Who Killed the Tucker Car?
Now, the question on your mind, no doubt is: Was there a conspiracy against Tucker? I haven't been able to unearth any evidence proving this, but Wilson Wyatt seemed to think that there was no need for a Tucker Corporation, and Drew Pearson had what many would consider reasons for an ax to grind with Tucker. There's also hints within the various documents I've seen on line at the sites for the Truman Presidential Library, the Eisenhower Library, and the National Archives that Tucker was disliked by people in power, for whatever reason. Admittedly, the amount of documentation on line is scanty, and I lack the means to research the matter in person, so it's tough to say for certain. Still, when factor in that Henry J. Kaiser, who was also trying to build cars at this time (and it should be noted that even the fans of Kaiser's cars admit that the engines were dogs) got away with activities of questionable legality, while Tucker was being investigated, and like Fiat, was given massive government loans to keep operating, things do seem a bit odd. Of course, Kaiser was seen as a bit of a war hero for his Liberty Ships and had plenty of connections in DC, so it might have simply been that he got a free pass, as it were. So at the very least, it seems likely that people with the means to do so wanted Tucker out of business, for whatever reason. Were they all working together or separately is something I can't answer.
I'd literally had this article for years, never read it, and never even paid any attention to it, until recently. As I was flipping through my collection, I noticed that it was about a hydraulic drive car, and I said, "Meh, Tucker had the same idea." Then I noticed who wrote the article and the date which it was published. It was written by Charles T. Pearson, who's the author of the official Tucker biography and it was published in 1946, and it's about an engineer who had built a prototype hydraulic drive car for Ford. Pearson would have been working (at least part time) for Tucker when the article was written and strangely enough, the figures he cites in the article are identical to those claimed by Tucker for his system. Even more puzzling, there's no mention by Pearson of this article, or Ford's work, in his bio of Tucker. It has me wondering: Was the engineer really working for Ford? Did Tucker crib his ideas from Pearson's article?
Of course, if a conspiracy did do Tucker in, it wouldn't be the first time this happened to a car company. After WWI, flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker tried to build a safety car (it had four wheel brakes, a first), only to be shutdown by a conspiracy of competing automakers, who waged an aggressive campaign against his car.
As the government was gearing up for WWII, it launched a completion to come up with a replacement for the horse. The winner of the competition was the American Bantam Company, however, the Feds decided that the company wasn't capable of building the car, and awarded the contract to Willys and Ford, without bothering to pay Bantam a dime for their work.
After Tucker was shutdown, Studebaker-Packard suffered a similar fate. Eisenhower's new Secretary of Defense was a former GM man, and his first act in office was to cancel all the defense contracts which had been awarded to Studebaker-Packard and give them to GM. This would help spell the end for Studebaker-Packard, and even though a Congressional investigation agreed with the president of S-P that wrongdoing had occurred, no one was held accountable (even being friends with Ike didn't help the president of S-P in this matter). Gary Davis met a similar fate to Tucker, but unlike Tucker, was found guilty.
Just How Good Were Tuckers, Anyway?->
