1948 Tucker 48
If you’ve never heard of the Tucker Corporation, that’s okay. This minuscule car maker only saw American street lights briefly, thanks largely to negative publicity, some financial fraud investigations, and collusion among the Big Three car makers. But the Tucker 48 automobile that owner Preston Tucker designed and built is an oddly cool car if there ever was one.
With just 51 built, you’ve likely never seen a Tucker 48 on the road. But if you were to be blessed enough to see one, you’d be looking at a high-performance, ahead-of-its-time grand tourer worth over $1,000,000 today. The Tucker 48 was massive, sporting three side windows, a total length of 219”, a total width of 79”, and a weight of 4,200 pounds.
Packed inside all that metal were some innovative features: a directional third headlight, a rear engine with rear-wheel drive, a perimeter safety frame and integrated roll bar, shatterproof glass, and a separate subframe to insulate passengers from the powertrain in the event of an accident.
The Tucker 48’s design is wild, like a concept car built by its original design elements. Some other wild innovations never made it to fruition, including magnesium wheels, disc brakes, fuel injection, tubeless tires, a torque converter, and a 9.6L flat-six Hemi motor with overhead valves operated by oil pressure, without cams. Each Tucker 48 was built different from the last, so every vehicle is considered its own prototype. Very odd and cool, indeed.
