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Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow
Steve Lehto, Steve Lehto, Jay Leno
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Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow
Steve Lehto, Steve Lehto, Jay Leno
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About This Book
A 2017 Michigan Notable Book After World War II, the American automobile industry was reeling. Having spent years building tanks and airplanes for the army, the car companies would need years more to retool their production to meet the demands of the American public, for whom they had not made any cars since 1942. And then in stepped Preston Tucker. This salesman extraordinaire from Ypsilanti, Michigan, had built race cars before the war, and had designed prototypes for the military during it. Now, gathering a group of brilliant automotive designers, engineers, and promoters, he announced the creation of a revolutionary new car: the Tucker '48, the first car in almost a decade to be built fresh from the ground up. Tucker's car would include ingenious advances in design and engineering that other car companies could not match. With a rear engine, rear-wheel drive, a safety-glass windshielf that would pop out in case of an accident, a padded dashboard, independent suspension, and automatic transmission, it would be more attractive and aerodynamicâand saferâthan any other car on the road. But as the public eagerly awaited Tucker's car of tomorrow, powerful forces in Washington were trying to bring him down. An SEC commissioner with close ties to Detroit's Big Three automakers deliberately leaked information about an investigation the agency was conducting, suggesting that Tucker was bilking investors with a massive fraud scheme. Headlines accused him a perpetrating a hoax and claimed that his cars weren't real and his factory was a sham. In fact, the Tucker '48 sedan was genuine, and everyone who saw it was impressed by what this upstart carmaker had achieved. But the SEC's investigation had compounded the company's financial problems and management conflicts, and a superior product was not enough to keep Tucker's dream afloat. Here, Steve Lehto tackles the story of Tucker's amazing rise and tragic fall, relying on a huge trove of documents that has been used by no other writer to date. It is the first comprehensive, authoritative account of Tucker's magnificent car and his battles with the government. And in this book, Lehto finally answers the questions automobile aficionados have wondered about for decades: Exactly how and why was the production of such an innovative car killed?
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An Early Morning Car Crash
September 24, 1948.
Eddie Offutt had been driving all night at 90 mph. It felt slow to him as the stands flashed by his car. Here, on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he normally drove much faster.1 Even so, the rough brick surface of the two-and-a-half-mile oval chewed the carâs tires. Offutt sailed around the oval with the pedal almost to the floor, watching the miles add up on the odometer of his âwaltz blueâ Tucker.
Offutt was in charge of a team testing the revolutionary Tucker â48 sedan, then the hottest thing in the automotive world. More than 150,000 people had written letters to the carâs manufacturer asking how they could buy one. So many people paid admission to see one displayed in New York City that the venue outgrossed some Broadway plays running nearby.
The carâs namesake, Preston Tucker, had unveiled the car to the world on June 19, 1947. Tucker, a brilliant salesman and showman, was promising a newer, safer, and more reliable car than those the auto giants in Detroit churned out. His rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive automobile featured better traction and more passenger space than its competitors, along with disc brakes and an automatic transmission, long before those became standard in the industry. Its padded dash and sturdy frame would better protect passengers in a collision, and the car would drive more smoothly and cost less than other vehicles on the market. The established car companies had stopped assembling new automobiles in 1942, spending the last few years building tanks and airplanes for Americaâs forces in World War II. Now, as peacetime production resumed, these companies were struggling to bring fresh new models to the market. Tuckerâs bold alternative was raising a stir.
Eddie Offutt lapped the track at 90 mph, worrying little about business problems as he noted how smoothly Tucker #1027 ran. Offutt, Preston Tuckerâs lead mechanic, had met his employer at Indianapolis years before, when Tucker had worked with famed race car builder Harry Miller. Now Tucker had sent his team to Indy with a fleet of seven Tucker â48s to test the carsâ endurance and resolve last-minute bugs. The cars werenât in mass production yet, but Tucker had assembled enough to display them around the country and build consumer interest.
