Tucker's Influence on the Automotive World
I found an interesting interview with former Studebaker automotive designer, Bob Bourke. He grew up not too far from where the Dodge plant would later be built and worked with some of the same folks who'd go on to design the Tucker '48, and, it appears that the Tucker had a great deal of influence on Studebaker. In part of the interview he says:
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| That particular item was just one of many, and I really can't say who it was. But we had directives from time to time. I remember how that transparent spinner started out. Somebody thought it would be neat to have a light behind it, and I talked them out of that, and we painted it with opaque silver, because they were ready for production. It would have been really crazy. I think that was brought about by the fact that somebody was impressed with the Tucker or a Cyclops eye -- a single headlight on a locomotive. |
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| It sure was, right. We had done work on a symbolic '47 and, in turn, had a grille on the back end of it. I had a lot of sketches where the glass curved around in the back. So we built a wood model of this early pre-'47 prototype, which had some of the characteristics of the production car, albeit they were somewhat different. It didn't have a fender, as such, on the rear end. It had detail around the back, and it had a grille across the back, and the car, actually, was being considered for a rear engine automobile. |
Studebaker wasn't the only car company to be influenced by the intial Tucker design. Apparently, after the Lawson designed Tucker Torpedo appeared in ads, a designer at Chrysler, Jon W. Hauser, was inspired to create Le Prix in 1946. It looks an awful lot like a Tucker Torpedo crossed with a Chrysler Airflow.
A motorcycle which uses a hydrostatic drive transmission like Tucker originally wanted to do with his car.
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| This bike belongs to Jeff who built it about 3 years ago but I never saw it until I was looking for information on diesels and ran across their website, Hydraulic Innovations. This bike has a custom built frame and mounts a Kubota 3 cylinder diesel engine but what makes the bike even more unique is the hydrostatic drive system, no belts, no chains, no gear drive transmission just hydraulic pumps and motors. Neat. You still control speed with a twist grip and there’s a front brake lever on the right but the “clutch” lever actually opens a bypass valve to let hydraulic fluid recirculate instead of driving the bike. There is only one foot lever on the right side which has a sort of neutral position in the center, pushing it forward gets the bike in forward motion and pushing it to the rear actually can reverse the bike. Jeff says, theoretically it could go as fast in reverse as forward but he limited the speed to prevent things from getting out of hand. |
This 2006 Ford patent describes a hydraulic drive similar to Tucker's.
The EPA and UPS are testing a diesel powered hydraulic hybrid delivery van.
The military's ultimate urban assault vehicle (UAV) has a hydraulic hybrid drive system.
VW, Lexus, and several other car makers have adopted the idea of moving headlights, seatbelts are now manditory equipment, fuel injection and disc brakes are all standard equipment, safety is also a prime selling point of cars these days. And the story of Preston Tucker and his car is often used as a teching aid.
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