Wanna Limo

The last week has been a banner one for finding additional images of long-lost vehicles. First, we found the color images of the Brooks Stevens FC-150 Commuter, and now, thanks to Bob Stinnette, we have three more images of the mysterious Mars Express.

Bob wrote on his My Hemmings page that his father, Robert B. Stinnette, took the photos sometime in the late 1930s on U.S. Route 1 just north of Richmond, Virginia.

We know from automotive historian Bob Cunningham that the Mars Express first appeared on American roads in 1934, promoting the Pan American Petroleum Corporation. As an account in the Tuscaloosa News from June 14, 1934, reported, Pan American advertised the Mars Express as a 1,000 MPH car that “follows scientific forecasts of 50 years in the future.”

There will be decorated automobiles of the newest type accompanying the Rocket Car. And a special auto will carry the “Man from Mars,” who depicts the characters that we will see journeying to earth perhaps from our neighboring planets.

The car’s complete streamline effect will help to make possible the unbelievable speeds of the future – speeds of 1,000 and more miles an hour.

To eliminate useless weight, while retaining essential strength, the car has an aluminum body, painted copper. Its overall length is 20 feet, width 7 feet, height 6 feet.

The rocket car has powerful radio, two loudspeakers and microphone. On the dashboard, ahead of the driver’s seat is a planetary map… a well-known artist’s fanciful idea of the heavens.

The cabin is beautifully finished in fine tan leather. Here you see the control board, with strange instruments predicted for rocket car tours – switches for humidimeter, velocimeter, disintegrator ray and oxygen tanks.

Pan Am is the first to build an actual practical car following rocket car lines.

That last claim appears to be just as fanciful as the rest of the claims made about the car. Either way, the Mars Express next shows up in 1938, just a few days after Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, with the somewhat more plausible claim of being able to run 115 MPH with a supercharged Ford V-8 engine powering it. However, Pan-American no longer associated itself with the car; instead, Peter Vacca (sometimes referred to as Peter Vacco) of Buffalo, New York, claimed to have spent $16,000 building the car. The man in Stinnette’s third photo may just be Vacca, posing with the Mars Express for an impromptu portrait.

Cunningham said that the Mars Express later went on to tour with the Cole Russell Brothers circus from 1939 through 1942 before disappearing altogether; with that much aluminum in its construction, it’s very probable that it was scrapped for the war effort. The major differences we see here are the spotlamp mounted to the front and the 1937 New York license plate (5x-xx-90); previously published photos of the Mars Express show it sans spotlamp and wearing a 1938 South Carolina license plate (102-624).

So what was Vacca doing with the Mars Express in Richmond, Virginia, at that time? And does anybody know its ultimate fate?

Half-Safe in Copenhagen, 1951

Ford’s GPA might have done well in the Detroit River, but when it went into service during World War II, it proved less than capable in the field. Cumbersome and unwieldy on both land and water, the so-called Seep’s production run ended early, after just 12,778 of them emerged from River Rouge. Those that didn’t sink during the war were sold off as surplus or simply junked. Their land-going Ford GPW and Willys MB cousins received many more accolades than the GPA ever would.

But that didn’t stop one Australian from deciding that the GPA would be the perfect vehicle with which he could circumnavigate the globe.

Ben Carlin, born in 1912 in Northam, Western Australia, studied engineering before spending the duration of World War II in service with the Royal Indian Engineers, reaching the rank of major. Though the GPA didn’t live up to expectations, the Allied forces – particularly the Americans, the British, the Canadians and the French – still put it to use in far-flung places like India, where Carlin inspected one in 1945, toward the close of the war. He told a counterpart from the Royal Air Force, Group Captain Malcolm “Mac” Bunting, that with some preparation, he believed a GPA could indeed take him around the world. “Nuts,” was the reply, which Carlin took as a challenge.

Elinore and Ben Carlin

Carlin thus followed his wartime sweetheart, a Bostonian Red Cross volunteer named Elinore, back to the United States, married her and located a war surplus 1942 GPA (serial no. 1239), which he bought at a government auction outside of Washington, D.C., for $901. He tried to get Ford to sponsor his trip, but found that nobody – least of all Ford – believed he could even make it across the Atlantic with his tiny vessel. Still, he decided to fund the trip out of his own pocket and proceeded with his modifications, adding a small cabin, a rudder, a two-way radio, a bunk inside the cabin, and a bow that doubled as a spare fuel tank and extended the length of the GPA to 18 feet overall. Another fuel tank increased capacity to 220 gallons. He christened the GPA the “Half-Safe,” after a catchphrase in a deodorant commercial, and chose Montreal as his official starting point.

