WORST CAR FAILURES OF ALL TIME | PETERSEN TOUR

hello everyone welcome from the Petersen Automotive Museum I'm Jason the director of education here at the Museum and I'm standing in front of our vault which is a collection of over 250 cars spread out over a city block size parking area today we are going to be looking at a little bit different a segment than some of our previous videos we are here and have in our collection some of the most iconic vehicles of history the the winners the race winners the the great sellers and all that but the history the automobile would not be complete without also looking at some of those other cars the ones that may not have won as many races or may not even hit the factory floor today we're gonna be looking at what we may want to call the failures although they each have an interesting story to tell on their own so join me as we go off to see the also-rans and in times the never ends so we will start right here at the beginning of the car just like every new item new object new good new machine whatever else there's a cycle of innovation someone comes up with the idea and you get the early adopters the early innovators at and soon you have all kinds of companies all waiting to take part in it to where eventually you get that Slough of disappointment where everything sorts itself out early days of the car no different than any other good you had all kinds of companies wanting to be a part of this right this particularly was true after Henry Ford in 1908 launches the Model T and turns the car from being a limited production good largely tailoring to wealthy audiences to amass produce good all kinds of people could make money then so you had all kinds of companies form including in 1909 the demo car company whose car was to beam up now this starts off with ch Ritter deciding he wants to be part of this new car craze and opens up a company and starts thinking of a name for it and well we're in Detroit we make motor cars maybe possibly we go by the Detroit Motor Car Company well that doesn't have a lot of zing to it and it also opens up the possibility of confusion considering Henry Ford's first company had been the Detroit automobile company so they're like okay what do we do with a Detroit motor car Detroit Motor Car ah perhaps we just shortened it to be the demo car company and we will name our car demo and to make sure everyone knows how to pronounce EA that we will pronounce it we will put a line above vo so it is clearly demo because that has an added benefit in that it sounds French Detroit the Paris of the West whole lot of attention on French history and like in the area and also early days of the car France was where was that for innovation and style on that so slapping demo on the front of this gave it extra little panache snazzy car whatever else also marketed cheap a Mardis Model T at this time will been close to $900 you could have had this beauty for about 550 okay all seemed great perfectly said up to be the next for the next one to take over they open their doors in September of 1909 in August of 1910 less than a year later they go bankrupt and production of the vehicle white wines down and they're done making cars by 1911 their Factory at 1305 Bellevue was then bought by Harry Ford not Henry Ford Harry Ford a completely unrelated Ford family person not released no relation at all to Henry but he goes off to start making cars in their old factory for Saxon demo wasn't the only one like this there were all kinds of other companies formed some of them companies starting from scratch others companies that had been around a while doing other things that decided to enter into the car fray Babcock has excellent example this is the H H Babcock carriage company of Watertown New York not to be confused with the Babcock electric carriage company of Buffalo New York similar names completely separate companies HH Babcock it actually started in the mid 1800s making carriages and they got pretty good at it and we're fairly famed for their carriages but 1900s hit everyone realizes the carriage is on its way out the future is on automobiles so in 1908 they started producing cars this happens to be in 1911 Babcock build in Watertown New York somewhat cool um cool because it actually survived living in upstate New York and all the weather and everything else but the company itself would not survive long as far as a car maker they stopped automobile production in 1915 realize it's not smart to go back into carriage production so what they decide to do instead is become a automotive body company and they actually become very good at that they become one of the leading suppliers of ambulance bodies during the First World War now as your lorry we're gonna be focusing on the companies themselves that were short lived for the most part a couple side stories and all that if you get right down to it many of the most famous car companies at some point fail right we have a limited set out there so even though once in the day companies like as you look ahead Duesenberg and like were where was that a lot of these companies don't survive the depression or the world wars our dela Hayes on the other side the lodge's these are our companies that are gone now but we won't really consider them failures cuz in their day they were really where was that it was just a matter of time of circumstances in time undermine them our focus today is largely on the ones that never really became the thing for example Ruxton this is 1929 Ruxton and the Ruxton goes down in fame largely because of some technological innovations it seems to bring although they aren't necessarily the first the story starts here with a gentleman by the name of William Mahler he is working for a company called the bud body company that makes automotive bodies