Mr. Strohl's article includes a huge amount of detail, in particular
drawing upon a fine February 1983 four-page article for Special
Interest Autos by Keith Marvin. Not only are there fascinating
facts, but there are MANY photos of the car, including during a
complete '80s restoration. My few words here just scratch the
surface about this lost-found-lost-again auto. It will be MORE
than worthwhile to anyone who searches up Daniel Strohl's
Hemmings blog. I'm not sure of the direct link, but you can
find it pretty easily by, first, going to the Wikipedia article
available by searching ALBATROSS AUTOMOBILE, then go to
the bottom of the Wiki page where you'll find a link" "SIA Flash-
back: Found! Arno's Albatross."

Albatross (automobile) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_(automobile)




Built on a Mercury chassis, Arno's rakish speedster, AKA
Black Dragon, seems to combine many styling touches
popular in the mid- and late-'30s, including Mercedes and
Bugatti, plus side trim evocative of ACD and Darrin's customs!
My only criticism is that, maybe, the grille mesh could have
been more creative. Otherwise a car that would look good
parked alongside a Mercedes! THANKS for the photo go
to Hemmings and to Special Interest Autos!

 

Mercedes 540K, to which Arno's Black Dragon (Albatross) owes a
little something! Photo is from a coucours event and is from AlsAncle.

 

So after I found my blog "The Autoette Project" and my car mentioned on this board I've been looking at all 194 pages of amazing and cool cars. I posted a couple additional ones but thought maybe I should elaborate a bit. Here's the deal - There was an entire industry in Southern California that evolved around these cars that lasted about forty years. Remnants of it exist today in a variety of forms and several of the original manufacturers are still represented in today's EV world.

The first company to produce the cars was Royce Seevers' Autoette Electric Car Co. in Long Beach, CA. Royce had hand-built an electric reverse trike for delivery of chicken feed on his chicken ranch in 1944 or so and soon thereafter worked a deal to sell the idea to R.D. Taylor Jr., who was the manufacturer and seller of pre-fabricated chicken ranches (one of which was purchased by Royce and later sold). Taylor shows up later in the story but suffice it to say that the history of these cars has been muddied a bit by the re-telling of the story by different parties (several who are still around).

In 1946 Royce built a prototype for his first "car". The first cars were intended to be mobility vehicles for the elderly and mobility impaired, especially G.I.s who were having to cope with disabilities in a increasingly mobile society. By mid-1947 Royce produced a handful of production cars which he quickly began selling as "shopping cars" in addition to the mobility market. Here is the earliest editorial piece I know of for any of the micro-electric cars. This is from the September 1947 edition of Popular Science and shows the early version of the car with a front apron cut and formed from a piece of phenolic (fiberglass, paper and "laminac") material. This version of the car was only produced for that first production run because the phenolic cracked and chipped too easily. PopSci got it wrong however and attributed the manufacture of earlier industrial cars to the company. Actually, earlier electric vehicles had been made by Royce under another name. These were electric camera dollies and equipment trucks for the film industry. Several family members were involved in Hollywood which led to the development of that business.



Also attached you'll find the earliest version of an advertisement for the cars that I have been able to locate. Clearly in this ad from the LA Times in October 10, 1947 edition shows the mobility market as the intended buyers.



However, things changed pretty rapidly and the cars caught on as general utility cars for errands, shopping, etc. In fact in Long Beach and some other communities the merchants began lining designated parking areas for Autoettes in front of their stores. These areas still exist on Balboa Island, in Balboa Village, Laguna, Catalina, and Palm Springs.

In the first post about Autoettes #3846 from Jimi there was a photo of my 1953 Autoette CruiseAbout, the most popular model of the cars. Other models appeared including a four passenger model and a 1/4 ton twin motored model.

In the October 1953 PopSci was another piece on the Autoette showing some of the models and features including the Golfmobile. Yes my friends the first production golf car was the Autoette - contrary to what you may find published elsewhere.



So that's a little more info - If anyone is interested or has any questions I'd be happy to post more on the Electra King built by B&G Electric Car Co., the Mobilette by the Auto Electric Car Co. or, a copy of the Autoette called the Electric Shopper and the interesting battle for rights. There was also Marketeer, Marketour, Taylor-Dunn (yup that guy), Westinghouse, Electric Sportsrider, and more.... let me know if this stuff is suitable for this board.

Keep on buzzing -

Larry Fisher
"The Autoette Project"

 

<HR style="COLOR: #e5e5e5; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #e5e5e5" SIZE=1> <!-- / icon and title --><!-- message -->Larry, we've included cars so small, they could be folded up and packed into a small plane's hold. So, by all means, post away, buddy!
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<TABLE style="WIDTH: auto"><TBODY><TR><TD>Vintage Hotrod, posted this old mag article on the
"Vintage Shots From Days Gone By" thread. I feel
it's pertinent to the streamliner coverage we've been
doing over here, and I hope by showing it here, too,
we could double the chances somebody knows the
fate of the car.

My comments: This is the second old, old article
I've seen on John Tjaarda's streamlined, mechan-
ically advanced car. In blowing up your article a
tad from Modern Mechanics & Inventions, as well
as the other one I saw, I get the impression the car
was designed for a FOREIGN company (both items
strongly mentioned the for-U.S.-export angle, e.g.).
In both cases, only one page was shown, and nei-
ther mentioned the car name nor the company name,
just Tjaarda's. So, ANYBODY got solid info on the
car? What was it? Did it ever get off the ol' drawing
board???


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It resembles the Tatra T-77, eh? (Though, I suspect it's NOT a Tatra.)

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Tatra T-77 (1933-1938)

 

Wow, I thought we'd seen EVERY prototype,
experimental & demo Packard from the first
Brown Bomber on! Check this out! Intended
for 1957, at least two of the following three
appear to be purely from the Packard/Teague
in-house stylists! IMHO, the first two are NICE-
looking cars and worthy follow-ups to the
'55/'56 models!




This full-size clay model is what Packard designers had
intended to be the 1957 Caribbean convertible. Styling
would have carried over to a two-door hardtop, but a
four-door hardtop was also in the plans - as was a limou-
sine version. Sincere THANKS to PackardInfo.com !!!

 

This full-size clay model is what Packard designers had
intended to be the 1957 Four Hundred, continuing in two-
door hardtop form. The styling would have likely carried
over to a Patrician four-door sedan, but a Patrician/Four
Hundred four-door hardtop was also in the plans. Sincere
THANKS to PackardInfo.com !!!

 

This full-size clay model is what Packard designers had intended
to be the 1957 Clipper, in two-door hardtop form. Four-door Clippers
in both hardtop and sedan styles were also in the plans. Sincere
THANKS to PackardInfo.com !!!

 

This is the Paxton Phoenix from 1953 -- the Paxton super-charger
fella. He only made one, and he'd dealt with aged Abner Doble
to try and do a NEW STEAM CAR! More tomorrow
on this one-of-a-kind car.​

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Most would be aware of the late model Maybach Excelero that received so much publicity a few year ago. There was, however, an earlier model, a 1938 Maybach streamlined model also used by Fulda Tyres to test high speed tyres.

General consensus is that the car was lost or destroyed during WW2.

Is it an extinct model or is it still out there somewhere?



http://au.cars.ign.com/articles/618/618826p1.html



http://blogs.automobilemag.com/6265284/car-news/2005-maybach-excelero-concept-for-sale/index.html