In June of 1948, he and Elinore left from Montreal to launch into the Atlantic from New York City. Over the next couple of months, they turned back twice due to problems with the rudder, leakage and seasickness. Another attempt in August went well for about a week until a propeller bearing welded itself fast from lack of lubrication. They floated for another week, 300 miles offshore, until a Canadian ship took them back to land. They tried to leave Half-Safe behind, but the captain of the ship persuaded them to take it with them. Upon landing back in North America, Elinore returned to Boston and Ben took a job with a Canadian shipping firm.

A year later, they tried again, this time from Halifax, Nova Scotia, towing a pair of auxiliary fuel tanks. The first night out, the tanks crashed into each other and broke loose. Ready to throw in the towel, Ben allowed Elinore to persuade him to soldier on, and constructed another fuel tank. They left, again from Halifax, on July 19, 1950, and 32 days later, after removing the head of the engine a few times to clean the carbon from the valves and replace the head gasket and after authorities feared them lost at sea, made it to the Azores; from there, they sailed another 23 days through a hurricane (most likely Hurricane Charlie) to the Canary Islands and on to Cap Juby, Morocco, then up the coast of Africa, into Europe, and across the Channel to England.

Out of money (throughout Europe they displayed the Half-Safe in department stores to raise funds) and unable to head back out right away, the Carlins settled temporarily in England and spent the next two years raising enough money to continue their trip and rebuilding the Half-Safe with the assistance of Bunting, still serving with the RAF. While doing so, Ben wrote a book chronicling the first leg of the journey, Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic in an Amphibious Jeep, which sold 32,000 copies over the next several years and was translated into Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish.

The Carlins left England in May 1954, made their way through Europe to Istanbul, and then from there to Calcutta, where they took another break from their voyage and had the Half-Safe shipped by steamer to Australia for a side trip. Before Ben could ship the GPA back to Calcutta for the resumption of the journey, Elinore decided to call it quits; susceptible to seasickness, she couldn’t take any more, so she headed back to the United States while Ben searched for another co-pilot/first mate. Some sources note that Elinore filed for divorce upon returning to the States, but later newspaper articles still refer to Elinore as Ben’s wife.

After Carlin crossed the Bay of Bengal in early 1956, Australian Barry Hanley took up the challenge and accompanied Ben to Yangon (Rangoon), then overland to Bangkok, Saigon and Da Nang; across the South China Sea to Hong Kong and Taiwan; then across the East China Sea to Japan. As Dave Brooks noted on his page dedicated to the Half-Safe journey, the route through Burma was undertaken at the same time as the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, a much better documented expedition, though neither party seems to have known of the other’s presence. What exact route Carlin and Hanley took seems to be a mystery, though Carlin described it as the worst section of the trip, the hurricane included.

Ben Carlin atop Half-Safe in San Francisco

The nine months that it took for the duo to make that leg of the trip forced Carlin to winter in Tokyo and rebuild Half-Safe again, during which time Hanley left the expedition. Ben found his third co-pilot, American journalist Boyde de Mente, and left Japan in June 1957, headed for the Aleutian Islands, ultimately landing in Anchorage in September. The two then kept to land for the remainder of the journey, heading as far south as Los Angeles and Arizona, before turning back north and east to New York (where Ben met up with Elinore) and Montreal, completing the trip on May 12, 1958 – nearly 10 years after Ben and Elinore first set out to circle the globe. Altogether, Carlin estimated he traveled about 50,000 miles – 39,000 of them over land and 11,000 of them by sea – crossed 38 countries and spent about $35,000.

As one newspaper wrote at the time, Carlin hadn’t developed one lick of affection for Half-Safe over that decade. “I can’t get rid of her fast enough,” he said. “It’s been a tortoise shell on my back for many years.”

