Preston Tucker brought fame, if not fortune, to Ypsilanti

Ypsilanti, Mich., was the home base of automaker Preston Thomas Tucker, who was a flash in the pan 80 years ago. He formed his company in 1946 to manufacture the iconic “Tucker Torpedo.”

 

A member of the Automotive Hall of Fame, Tucker was born in 1903. Fascinated with the emerging world of cars, he spent much of his childhood hanging around service stations and garages, learning his way around under the hood.

He started driving at age 11, and as a teenager, Tucker began purchasing pre-owned automobiles to repair and refurbish for resale. He dropped out of high school to take a job as an office boy for the Cadillac Motor Company and later worked on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company.

In his early 20s, Tucker jumped at the opportunity to join the Lincoln Park (Mich.) Police Department, so he could drive fast, high-performance police cars.

 

It was a cold winter day when Officer Tucker used a blowtorch to cut a hole in the dashboard of a cruiser to allow engine heat to warm the cabin. Brilliant, but against department regulations.

Instantly, he realized that he wasn’t cut out for a career in law enforcement. Tucker became a crackerjack car salesman, selling Studebakers, Chryslers, Pierce-Arrows and Packards for various dealerships.

Tucker tried his hand at building race cars in Indianapolis before finally “settling down” as a family man in Ypsilanti in the late 1930s. 

He established Ypsilanti Machine and Tool Company, by remodeling an old barn on his property into a two-story garage, which would soon be “bustling with draftsmen, mechanics and engineers,” all engaged in multiple entrepreneurial efforts to help with the World War II effort.

“As the war was ending, Tucker hoped to become a carmaker, capitalizing on his visceral understanding of car buyers plus the technical knowledge he had gained in the racing world,” commented Joe DeMatio of The Haggerty Group. 

“A less ambitious man might have been deterred by his lack of money, education or experience in the auto industry.”

Dominance by the “Big Three” – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – left “little room for newcomers,” DeMatio said. “But Preston Tucker would not be thwarted.”

“He would conceive and construct a rear-engine drive motorcar that would ‘open a new era in motoring’ – a comfortable, efficient, safe and affordable sedan with technological leaps in suspension, body engineering and powertrain efficiency.”

“Tucker correctly assessed the mood of the American public – they were starved for new cars after the wartime production shutdown. Throughout 1946, word spread across America of Tucker’s impending ‘Car of Tomorrow – Today!’”

Tucker’s revolutionary “Cyclops Eye” center headlight was designed to activate at steering angles of greater than 10 degrees to light the car’s path around corners. He lined up 363 dealerships and geared up for production in a vacant, government surplus factory in Chicago.

 

The trade publication Automotive News commented that “Tucker had the aura of a lone knight ready to take on the giants of the industry.”

Against all odds, the Tucker Corporation produced 51 cars (called Tucker 48s) in 1948. 

And that was it.

It’s an incredible story about how American political muscle and pressure from industry heavyweights choked Tucker’s company into oblivion.

Francis Ford Coppola revealed all the details in his 1988 motion picture: “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” starring Jeff Bridges.

Remarkably, 47 of the original 51 Tucker 48s are still in existence. 

The Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa., has three on display.

 

Visit the Tucker Automobile Preservation Society online at tuckerclub.org.

Tucker, who suffered from lung cancer, died on Dec. 26, 1956, at age 53.