- Murder in a corporate office, financial crimes and possible mob ties. A CEO with a surprising past. Now, even though this story takes place almost half a century ago,
people keep coming back to it. But of all the failed auto startups, why are people still
captivated by the story of the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation? Patience, geez, I'm gonna tell you. This is everything you need to know to get up to speed on the Dale. (upbeat music) - [Female Announcer]
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to compare quotes for free and find your perfect policy today. (hood slamming) - Ah, Honey, my finger was there. - Oh, I'm so sorry babe, I didn't see it. - Of course you didn't see it. - You know, I'm sensitive about my vision. - DeLorean, Tucker, Vector. I hardly even knew her. The graveyard of fallen auto
startups is far from empty. All struggled with financing
and delivery dates. Even tech giants like Dyson, the guys who make the best vacuum and Apple, the guys
who make the best watch have dipped their toes in the water only to realize that making
cars is a tricky business. Tesla and maybe Rivian, we'll have to see, is kind of the exception
that proves the rule. But even after a decade of success, their cars are plagued
with quality control and reliability issues. And in the seventies,
one company found out just how hard it really was and became a notorious scandal. Because of the gas crisis,
Americans were ready to trade those underpowered,
living room sized, luxury mobiles for smaller,
fuel efficient, economy cars. We've talked about this a
million times on this channel. We made a video about it, check it out. But no one was really
making them in the U.S. yet, so there was a wide open market for anyone daring enough to
go up against the big three. Which brings us to Dale
Clifft, with two F's. Now Clifft was an inventor,
an avid motorcyclist in Los Angeles. A few years before the crisis, Clifft, with two F's,
built the commuter cycle. An inexpensive, motorcycle
based, all weather vehicle for cruising around SoCal because you know we have so much weather. It was made of simple metal tubing, covered in red naugahyde, a fake leather, that covers hot tubs mostly and it was powered by a 305CC
Honda Super Hawk motorcycle that was welded directly into the frame. Yes, I said motorcycle,
not motorcycle engine. It used the whole bike. Basically, he built a roof. Now, even though Dale
saw his vinyl tricycle as a minor engineering success, he wasn't trying to be no business daddy and we wouldn't still be
talking about it today if it weren't for someone
with let's just say, grander ambitions. Enter Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael. Now, Liz was an associate at the United States Marketing Institute. One of those firms that promised
to connect wacky inventors with business daddies. You got an invention? We'll find you a daddy. Cha ching, cha ching, cha ching. Liz was on the hunt for an
ultra efficient commuter car, so when Clifft's eye-catching prototype got someone in a restaurant
to connect with her, she was stoked. Liz met clifft and offered
him $1,001 for his invention, as well as a promise of
3 million in royalties once the car went to market. She also named the car Dale, in his honor. Such a kind, thoughtful woman and such a good name for a car. Turns out clifft would
never get that money. So who was this lady? Here's her side of the story. According to Liz, she built
her first car at 18 years old, then she got a degree in
mechanical engineering. She also, casually married
a NASA structural engineer whose death left her a
single mother of five. Now you couldn't engineer
a better origin story for the women's lib movement. All right, tack that onto the fact that Liz wanted to quote rule
the auto industry like a queen and you got yourself star, pal. Liz was also a libertarian
and named her new car company the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation, after a business in Arn
Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", a great movie starring Sean Hannity. As a staunch individualist,
Liz was unapologetic about her motivation
for going eco-friendly. Sure creating a fuel efficient
car was great and all, but she was actually looking to capitalize on consumers fears about the gas crisis. Liz told the world that the Dale would have an 850CC motorcycle engine, capable of getting 70 miles per gallon. All right, just for context,
other cars at the time averaged 11.9 miles to the gallon. People freaked and a deposit of $500, the prototype got a
whole bunch of attention. Like a bulldog wearing Oakley's attention. Public wasn't even turned off by the Dale's banana on wheels appearance or its unconventional three wheel layout, which reduced the car's
weight and friction. Folks had a Vietnam hangover and the gas crisis got'em scared. They were ready to feel some optimism. 70 miles per gallon, fill her up baby! But here's the thing, people weren't gonna plunk down deposits for a motorcycle with
a hot tub roof on it. This ain't Mad Max,
Pleatherdome, All right? So even though the efficiency claims weren't completely unrealistic, there was definitely an asterisk to them. With a small displacement
motorcycle engine and a frills free body, reducing
weight, wherever possible, 70 miles to the gallon
was theoretically doable. But the line between motivated
entrepreneur like him, and snake oil salesman
like him can start to blur once you begin drinking your own oil. Liz was so certain of
the threat that she posed to the Detroit big three that workers at the 20th
Century's California offices remember security being nuts. Like 2007 iPhone development lab nuts And there were a lot of
bodyguards, big dudes in pin striped suits, brass knuckles. There were also fat stacks of cash that appeared on Liz's desk every Friday. Briefcases full of it. In fact, with 357 magnums next to'em. Ring, ring. Hello? Good fellas, we got a
mob situation over here. But if private doubts were forming within the company's rakes, Liz's success only seemed
to be picking up steam in the national consciousness. The Dale was getting ever