Except he didn’t get rid of Half-Safe. He spent the next few years traveling the United States with Elinore, giving presentations on their journey, and then lived out his later years in Australia in relative obscurity, working at a yacht harbor and retaining a one-half share in Half-Safe, which remained in the United States in the care of Carlin’s friend George Calimer. When Carlin died of a heart attack in 1981 (Elinore apparently died in 1996 in New York), he left his share to Guildford Grammar School in Perth, Western Australia, which he attended as a schoolboy in the 1920s. Guildford has since bought out the other half-share in Half-Safe, restored the GPA to its around-the-world configuration, and put it on prominent display on the school’s grounds, trotting it out occasionally for public appearances. Guildford has also published a second book, “The Other Half of Half-Safe,” available directly from the school, which details the Carlins’ adventures after their layover in England.

Photos from the Don Emde Collection, courtesy of Wheels Through Time Museum

December 10th marked the 70th anniversary of the death of Frederick Ten Dan Ham, better known to motorcycling enthusiasts as AMA Hall of Fame member Fred Ham. Fred immigrated to the United States in the early Thirties and got a job as a chauffeur in California. He discovered that his true passion in his off time was motorcycle riding. A lot. He raced competitively in distance events, winning the 1933 and 1934 Big Bear Endurance Run, but Fred searched for even bigger challenges. The August 1985 issue of AMA Magazine stated that he once put his wife on a train in Los Angeles, then hopped on his bike and met her in Chicago when the train arrived 42 hours later.

Fred knew that Wells Bennet had established the Three Flag Endurance Run (Canadian border to Mexican border) record in 1922 on a Henderson in 51 hours and 4 minutes, and decided that this was a worthy challenge. The AMA disavowed any subsequent attempts to better this mark because they would involve driving well above the speed limit on public roads, but Fred decided to attempt it anyway. In 1936, he journeyed to the Canadian border in Washington with a prepared 1935 EL knucklehead and proceeded to shatter the mark, completing the same distance as Bennet, and arriving in Mexico only 28 hours, 7 minutes later. He beat the previous record by almost a full day.

Bennet had set another record in 1922 (on the same Henderson) for distance covered over 24 hours, traveling 1,562.5 miles on a board track in Tacoma, Washington. Fred decided he would make an attempt at that record also. In April of 1937, Fred brought his own newly acquired 1936 Harley EL to Muroc Dry Lakes in California to make his assault on the world 24-hour endurance record. With sponsorship and tuning from his local Harley dealership, Fred shattered Bennet’s distance record in a little over 20 hours, continuing to complete a record 1,825 miles in one day. The same AMA magazine article stated that Fred got off his bike, had a meal, drove two hours to his home, took a shower and then went to a movie. That record stood for over 35 years before being topped by Merle Shank in August 1972 aboard a Honda 750 at Pocono Raceway.

His exploits were the best advertising Harley-Davidson could hope for and silenced the critics who were pooh-poohing the Harley EL knucklehead engine as unreliable. H-D sales improved and the company kept the knucklehead design as its engine, thanks, in part, to Fred’s exploits. Harley-Davidson later acquired the record-breaking engine and gave Fred a brand new one, which he proceeded to install into the same 1936 frame he used to set the endurance record, and Fred used the bike as his daily police motorcycle while he was a patrol cop in West Covina, California, until his death (aboard the bike) while on duty on December 10, 1940.

Knucklehead sales continued to propel H-D through slim financial times until the onset of World War II. The reliability proven by Fred while on his exploits set in motion the development of the panhead and shovelhead, both based on the earlier knucklehead design, which sustained the Harley-Davidson heavyweight bikes into the mid-Eighties. Few other riders of the Thirties or since could deny that Fred had the ultimate Iron Butt, riding long distance in his free time and getting paid to ride 40 hours a week for his job when he wasn’t competing.

We hear a lot of anger from readers about the neglect and loss of America’s automobile history. We share it, too: Things are being lost that can never be recovered. The Big Three have only ever been halfhearted, at best, about conserving their heritage. When they could have afforded to do something, they didn’t, and those days are past, now. With a few exceptions such as Studebaker, the picture is grimmer still for the thousands of other makes that aren’t Ford, GM or Chrysler. Detroit and its environs house the densest population of important sites and a surprising number have survived, but the poor, benighted city can’t even begin to contemplate historic preservation.