and he has a plan okay he's the engineer for the firm and he realizes that there's some new technologies coming out okay among these front-wheel drive Ruxton and cord which will mention in a second I'm get a lot of credit for being the first two front-wheel drive but that's among the American companies France here again is where it's at for innovation Trachta had largely developed a lot of the underlying I'm technologies of front-wheel drive in the area in the mid twenties that's why a lot of front-wheel drive vehicles have a constant velocity joined in them known as a tractor joint so internationally as far as the innovation American companies were not first but Ruxton was one of the first American companies to actually introduce it into their vehicles if they existed Moeller has the idea they're not around yet he needs to find money and he has a perfect plan for his new idea of introducing a front-wheel drive vehicle into the American market okay he's going to design it they're gonna sell it to automaker who then will contract with bud body remember the company Moeller works for to build the bodies for the car genius plan however he isn't able on his own he's a good not necessarily the best marketer on that he isn't able to get it up and running but there's someone else on the board that works a bud he's actually on the board for Bud named Archie Andrews Archie Andrews is the one that has the marketing skills and more importantly has the connections he also worked for he also was on the board for a company known as up motor so he uses his connections to go and try to market the car no one wants it still they go through a series of companies looking for someone who would want to invest in this can't find anyone at some point they're like well let's just get the money to help build it and they find an investor they think who'd be interested by the name of William Roxton they go so far as starting the company and naming it after mr. Ruxton who wanted nothing to do with it and actually gave them some legal trouble over the time because he didn't want his name attached to a car he had no no no role no part to play in developing eventually Archie Andrews and William bowler do find someone willing to build it the Moon Motor Company out of st. Louis well their progress is not as fast as Archie Andrews wants so Archie Andrews starts buying up stock of the company to where eventually he's able to beast back control of the Ruxton and the president of moon motors locks himself in his office in protest over the whole thing still not produced yet by the early 30s there early 1930 there is actually movement because most the production plan had been taking over by Kissel motors in Wisconsin great it's finally someone to help build this car which is fairly unique it is a front-wheel drive vehicle allows it to be much lower average height of cars of time about six feet this is 54 inches high okay they painted in period colors and all that there were striking some of them got these would light headlights which striking Art Deco cool and all that not the best headlights but they look stylish though everyone wants them anyways the Kissel company begins producing them Andrews still not very happy with their progress tries to pull the thing the whole the same thing and starts buying up their stock Kissel though Dube reacts differently than moon they basically declare bankruptcy to black hole which ends the life story of the Ruxton after only 96 cars have been produced so important in the history of American automotive innovation not so relevant in terms of number of cars that hit the market as we're walking by we have a Cordell 29 which actually beat the Reston to the American market by a few weeks to be the first American produced front-wheel drive vehicle then Duesenberg which goes out of business in the 30s after dominating the market for luxury vehicles in America before then pierce-arrow another early player founded by a company that had built bird cages innovators in style first presidential cars were pierce arrows but another company they're gonna survive the depression now we're entering into our outer vault I'm going to return to the spot in just a second but we may need to make a quick jaunt around the corner into our shop for a couple Southern California tails I have to Southern California cars that fit well into this the narrative we're setting up today the first is a 1920 a 1922 leach so Martin leach was in the early part of the last century one of LA's primary car dealers he was famous for the number of cars he could sell he had basically I'm taking over a lot of the market in in town well he got so enamored with his ability to sell cars he decided not only do I want to sell them I want to make them I want to design that my when to build them and like and so he launches the Leech company he buys out a factory that formerly been owned by Harry Morgan a famed racecar designer of the day and everything else Harry Miller sorry not Morgan Harry Miller and decides to use that Factory in Vernon to make his cars he actually uses Harry Miller designs straight-6 engines in them and he does a lot to make it a California car because that's his market place that's what he knows and that's what he thinks he can sell the top that you're seeing right now is known as a California top it's trying to balance the freedom and win in your hair of an open-top car with the comfort and weather protection of a hardtop and by trying to do both it does neither perfectly but hey at least an attempt of something you also have these lighted step plates that allow you to easily get in not a full running board length but the lighting helps give it a little extra panache there's also inside built into the dash a cigar lighter okay he's trying to find little things that