more press attention, thanks in no small part to
Liz's larger than life persona and canny ability to
drive the media narrative. And she was honing her origin story. In the age of the feminist movement, the tale of one woman going up against the big three of Detroit was
a layup for magazine covers and TV interviews. Liz also got wilder with her claims about the Dale's selling points. She said it's body of
rocket structural resin, I think she made that
term up, called Rigidex, definitely made that one up, was nine times stronger than steel and would never dent or shatter. But Liz was so sure about its miraculous plastic construction that she
even took her own engineers to a shooting demonstration. She fired a revolver at a Rigidex cup (gun firing) and it (beep) shattered, dude. It blew up, blew up like what happens when you shoot a plastic
cup with a revolver. And that was the last time
that a demo ever went poorly. - Oh, man! - Regardless of this, the company felt that
everything was set to go. Spirits were high. People were firing their
357 magnums into the air left and right, like
so many Yosemite Sams! The Dale was set to start
rolling off the assembly line in June 1975, but there
was one little problem. The car did not exist. The dream that Liz was selling required parts fabricated from scratch and the inexperienced team
still hadn't delivered anything resembling the car that was being sold. They didn't actually put together a Dale that could drive under its own power, much less anything that was ready to start being manufactured at scale. The hype around 20th
Century Motor Corporation and the personality at its center, triggered the spidey senses
of a couple reporters at KABC, who thought something was
fishy about this whole deal. So they arranged for an interview with Liz and when they arrived at
the corporate headquarters they noticed an officer from the LA District Attorney's office, who was himself, snooping around. Although, when I think
a detective does it, it's called investigating. The investigator, told them to keep an eye on this place, Jack. Now the ABC reporters weren't car experts, so they came up with a plan. They paid a retired car
engineer a hundred bucks to take a tour of the factory with them. He pretended to be part of the crew. Afterwards, he told reporters on air, that everything going on
inside that Dale garage was not lining up with Liz's claims but did this affect pre-orders? Sure did, but not in the
way that you'd expect. The publicity had the
exact opposite effect. One of the reporters believed
sales increased 200%. Now here's a little business, 101 for you, legally, if you're taking deposits on cars or anything that doesn't exist, you have to put that money
into a special bank account, think of it like a piggy bank,
until the cars can be built. Liz wasn't having any of
that nanny state mumbo jumbo. Laws my ass, suck my butt. She needed those fat stacks to keep the lights on, make payroll. So while the ABC report might
not have slowed the brakes on the Dale hype, it did put pressure on the state government
to take a closer look at the company's shady
investment practices. In the fall of 1974, a
cease and desist order from California demanded the 20th Century Motor Car
Company stop taking pre-orders. Liz blamed the auto industry and their friends in the government. She claimed that there had been acid in the plastic vats. Plans stolen, fricking locks busted, fires started, false reports turned into various regulatory bodies and the company continued
to collect deposits on the unmade cars in direct violation of the state injunction. ABC captured this on camera in an embarrassing follow-up broadcast that shut the offices down for the day. The conflict between ABC
and 20th Century Motors was only heating up. One of the reporters received a cash bribe that he believed came from Liz herself. And it didn't take long for
him to poke around and realize that the Universities Liz claimed to have gotten degrees from, had surprisingly never heard of her. The walls were closing in
and 20th Century Motors began to run into money problems. Paycheck started to bounce, but a lot of the people
inside the Dale project were true believers led along by Liz, who must have maxed out her charisma stats in the character creation screen. She'd gotten her team to buy
into the dream of the Dale and a lot of them weren't ready
to turn on her, quite yet. Besides she had one more
trick up her sleeve. A thing I like to call Japanese investors. Everything hinged on this. As the Japanese economy was heating up and taking over the automotive sector, a 30 million cash infusion
would be the only thing that could finally restore
the company's credibility and put it back on the path to success. But in order to pull it off, the Dale was gonna have
to finally prove itself on the hardest place for
a car to prove itself, the road. Liz ordered her team
to get the car running, even though it was unfinished. After a sleepless crunch period the development team brought
the working prototype to a parking lot where
Liz and her workers met with foreign businessmen
for a demonstration. And at the moment of
truth, the car started. It worked but there
was one little problem, the test driver eager to
resolve lingering uncertainty about the three wheel design stability, juked hard into a turn that briefly caused the Dale to tip up on its side and scrape its body against the asphalt. Not a great look and enough to scare off the would-be investors. Liz was irate. She called the test an
abortion on three wheels. She's got a way with words. Now, other tadpole
style, three wheeled cars have proven stable over the years. So what went wrong? According to at least
one of the engineers, this kind of minor flaw could
be worked out in testing, but sadly, the Dale was
outta time and outta money. Oh, and there's one other little hiccup. Totally normal stuff for any business getting up on it's feet. A guy got shot in the head,
three times inside their office. The main suspect was 20th
Century employee, Jack Oliver, who had previously