As daylight began to break at Indianapolis, Offuttâs drive took a dramatic turn. Just as he entered a curve at high speed, the sedanâs engine stalled. In a fraction of a second, the rear of the car swung out from behind him. As he fought to regain control, the right rear tire blew out. The vehicleâs tires, with a new tubeless design by Goodrich, had seen nothing but heavy driving in the previous days as the team had clocked a thousand miles at high speed, virtually nonstop around the speedway, often without even slowing for corners.
Offutt lost control. He skidded onto the grass of the infield and the car turned sideways. Then it flipped. The driver held on as it tumbled over and over again, three times in all. The windshield popped out. Finally, the car landed on its wheels.2
Offutt climbed out and surveyed the damage. He had bruised an elbow but suffered no other injuries.3 Other than the missing windshield, some minor body damage, and the tire that had blown out as he lost control, Offutt saw nothing wrong with the car.
Later, Offutt and the others would realize the accident was the result of a simple mistake made in the early morning darkness. At 4:15 AM, Offutt had stopped to refuel the car. A mechanic had reached for the wrong container in the dark and placed aviation fuel in the vehicle, which the Tucker engine was not tuned to run on.4 For now, Offutt replaced the tire and drove the vehicle off the track.
The Tucker team was conducting the Indianapolis tests in strict secrecy. The Tucker â48 had been subjected to oddball rumors and gossip, like a persistent story that the car could not drive in reverse. No matter how many times they demonstrated the cars backing up, the story dogged Tuckerâs men. Tucker could not afford leaked test results, especially if something went wrong.
Fortunately, the tests were a spectacular success. The team logged thousands of miles in the Tucker â48s and found only a few minor problems, all easily resolved. And Offuttâs crash was not caused by the failure of a Tucker part. If anything, the crash underscored Tuckerâs assertions about his carâs safety: it had rolled three times after crashing at 90 mph, and the driver had walked away with nothing but scrapes and bruises. The team drove the caravan of Tucker â48s back to Chicago, satisfied with their results. Only the damaged Offutt car had to be trailered homeâbecause it was missing its windshield.
But not all was well at the Tucker Corporation in Chicago. Even though the American public clamored to buy the cars, and Tucker had raised $20 million from enthusiastic investors, powerful forces in Washington were gunning for him. The Securities and Exchange Commission had announced that it was investigating Tucker, suspecting him of bilking investors with a massive fraud scheme. The latest headlines about Tucker accused him of perpetrating a hoax, suggesting that his cars werenât real and his factory was a sham.
But everyone who saw the Tucker â48 sedan believed Tucker had built an amazing car. The vehicle was revolutionary, and Tucker had built it despite vocal critics who said it was impossible. Tucker had not resolved one problem though: the cars were taking too long to get to market. Could Tucker save his business?
Offutt would witness just how serious the disconnect was between the reality and the governmentâs suspicions in early 1949, when he was summoned to appear before a grand jury and grilled about the Tucker â48s. The US attorney not only believed the cars were fake but thought Offutt knew it too. Offutt told the attorney about the successful tests at Indianapolis. The attorney then asked him, âHow were the cars taken to Indianapolisâtrucked down or driven down?â
Offutt said the cars had been driven to Indianapolis from Chicago.
âAre you sure you drove them down?â the attorney pressed, giving Offutt the chance to change his story in case he was lying.
Offutt stuck to his answer, which was the truth. The cars had not been âtruckedâ down; they had all been driven to Indianapolis under their own power. Offutt offered to let the attorney and the jurors visit the Tucker plant and see the cars. The offer had been made before, many times.
Again they declined the offer.
And so the stage was set for a trial that would ruin an innocent man, Preston Tucker, and doom the corporation building the spectacular Tucker â48 automobile.
Preston Thomas Tucker
People who met Preston Tucker described him as an extraordinary salesman. Six feet tall, he exuded a confidence that could make you believe whatever he was pitching at the moment. He was always well dressed in public, usually in a suit with a fancy necktie. But his most striking characteristic was his ability to speak easily with anyone, to put his listener at ease. His powers of persuasion worked on journalists too: several interviewed Tucker and wrote about him in such glowing terms it was apparent they had fallen under his spell.