would add something extra to the car so you get these these added accoutrements you get a Harry Miller design straight-6 engine everything else leach feels he is perfectly set up to take over the LA market the problem he faces is that the engines he was putting in were not the most reliable throwing the fact that the top itself had issues with leakage and like all of his dreams never really came to be the car didn't run or perform quite to the level it wanted and so here like many of our stories the company goes out of business there were only about 500 car leashes made by the end of the day and we believe this is the only if not the only at least one of the only survivors right next to it we're gonna briefly jump ahead in time this is a 1974 Dutcher but by the steam motor works out of San Diego early 70s there's great discussion in California about smog there's general interest in the country and fuel efficiency and the like and there's there's talk about getting past fossil fuels right a discussion we may hear up today that was going on 50 years ago what did God is in the late 60s a California congressman and state legislative some Blee had actually started proposing laws and all that that would ban gasoline-powered cars by the mid 70s none of those really got off the ground but it did start pushing regulators and like into what can we do to try to solve the smog problem and it was generally believed getting away from gasoline-powered vehicles would be the primary way of doing it so the first step they took were setting up steam-powered buses which works and there was some progress made on getting some of those but solving just the bus problem doesn't solve the majority of the issue because most people in California at the time were driving cars so they put in a policy that would reward a company that would come up with a steam-powered option two companies sign up for the program Aerojet al Sacramento's plan was just to think old Chevy Vega and repurpose it get a steam engine in it what steam Motor Works did is they said no we're gonna start from scratch so they actually built a car from scratch even though it has some stylings reminiscent of others they actually started from the ground floor so the car was built as a steam-powered vehicle from the get-go not just retrofitted to be you want well kind of works there are some benefits of steam there's also some drawbacks right it's it is less emissions than an internal combustion gasoline powered car but it's also not as it needs a lot more fuel right so there wasn't a whole of development of it past this to begin resolving some of those problems but it did at least demonstrate that hey cars could run on other things even though we may need to think through with some of the technologies now join me back where we had left so just we as we talked about the beginning when you had the launch of the car there were all kinds of companies that came into being all wanting to get a piece of this new market eventually you had had series of consolidations companies going out of business mergers happen to everything else that got you down to a core group we think of the big three but throw in NASH and some other companies there was a few more but anyways there have been great consolidation World War two comes along and what winds up happening is this is going to completely shake up the industry because all those companies that grown to dominate are now no longer making cars they're off making war equipment tanks and trucks and the like coming out of the war you have huge amounts of pent-up demand he put out been buying consumer car consumer goods such as cars and all that for a while you have GIS coming home that want cool little sports cars on that and the American car companies were having to retool you have to come up with new designs you have to reget get your factory back reworked for car production rather than tank production the like so there's an opportunity so you have another phase just like at the beginning of the car there's a new phase of new companies jumping into the market and I have a few examples right here first is the 1948 Davis to ban this actually starts life as a design before the war Frank Curtis who is mostly famous for always worked with Curtis Kraft building race cars had also tinkered around with some other types of cars before the war joel thorne a racecar driver of the day had actually commissioned Frank Curtis to design a road-going car for him that car was known as the Californian and would have looked very very similar to this the war comes along though nothing really he goes on with the car and all that it's resurrected after the war when Gary Davis a local sales person buys the design and decides he's going to turn it into a car that will take over the world okay his thought is that look this is a new era we're into the future we're into rockets it's from flying saucer days it's all these things we need a car that's looking ahead rather than looking behind and this is what the future looks like okay it is an interesting vehicle it is a three wheel design a tricycle design although not very stable normally if you do want a three wheel car you probably want your single wheel and back but regardless hey here's an attempt for it that mirrors the bins pan and motor bogging the started the whole industry in many ways since you have that that single wheel up front it allows you to get that nice aerodynamic looking right front cone you don't want headlights getting in the way of that so this is a early use of hidden retractable headlights this hardtop is removable so the whole thing could basically look like this bottom part there are built-in jacks that if you do have a flat tire or something you can just pop a lever and a jack will come down and you can jack it up