served time with salesman William Miller in prison. According to Oliver's son, Miller had come up with a brilliant plan to kill an investigator
from the securities and exchange commission. Oliver tried to stop him,
they argued about it. Miller turned the gun on Oliver, bada bing, bada boom, self defense. Good fellas much? Turns out, the kind of
company Liz was keeping only brought further scrutiny. But that didn't stop the
Dale mock-up from appearing as a prize on The Pice is Right. Did the prize booker
on that show just like not know about the guy with three bullet holes
in his head at this point? Man, you could get away with
a lot before the internet. Not that it did anything to stop the heat. Soon after Liz Carmichael and nine other 20th Century employees were
indicted on charges of fraud. As investigators had come to believe the Dale would never be anything more than an empty fiberglass shell. When she learned of the charges, Liz and her family went on the run and this is when the story
caught national attention for an entirely different reason. Now police got a warrant
to enter Liz's home, where they found wigs and padded bras and what a police report at the time, referred to as a device
used by female impersonators to disguise their sex. Now this led authorities to discover that Liz was a transgender woman who had been wanted on
counterfeiting charges dating back to 1961,
when she still identified publicly as a man. Before that, she had been fired from a job selling vacuum cleaners for pocketing customers down payments. Sound familiar? In April of 1975, a few months
after going on the lamb, Elizabeth was caught
in Florida, of course. She was sent back to LA to
face charges of grand theft, corporate securities
fraud, and conspiracy. Though it had nothing
to do with the charges that Liz faced, news coverage fixated on the status of her gender
confirmation surgery. And there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether in the eyes of the law, she was a man or a woman. While awaiting trial, she was housed at the LA County Men's Jail,
where she was unfortunately and very predictably beaten
up a lot by other inmates. She had to petition the court for the right to be addressed
and tried as a woman at her trial, which she was granted. Now this is a very high profile,
landmark case, at the time. To many people living in
1970's American society, Liz Carmichael's gender
identity was in and of itself evidence of her guilt. And I hate to say it, I feel
like it would be the same now. Not only did it mark her as someone living on the
fringes of proper society, but to them, the shifting
nature of her public identity suggested an ulterior motive. Dick Carlson, one of the ABC
reporters who exposed her fraud focused his follow up
stories on her gender speculating She'd been living as a woman, as a means to both escape
the law and get publicity. In a previous reporting
job, Carlson had outed a San Diego transgender
tennis player and his son, Tucker Carlson, would go on to
continue the family business of anti-trans crusading and generally, just being a giant piece of (beep). (beep), Tucker Carlson. But to hear Liz's family
and friends tell it, her transition was a fact of who she was. She had lived as G. Elizabeth Carmichael for a decade before the Dale
was even a twinkle in her eye and it's not like she reverted
to her previous identity when the cops were looking for her. But this was a hard thing to convince the public of in the 1970's, given her criminal past and her lies about her qualifications and the entire operation she was running at 20th Century Motor Corp. The whole thing was a mess admittedly. At her trial, Liz chose
to represent herself, which is, you know, always
a really good choice. Do you want a lawyer? No way. I know best. She called herself a pioneer who dared to go against Detroit. And though the jury deliberated
for a lengthy 16 days, eventually Liz was found
guilty on 26 counts. Her customers and investors
had been defrauded on an estimated one to $3 million. Liz was sentenced to two
to 20 years in men's prison and ordered to pay $30,000 in restitution but she wasn't gonna go
quietly into the night. No boy. After running out of her appeals in 1980, she escaped while out on bail. Now the story went quiet
for a long time after that. The gas crisis and the tale of the Dale faded into auto history. That is until 1989, when an
Unsolved Mysteries episode led to the capture of
G Elizabeth Carmichael, who was going by the name of
Catherine Elizabeth Johnson. Liz was found operating a
roadside flower selling business in, I swear, I'm not making
this up, Dale, Texas. Liz served two years in prison
and died of cancer in 2004. One of the Dale prototypes is now housed in the Peterson Auto
Museum in Los Angeles, along with our trucks. And its story got renewed attention when HBO released a four part, docu-series about it last year. It looked at the details of the case, but also Liz's complicated legacy as a part of transgender history. The story of the Dale is complicated, surprising and tragic for
basically everyone involved. Sometimes the only thing
separating a get rich quick scheme from entrepreneurial genius is how successful it all turns out. - [Announcer] HI CAR is
officially back from the dead, so naturally we have brand
new BoostCreeps shirts to welcome it back. BoostCreeps can be scary, I know, but they're perfectly harmless, I promise. So go get your new
BoostCreeps shirts today at Donutmedia.com. - Thank you guys so much
for watching this video. I think this is a really
interesting story. I really encourage you to
check out the HBO series and check out the past
podcast that we recorded about this very complicated
and super interesting, and just like, such a great character. Hit that subscribe button make sure you don't miss anything. You wanna get some donut merch, I'm really, really excited about our merch program right now. We're dropping a new thing every week. My best friend in the
world, Andy, makes it all. So go to donutmedia.com
to get some of that. Thanks to Nick and Gio
and Christina and Joe for helping me make this video. I love you.