So to my mind, there are no small successes. Every piece we save is important, but some, like a lot in “Milwaukee Junction” at the corner of Piquette Ave and Beaubien Street, purchased by Henry Ford in 1904, stand out. It became his Piquette plant, where the Model T was ultimately developed. In a very real way, it is perhaps the most important single site in our automotive history, and in 1998, it was about to be demolished.

Over the next decade, the Henry Ford Heritage Association and later Model T Automotive Heritage Complex worked first just to stabilize the building, then begin the groundwork for restoration. Today, as T-Plex Chairman Steven Rossi reports, they’re beginning a new 10-year project to complete the restoration, and he sent over the following report on Piquette’s first 107 years. Score one for the good guys.

History of the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant

The Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, birthplace of the famous Ford Model T, could easily be the most significant automotive heritage site in the world. Because of its simple design, constantly improving manufacturing efficiency, and price reductions throughout most of its production run, the Model T became a ubiquitous fixture in the early 20th century. It also started a process of fundamental change in the economic and social structure of the entire world. This paper is a brief summary of the history of the plant.

Ford Years

By 1904, only a year after its founding, the Ford Motor Company had already achieved commercial success with its first Model A, and needed to move out of the cramped building it rented on Mack Avenue in Detroit. In April 1904, Ford’s stockholders authorized purchase of 3.1 acres of land in the “Milwaukee Junction” area, which would become by 1910 the center of Detroit’s auto industry. Construction of the plant began on the site within two months, and was completed by the end of 1904. The three-story New England mill-style building was designed by the Detroit architectural firm of Field, Hinchman & Smith, and is constructed of brick load-bearing walls with timber post-and-beam framing and thick wooden floors. The 402- by 56-foot building used 355 double-hung windows to admit natural light and ventilation. Because of his shareholders’ awareness of the Olds Motor Works fire a few years earlier, Mr. Ford had his building equipped with the latest fire prevention and control technology – three firewalls with double steel doors dividing the building into four sections, fire escapes in each section, an automatic sprinkler system, and fire-resistant frame and floor construction. At the time of its completion, some people wondered if the company could ever fill the plant’s space, but history soon proved that concern to be unfounded! Besides the main plant building, Ford also built a steam power plant on the site, and in the next few years, a number of outbuildings were added for various manufacturing purposes.

The business offices were on the ground floor at the front (south) end of the building, but Henry Ford’s office was at the southwest corner of the second floor, amid the “real” business of the factory – designing and building automobiles. Mr. Ford was usually to be found in the production areas, the power plant, the design department, etc., and paperwork tended to lie ignored in his office. The plant layout was constantly changing, as happens in automobile plants today, but at Piquette, the changes occurred at a very rapid pace. Initially, the company produced the C, F and B models, all of which were discontinued by 1906. In April 1906, production commenced on the larger, more powerful Model K, which was championed by major shareholder Alexander Malcomson, but totally contrary to Mr. Ford’s product instincts. In July 1906, Ford began production of the Model N; a simple, light vehicle to suit Mr. Ford’s design philosophy, and which proved to be a commercial success, validating his own instincts.

The Model N was followed by Models R and S, both minor upgrades of the N, on the same chassis. Soon, however, several shortcomings in the N’s design became evident, and Mr. Ford saw the need for a new and better vehicle; one which would follow the same design philosophy, while correcting the N’s shortcomings, and introducing new innovations such as left-hand steering, magneto ignition, extensive use of vanadium steel, and others.

In January 1907, Mr. Ford ordered an experimental room to be constructed in the northeast corner of the third floor. In this room, Ford and a few trusted and gifted employees designed and developed the revolutionary Model T automobile, which would soon change the lives of Americans, and eventually many of the world’s people. These men conceived, sketched, discussed, modeled, and tested the design features of the Model T, using the Model N as a test bed or “mule” for proving out new components. By October 1907, the basic design and development had been completed, two prototypes fabricated, and production drawings initiated. Starting early in 1908, N, R and S production was phased out, and on September 27, 1908, the first production Model T was completed. Within a few months, production had risen to 200 cars per month, and over 12,000 Model Ts were eventually built at Piquette before production was transferred to the new Highland Park Plant in January 1910.