it's called the Davis divan divan being the Arabic word for sofa because it basically is a driving sofa now that opens up the idea if you're trying to take over the car market you need to be able to fit a family in Gary Davis would drive it around the shopping mall parking lots and say yep sure thing perfect for the family and he would put four people in it they happen to generally be for American Airlines flight attendants that would more easily fit in than maybe a standard sized family of four but regardless the idea is that this is the future and this is what he was trying to sell people on is it's radically different looking because the future is different okay now he was a salesperson and he could market it great he had people lining up to be dealers for it and he had promised all those investors as well as employees hey I'll pay you all kinds of money once I sell about a million of these well he wound up making about 16 of them so investors employees not the most happy with the deal pursue legal action he actually gets convicted of a couple dozen fraud counts and winds up spending a couple years I think a stay at a a work camp he comes out though and he does find a way of making millions and millions of dollars not selling davus two vans but rather if you've ever been to a theme park and been inside a bumper car over half a bumper car designs or Gary Davis originals so you kind of see maybe where he got his design cues problem the same year Gary Davis was building the divan someone else was out there thinking they could launch a car company in this economic market opportunity that has been created by the big producers having to retool and having a break Preston Tucker is among those whereas Gary Davis was trying to envision the future and others were trying to build the new next sports car Preston Tucker's focus was on safety he thought cars particularly as they were getting speedier to speed here and all that were not as safe as they could be so he wanted to develop a car that would be safe okay you have such things as a cyclops headlight in the front that will turn with you as you steer it's one of the first cars you could get with seatbelts being standard there was lots more padding around in the dash and the like okay for power he actually went the Bell Helicopter company and got a air-cooled helicopter engine that his engineers actually converted or at least worked on converting to liquid called name the whole idea is that there's all kinds of things going in to make us safe a car as possible and he's pushing the boat the the bounds of innovation at this time well just like Gary Davis he was pretty good at marketing it he was selling it to people and getting dealers to sign up and everything else but along the way and there's some discussion over what exactly happened he gets indicted for fraud if you want to go down one path it's because he had over promised all those people giving him money and signing up for exclusive dealerships and all that he was not able to deliver the cars another side of the story is is that this is when the big car companies eventually decided they didn't want the competition so they limited his access to resources and everything else I'm not here to make judgment on that but the idea is is that Preston Tucker gets indicted after 37 had been produced the original goal had been to make 50 they wind up making 51 but the last 14 after he get dieded after 37 are largely built by ex employees and volunteers and all that that take what they have and put together as cars one thing that makes this Tucker particularly special you can see here with the Tucker family seal this is one of Preston Tucker's Tucker's so gives it a little bit extra panache the last one I might want to mention quickly here it's one I I debated about including all that because of what we mean by failure this is a 1954 Keizer Darrin now the companies involved may not have failed as spectacularly as say the Davis motor car company okay basically Henry Kaiser had Kaiser industries he hooks up with the CEO of grant Paige motors in 1945 for them to start making cars okay and so you make cars for a while and everything else they had the Henry J that they sold that was also famous because it was sold within Sears Sears stores as the Allstate well in 1954 they decided they went in a sports car so they pair up with Dutch Darren who's a california-based designer and the like and the goal is to create a a kind of innovative sports car and the outgrowth is the Kaiser Darren 161 it is innovative this is the first production American production car built all thought fiberglass the pocket doors which if anyone's ever had one in their house realized they're not the easiest to maintain but it does give it a pretty sporty look and makes it easy to park in tight spaces okay they wind up building a little bit less than 500 of these before they decide the costs are too high for the amount they're selling and the whole thing goes away and the kaisers automotive company and all that also this year is going to go away when it's fully picked apart and eventually becomes kaiser-jeep part of other companies now if you follow me this way this will be another one of those cars that I kind of debated about everything else because if consider one of the most beautiful cars ever made but the company was short live so I think it's relevant for our discussion this is a 1947 key satalia 202 coupe much like we just set up with the American story Italy had a similar story in the coming out of the war everything needs to kind of retool and what happened in Italy is you had a lot of industrialist and a lot of people and all that that just starts scooping up Fiat parts that there were lots of around and trying to make their own car company out of Pierrot do zo was a