He did not come across as slick. He spoke in a folksy style, sometimes misusing words, much to the dismay of his close friends and family members. Speaking of a car with its gas pedal depressed, he might say that the car âexhilarated,â or when talking finance to board members, he would reference the recent âphysical year.â His daughter tried more than once to help him with his vocabulary; he told her not to bother. âThey know what Iâm talking about.â1
Those who knew him best said there was much more to the salesman than an unpretentious charm. To Cliff Knoble, an advertising man who worked closely with Tucker, âhe possessed a warmth and humanness that made men eager to help him.â He was loyal to those he knew and determined to follow through on the ideas he believed in. This, perhaps, was his biggest flaw. People who worked with Tucker in his most important years said that he sometimes discarded advice from experts and deferred instead to friends. Knoble referred to it as a ânaivetĂ©â that left him âsusceptible to the blandishments of an occasional highly skilled parasite.â2
Family members saw Preston not as a salesman, of course. To them he was trusting, taking people at face value. His granddaughter says he was not suspicious of anyone. Loving and warm to those around him, he was often even goofy, especially with children. His home was overrun with his own and those of other family members. And he would speak to anyone, always as an equal.3
As many have attested, Preston Tucker had a magnetic personality. People were drawn to him.
Preston Thomas Tucker was born in Capac, Michigan, a small farming community about thirty miles west of Port Huron, roughly sixty miles north of Detroit, on September 21, 1903. His father, Shirley Harvey Tucker, was a railroad engineer, and his motherâs maiden name was Lucille Caroline Preston. Shortly after Prestonâs birth, the young family moved in with Lucilleâs parents, Milford A. Preston and Harriet L. Preston, in Evart, Michigan. Lucille gave birth to another boy, William, in 1905. Prestonâs father died of appendicitis on February 3, 1907, when Preston was three.4 To make ends meet, Lucille taught at the local one-room schoolhouse in a community known as Cat Creek, just west of Evart.
When he was in the fourth grade, Preston befriended a boy a year older, Fay Leach. In later years, Leach would watch Tuckerâs name appear in the news and remember the time the two had spent in the nearby farm fields. While Leach and the others were doing their chores, Tucker would be talking and asking questions of the older kids. Often, the conversation turned to what fascinated Tucker the most: âthese new machinesâthe automobile.â5
In 1914 Lucille decided to move to Detroit to look for work. She briefly worked in an office and then returned to teaching. Money was tight; by 1920 the family had six lodgers living with them.6
Cars continued to fascinate Preston, and as a teenager he spent much of his time frequenting local service stations and used car lots, talking to the workers and examining the cars. He even landed a job in the auto industry as an âoffice boyâ at Cadillac in 1916.7 His stint there was short but legendary. He worked for D. McCall White, an executive at the company, who had Tucker running around quite a bit. The teenager decided he could do his job more efficiently if he were on roller skates, so he began skating around the offices at Cadillac. One day Tucker rounded a corner at the office with an armful of papers and slammed into his boss. Tuckerâs time as an office boy came to an end shortly thereafter, but there must not have been any hard feelings; White would end up working for Tucker a few decades later.8
When Preston was sixteen, he convinced his mother to let him use his savings to buy a car. He found an Overland touring car for sale and negotiated the seller down to $300. He drove it for a year and a half and then sold it for the same amount heâd paid, using the money to buy a Ford Model T. There was something mechanically wrong with the Ford, so his mother told him to sell it rather than endure the headaches of maintenance and repair costs. Tucker found a buyer at $350. The profit inspired him. He sought another car deal and located someone selling a Chandler for $750. Tucker offered the $350 he had made from the Model T sale and struck a deal.
The Chandler had a defective transmission, and Tucker was reluctant to pay someone else to fix it. He tore the transmission apart himself and laid the parts out on the floor of the familyâs garage. To remember where the parts went, he numbered them as he took them out, writing the numbers on the floor by each part with chalk. Despite his system, Tucker could not get the transmission to run properly...