John Forster’s Piquette-built Model T Touring in front of the “Experimental Room”

The Piquette Plant continued to be used by the company for support offices through 1910, and the building was sold to Studebaker in January 1911. The Model T continued to be produced by Ford at Highland Park and in other locations around the world for 19 years, during which time over 15 million units would be built, using ever-more efficient methods (including the famous moving assembly line), forever changing world social and economic life in the process.

Piquette After Ford

After purchasing the building from Ford, Studebaker built an Albert Kahn-designed addition in 1920, which was used for parts storage and service, and which still stands on the site. Over the years following Studebaker, the site was owned by 3M, Cadillac Overall Company and Heritage Investments, and was used for various light manufacturing and storage purposes. The power plant and outbuildings were eventually razed, along with the water tower on the northwest corner of the main building. Although the building was modified slightly for various uses, large portions were basically unchanged from the day Henry Ford left. Even the original “No Smoking” signs on the fire doors are unchanged from the time they were photographed in the Ford era, as is the rear stairwell, the floors, most of the original windows, and many other features. For some reason, perhaps the brevity of its life as a Ford facility, or an industrial culture which valued only the new and modern, the Piquette Plant and its significance were almost forgotten by the late 20th century.

Saved From Demolition

In early 1998, the Henry Ford Heritage Association (HFHA), arranged with the plant’s owner to tour the interior for the Association’s spring field trip, and during that tour the members discovered that the owner intended to raze the building and replace it with a steel warehouse, thereby gaining a 12-year tax abatement for building in the Empowerment Zone. Immediately, several association members, including Dr. Jerry Mitchell, a Wayne State University professor, and Randy Mason, former Curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford, organized themselves to try to save the building. Jerry and Randy obtained approval from the HFHA Board to raise funds, and after a major effort over several months, nearly $100,000 was raised, and plans initiated to acquire the building.

Piquette Plant facade before restoration

In early 2000, the Model T Automotive Heritage Complex (“T-Plex”), a non-profit corporation, was formed with Jerry Mitchell as its first president; its primary mission being to preserve the plant, and in April of that year the building was purchased via land contract. Since its formation, T-Plex has stabilized the building’s structure, paid off the land contract, initiated restoration and preservation activities, obtained historic vehicles and other exhibit materials and begun regularly scheduled museum operations. The facade has been professionally restored to its original appearance, a team of volunteers is engaged in a 10-to-12 year project to complete the restoration of the plant’s 355 original windows, and an all-volunteer staff and board are pursuing the plant’s development into a world-class museum. The Piquette Plant has been designated as a Michigan State Historic Site, listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

Plant facade after 2008 restoration – February 2011 photo.

Plans for the Future

In order to continue organized and expeditious progress in its mission, T-Plex formed a Strategic Planning Team, which developed a long-term vision, an overall strategy, and work plans for all major projects needed to reach the vision. During 2011, these plans will be costed, prioritized, and mapped into a ten-year plan, so that the necessary funding and other activities can be put in place to support it.

Hemmings Muscle Machines readers will soon be opening their May issues to see a story on Steve Steers and his 1954 Victress S1A, the construction of which was at least partially inspired by the fiberglass and other homebuilt cars his father, John, built and raced while living in Palo Alto, California, in the late 1940s and duration of the 1950s. Fortunately, Steve has photographs of all four of his father’s cars and a little history to go with each.

John’s first car, built over a period of three months, started as a Ford Model A. He moved the engine and transmission to the rear and set up the driver’s seat ahead of the drivetrain, with his feet over the front axle. He constructed the body of hoops and stringers, covered in doped fabric. Steve writes:

He only drove it a few times, saying as he took off down the road the gas tank fell out of it. The only picture I have is from a newspaper some time after he sold it. Two young guys were claiming it was their build. Mom wrote on the bottom of the clipping “John built this car!”

In 1954, John set to work on his next car, based on the running gear from a 1937 Ford, installed in a tube frame that John designed and welded himself. After getting the basic chassis running, he couldn’t wait to get it on the road, Steve said, so he ran it on the street for a while sans body. Eventually, he decided to form his own fiberglass body over the chassis, so he made a form of chicken wire and plaster (in the lead photo, he’s preparing that form for fiberglass), took a single sheet of fiberglass and laid it over the form, making sure the sides were straight so he could pop the body shell off the form.