fairly wealthy Italian industrialist who formed the company Campania industrial Sportiva italia otherwise known as cheese italia and he took his Fiat parts and in the case of the 202 actually had the resources to be able to go to pnina one of the most famous coachbuilders of the day to create this very stylish body for it it's considered while the earliest attempts at designing a car as a unified whole so many pre-war cars you had a fender bolted to a hood bolted to a cabin and everything else it was all very distinct parts but the cheese Italia is a single envelope the entire body flows into one another so it's it's kind of setting the stage for what modern car design would look like it was considered so beautiful in 1951 the Museum of Modern Art in New York had an exhibit called eight automobiles that they featured what they considered eight eight cars that really capture the beauty and can be considered as rolling sculpture this is one of them in the 70s MoMA actually gets what he's donated by Pininfarina to be part of their permit collection so he I'm setting up the story the doozy oh and she said how you were able to make one of the most beautiful cars a trendsetter for all autumn rose from this point forward what happened Porsche happened one of the ways the do zo wanted to build the chest Italian mark and all that is to build a super successful Grand Prix racer and dominate racing ok he contracts out with Porsche oh the development of the engine gives them a whole lot of money that is money that Porsche uses to get Ferdinand away from his legal troubles in France that come out of the war well all that money went to eventually coming up with the engine which if you're a Porsche aficionado this is the type 360 but all that money got them an engine but also basically bankrupted the company so cheese to tell you never really fully survived all of that financial boondoggle the 202 though beautiful and striking didn't sell enough to make up for that and so cheese to tell you as a company is going to fade away now next is another one that I don't know if I can call it as failure as much because we aren't sure exactly what the grand plans would have bet but it is a limited run car that I can't add on a bunch of other cars by the producer so it's close enough it's a 1926 pedroso so the marque san carlos did Pedrosa was a for me a career for king alfonso spain and he had actually worked with marques Soriano in another car venture earlier in the 20s well they had some issues with each other and kind of went their own way but petrosal kept tinkering in his garage and all that and thought he had a plan for the next phase of sports cars he had some pretty interesting ideas this is a early car using a straight-8 engine I know Bugatti had Harry Miller design straight eighths early on in that but this is a straight-8 engine but he went a little bit further than anyone else was doing is he put a double overhead cam on it and that was a variable time cam there's actually gauges dials that you can dial on the dashboard that allow you to control the timing of your car which unheard of in the 1920s he gets so excited about all this innovation he's doing and all this technology's throwing in the car that he really wants to go out and test it it's but he hasn't built the whole thing out so he actually grows and grabs some wicker seats off his patio put some fabric over them and that becomes the actual seating on the car okay now here again this is hard for me to label a failure because who knows what would have happened everything else there's no idea if he had grand plans of building a whole huge company within everything else in the short-term only two were made the other one doesn't survive world war two so this is the only surviving petrol so in existence now as we're walking by many non failures right we're going to wrap the corner my next car and we'll throw in there because it didn't go anywhere it could have but one thing is to view this car from is that this was a concept if we are going to include all concepts any list of failures the industry would be riddled with them there's all kinds of ideas to get floated that just for various reasons of circumstances or timing never get anywhere but just so I'm not walking a whole lot without saying anything I will bring up the dodge storm so this is actually a fairly interesting car this is a Fred's eighth or junior design Fred's a ders dad front Slater juniors dad Fred's Eider was one of the three musketeers who had been Studebaker engineers the walter Chrysler brings over to Chrysler and they're behind some of the early Chrysler designs and all that fairly important odd in our math history well Fred's later son for the Seder Junior continues the tradition and works as a designer for for Chrysler this is the early 50s we set up the story about how retooling and everything else and satisfy demand there was a great push for the need for two-seat sports cars to satisfy all those returning GIS well 1951 Nash comes out with the Nash Healey really the first two-seat sports car by a fairly major producer 1953 you get the Corvette 1955 the Thunderbird so everyone's jumping into this market except where oh where is Chrysler the car in front of you would have been Chrysler's entry this is 1953 Dodge Storm z250 Fred's 8th or junior design the bodies were built by Bertone in Italy and actually shipped over to the US on the Andrea Doria which is a ship the gains paying for other reasons later on well I say bodies because there were two of them this is the driving around road-going body but there was also a more racing oriented body that there are four bolts underneath the car that you can undo and switch your bodies out by the time you factor in Italian design bodies that there are multiple ones of plus the some of the innovations under the hood and everything else this wasn't the cheapest car to produce and Fred Sater jr. also didn't have a whole lot of corporate support for it so the entire program goes away and really if you're looking for a Chrysler two-seat sports car you really have to wait till the 90s when the Viper comes out for them to satisfy that market segment now we're gonna wrap around the corner here we'll have a couple cars that are a little bit hard to see when you have 250 cars stuffed into a garage sometimes you have to stack them and everything else where we're making do with what we can but there's some stories I just can't skip so a lot of what we've talked about our car companies that came and went right the that didn't stick around and all that and I've mentioned some other things like the Dodge we just talked about not all the failures though are the companies that came in wet some of them are the companies you know and love perhaps no car best embodies and has become synonymous for the thought of failure as the Edsel the situation you have is in 1954 the Ford family basically Ford goes up or does their IPO so the Ford family's gonna lose their complete control over the company you now have investors and stockholders and everyone else involved okay well they were looking at the market and keep in mind this is mid 50s when they're doing all this assessment and what they started cluing into is that GM really had done a far better job at creating different different levels of car to target different segments of the market okay and Ford said for a while they always thought Oh Lincoln is our version of Cadillac but they started realizing by looking at the market that Lincoln was actually competing more with the Oldsmobile Buick levels and all that and they didn't really have a serious challenger for Cadillac okay and they certainly didn't have as many of the mid and lower in market segments covered so what do we do so the plan was they were going to start tilting Lincoln to be more and more upmarket this included for a couple years they actually spun off the Continental in terms of being its own mark but I am those if those are you being watching the vaulters probably have seen our Continental Mark 2 so Continental would be kind of the highest in and Lincoln right after it that's for the high-end market but that's creating an opening now in the intermediate market if foreign mercury are targetting lower intermediate and lower entry-level markets who is really our challenger in that middle there the idea was to create something new and so they started a project called the e car project with the e standing for experimental well by the time they were being ready to launch and all that experimental ecards gonna become the Edsel Ansel's were marketed beyond imagination before there had been the first car rolling off the production line Ford starts rolling out marketing for it about how the Edsel was going to be the car of the future it was gonna provide all the style and performance and comfort and everything you may want to hit those brand new American things the interstates with ok it was really being propped up as the car that everyone would want some of that description and all that to that intermediate sized car and everything else works well in the mid 50s when this was all being launched but by the time Ed's are actually being produced you're in the latter part of the 50s and the country is in recession people are no longer as interested in an immediate type car as sized cars they want what's about to be called the compact right the Rambler American already been out and you're gonna start seeing some other cars start filling in that smaller more efficient vehicle size that people are actually looking at you also throw in the fact that all that marking had been setting up the Edsel is being style beyond belief technology you've never seen before it is truly the car of the future and when it actually wheeled out people are like Yeah right it doesn't look that different than anything right it does look like every other red red convertible out there in the 50s and there wasn't anything really magical about its performance so the axle lands with a thud and is basically done as a independent make by by 59 ok but it has lasting effect because the Edsel name has like I said become largely synonymous with any type of failed product launch for better or worse follow me this way another car that has gained a reputation as being a failure rightly or wrongly we'll kind of explore that a little bit here is the Chevy Corvair as I just mentioned particularly after the 5758 recession there was a increased interest in compact car smaller vehicles the great big Road monsters of the 50s we're giving way to people focusing a little bit more on efficiency not quite to the extent you see in the 70s but you are you are by the early sixties starting to see some interest in smaller cars Nashes Rambler American had kind of set the pace that was the first truly compact American built car but you had along the way by the late fifties the Ford Falcon and the Plymouth Valiant there were other cars they were beginning inter that that segment GM needed something and so their idea was the Chevy Corvair Corvair from Corvette and bel-air to its most famous models the name being combined into one because then you get the best of both worlds anyways Corvair launches in 1960 and unlike the Falcon the value which was basically just taking a standard design and downsizing it Chevy actually went the extra mile and said no we're gonna kind of shake-up how we design cars and everything else one of the most visible changes is they went to an air-cooled rear-engined right everyone love Porsches of the day and everything else let's kind of copy their model they