He often laughed and said, “From the back it looked like an old lady bent over.” Because hinging the doors and making return edges was a lot of work, he dispensed with doors and just stepped in. Besides, it added rigidity to the body. Fewer rattle problems too. It was a cute little thing, built cheaply and in only a few months.

Steve said John could do 100 MPH with it, but he eventually gave it away to a friend so he could concentrate on his next car.

In late 1955, John began work on a Mercury flathead V-8-powered Glasspar G2 that he would finish in early 1956 and race to some success in local SCCA races. The photo above, snapped at the Stockton Airport in April 1956, was taken just after he won his class in that day’s race.

That’s my mother smiling on, me at age 13 helping Dad, who’d just come off the track, and Murray Stuart on the car’s right side, who later bought the car.

Steve said he’s actually located this Glasspar, still around up in Montana. But if any of his father’s cars directly influenced Steve, it was his father’s last car.

John built his Victress S1A in about 1957, placing it first on a chassis that incorporated his own coil-sprung front suspension. After hitting a tree with that chassis while racing around the hills near his home, John scrapped that frame and put the Victress body on a 1957 Plymouth frame, modified to include John’s own coil-sprung rear suspension. With a 283 and a Jaguar four-speed transmission (mated using an adapter John made himself), John ran the Glasspar on the street, then raced it on weekends, using a special underbody airfoil to selectively increase downforce on the rear axle when coming hot into a corner.

He never trailed the car but drove it to the tracks with its factory windshield, mufflers and sans airfoil. Once at  the track, the mufflers came off, straight pipes were put in place, a racing windshield was put on and the wing installed. After the race, it’d all be put back in street form and we’d drive home with him.

Though John didn’t build any more cars after the Victress, he did go on to build a commercial fishing boat and an airplane; as a captain for Pan American, he flew planes when he wasn’t backyard engineering something. Steve has yet to find his father’s first two cars or the Victress, so if anybody knows where they are today, let us know and we’ll pass word on to Steve.

A while back, Paul Bellefeuille let us borrow a few of his copies of Ford Times, Ford’s in-house monthly magazine that ran from 1908 to 1996, and after some perusing, we came across somebody who should be familiar to faithful Hemmings Blog readers, Ray Russell, he of the Gadabout and the hydraulic-drive and plastic-bodied cars. In the January 1954 issue, Russell received a few paragraphs about his latest creation, a sectioned 1953 Ford. They wrote:

Ray Russell, Detroit industrial designer, is shown below with one of the cars he has restyled. The principal change in this new 1953 Ford convertible is that it has been midsectioned seven inches, which means that a horizontal slice seven inches thick was cut out of the center of the car.

The job involved placing a chalk line around the car at a carefully determined distance above its floor level. Then the second line of the section was scribed around the car with a pair of dividers. Vertical lines were marked both before and behind the openings of the front fenders, and dropped below the headlights to preserve the fender flange. The same procedure was followed at the rear fenders and below the rear decklid.

The doors and the hood were worked on separately, and remaining body members were hand cut or torched off. When all the center section had been removed, the top of the body was lowered onto the bottom half. Then, with welding, finishing, and painting completed, Russell’s car with a different look took to the streets.

This was just about the same time that Russell was working on the fiberglass Detroiter, which we already know was a sort of cut-down contemporary Ford. Could this modified ’53 have been the body that he took the Detroiter mold from?

In the same article (Ford Times frequently ran articles on modified Fords at that time), we see something that doesn’t look at all like a Ford.

The sports roadster shown above is the completed dream of an uncle and a nephew, Paolo Cordero di Montezemolo and Beneventani Marco, of Turin, Italy. The men bought a used Ford V-8 engine and collaborated on building a special tubular frame. They designed the body, which was built by a Turin firm.

The engine was reworked to four liters, approximately 244 cubic inches, and equipped with four carburetors, overhead valves, and 8:1 heads, to develop 180hp at 4,000 RPM. Marco says that the car can be completely dismounted in a few minutes, and has been clocked at more than 130 MPH.

Paolo was no mere enthusiast. Unless his is a common name in Italy, he’s the guy who gave his name to the Cordero di Montezemolo winery. Presumably, he’s somehow related to Ferrari chairman Luca Cordero do Montezemolo, though after a quick trip through Luca’s family tree, I don’t see exactly how.