also went for a independent suspension including the rear tires being driven by swing axles now that too is a design they borrowed from Porsche and the like that had shown that it can work very well that's what leads us to the questions in 1965 Ralph Nader writes a book called unsafe at any speed that is about the Chevy Corvair he claims that swing axle design in the back it led to completely awful handling and a huge surge in the amount of accidents and there was some legal case to back it up there were lawsuits out there about some people suing seve Chevy about the Corvair well this was a black eye that really the Corvair could never survive from 1965 they went from the first generation to this which was a second-generation Corvair but by 69 the the model was dead now all in the follow up to this in the late 60s early 70s there were a series of Senate hearings and all kinds of assessment and a lot of those that basically come out of it saying yeah the Corvair really didn't have that many more problems than anyone else had right yes there were occasionally accidents but every car occasionally gets in some accidents and everyone started referring to the fact that there are all kinds of European car builders and all that that had used that same rear engine swing axle suspension design to no problem okay so the Corvair maybe one of the cars that was a failure in its day but may have been unfairly targeted for any number of reasons so it has become iconic and there are a huge Corvair fan bases out there to this day now for my last couple cars we're actually going to sneak back into the these storage areas of the vault okay so there's one car I really needed to close this with as we're walking towards it I'll point out a couple 1955 Fuji cabin Japan always a dude very small cars very fuel-efficient this is one that only 85 sold up so that would be considered one the failures now the car I really need to talk about is going to take some effort here for us to get past so I think you can get either side here it's this yellow one in the middle here is the 1975 Dale prototype the Dale is a very interesting car story whereas a lot of the ones we've looked at have became failures because of the market change or resources ran out or anything else the Dale in many ways could be considered to be designed for failure it was largely Akkad a woman named Liz Carmichael in the mid 70s starts going out saying I have the car of the future which you've heard that phrase for me several times a day it tends to be attached to a car that becomes a failure but in this case it truly was a failure so Liz Carmichael goes out and starts trying to get investment promising the car of the future it was a car that supposedly would get 70 miles to the gallon and in the mid-70s fuel efficiency was the major concern of a lot of people it had a BMW motorcycle engine that for whatever reason a lot of the documents they would share the drawings they would share it was mounted incorrectly it had what she said was no wires because it uses prey use printed circuit boards all through the - now how those controls would actually carry through to the rest of the car which normally requires wires was never really clarified but the idea is is that Liz Carmichael may not have been a car designer but she was excellent salesperson so anyways she starts going out and eventually starts selling rights to dealerships and other securities that she had no permission to do so that coupled with the fact that her chief salesperson winds up getting murdered along the way had drawn some law-enforcement attention so much so that she runs off to taxes and renames the day all the rivetti and starts trying to market it again well Texas authorities aware of the story we into this issue a cease and desist order on her to shut down everything and she basically disappears for a little bit well Texas along the way discovers the Liz Carmichael actually the woman that's off selling the rivetti ale or whatever we want to call it at this time actually had formerly been a man named Jerry Dean Michael who had all kinds of charges for counterfeiting against them when they disappeared so all of this starts coming together eventually liz carmichael jerry michael whoever is arrested their sentence they're convicted of counterfeiting everything else send us a 10 to 20 years but wind up jumping bail and disappearing well eventually unsolved mysteries the TV show airs something about it and someone discovers her in 1989 living in and you won't believe this Dale Texas where she is arrested again and goes to jail for 10 years so excellent marketer I forgot to mention back in its heyday it was actually the final showcase prize on The Price is Right fortunately the winner did not win the dáil and at that time would it did not discover that is largely made out of some wood here and there and that and never will really been a functioning car but hey you at least got it under the lights so anyways we close with this one of the at times lesser known but when you understand it one of the best examples of failure in the history of the industry thank you all for joining me for this somewhat longer trip through the vault we will have plenty of more content coming just keep it and keep your eyes on us

Channel: Petersen Automotive Museum

Views: 186,415

Rating: 4.7725968 out of 5

Keywords: delorean documentary, story of john delorean, twentieth century motor car corporation, davis divan car, davis divan jay leno, 3 wheeler, 3 wheel car, 3 wheeler fails, tucker 48 documentary, tucker 48 driving, automotive fails, automotive industry, petersen vault tour, worst cars to, worst cars ever made, worst cars ever, car fails, worst cars

Id: 6gWCoBGrA2s

Length: 45min 24sec (2724 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020