A little more identifiable as a Ford, H.M. Bennett’s 1953 Victoria, also mentioned in the Ford Times article, nonetheless had some extensive work done to it.

The unusual rear effect of the 1953 Victoria, above right, owned by H.M. Bennett of Dearborn, Michigan, was achieved by cutting off the taillights and fender backs, leaving enough metal for welding, and inserting fourteen-inch lengths of ’53 fenders. The result is a rear fender length of twenty inches greater than normal, six inches of which is due to special taillights.

Keep in mind that these were essentially brand-new cars that Bennett and Russell were cutting up and welding back together, just to see what they’d look like with different styling. They either didn’t see the cars as hefty investments or they had big brass ones. By the way, no word of whether Bennett was any relation to the infamous Harry Bennett.

Enduring Automotive History Myths, No. 467 and 467a: Electric cars, while popular around the dawn of the automotive age, were quickly abandoned when the invention of the electric self-starter prompted the widespread adoption of internal combustion. They have only been recently reconsidered as a viable means of transportation. Gasoline-electric hybrids were similarly abandoned after Dr. Porsche’s early prototype and only recently reconsidered.

If automotive history were solely comprised of production vehicles we could certainly buy into the above myths. But as we all know, it’s in the margins where some of the most fascinating stuff goes on. There certainly were dead periods for production electric and gas-electric hybrid vehicles and other alternate-propulsion vehicles over a number of decades of the 20th Century, but an almost endless litany of tinkerers and backyard engineers still messed around with cars not primarily powered by gasoline engines during that time. After all, speculation on the finite nature of gasoline as a fuel began as early as 1907, and if the Depression didn’t adequately drive home the lessons of scarcity, then fuel rationing during World War II did. It was the latter influence that led to a minor boom in homebuilt electric cars in the immediate post-war period and that specifically led Ray Russell to build his various wartime hydraulic-drive cars.

Against this background, then, it’s not too surprising that a bunch of high-level thinkers got together well before the first oil crisis of the 1970s to exchange ideas and display prototypes of vehicles designed to minimize dependence on petroleum products. As we saw from last year’s post on the Symposium on Low Pollution Power Systems Development and on the following post on the McKee-built Sundancer, research into such cars extended back into the mid-1960s and earlier. What’s slightly surprising, however, is the fact that GM not only presented a pair of small cars at the event – one electric, the other designed for fuel efficiency – they had actually built the cars a few years prior, well before the general public much cared about such things.

Those two cars actually came from a somewhat larger initiative at GM that resulted in the four 511 and 512 Urban concept cars, all runners, as Tom McCahill demonstrated in the October 1969 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. The sole XP511 car, a three-wheeler, used an Opel 1.1L four-cylinder engine to push around its 1,300 pounds of weight. The three 512 cars, all four wheelers, used gasoline (XP512), electric (XP512E) and gasoline/electric hybrid (XP512H) drivetrains. Built in 1969 for Transpo ’72, none of the three directly influenced any production car, though it does appear that XP512H’s hybrid technology – possibly borrowing ideas from GM’s many years of building diesel hybrid powertrains for locomotives – did show up again in GM’s somewhat larger XP833, and GM’s research into electric and hybrid powertrains did result in a number of patents, filed from 1960 to 1971 (by no means a complete list; if anybody comes across any more, please add them in the comments):

3,223,908 – Electric Vehicle Control
3,323,032 – Electric Drive System
3,476,999 – Motor Power Supply System
3,477,002 – Electric Drive Motor Logic Control System
3,551,685 – Electric Vehicle Drive System
3,564,366 – Motor Control System for a Direct Current Traction Motor
3,564,369 – Motor Control System for a Direct Current Traction Motor
3,566,165 – Electric Vehicle Drive Motor
3,568,018 – Electric Drive and Brake Arrangement and Method
3,686,549 – Power Control System

What happened to these four experimentals, nobody seems to know. Presumably, GM held on to them over the years, but the GM Heritage Center hasn’t replied to our requests for more information about them.

UPDATE (18.April 2011): As Frank the Crank reminded us recently, AMC’s all-electric Amitron concept from about that same time period was very similar to the 512 cars.