December 2013 – CARS-YDSE.com

1948 Tucker, Wow!!!

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Yes, I have cheated again. By that I mean I had originally set up this site to exclude pictures from car shows, museums and the like. I made an exception in 2010 by showing some pictures from a car show in Martin and this exception is also warranted. The car is on display at the Francis Ford Coppola winery near Sanoma California. It is clearly a Car You Don’t See Everyday but I also have some information from a personal friend of my father’s who was a Tucker dealer.

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Sam, my father’s friend and his brother worked at a Tucker dealer in New Jersey. Sam told me about the big promotion Tucker had to get people to put down a deposit on a car. You got a set of luggage which was designed to fit in the trunk of the car which was in the front. This is explained in one of the videos below with a slight twist; Tucker sold luggage and car radios to raise money but the Securities and Exchange Commission stopped this practice. Also, Sam talked about the threat the other car manufacturers supposedly made to the steel companies. If you sell steel to Tucker, we (General Motors, Ford Chrysler etc.) will look elsewhere to buy steel for our cars.

The way Sam told it, the Tucker plant would build cars to show they could actually produce the car and later clandestinely disassemble the cars to build them again to keep the production numbers climbing. I think the accepted number of cars actually produced was 51 cars. This was a very controversial car fighting the established car makers at the beginning of the after the war industrial boom.

This first video presents a brief description of the car and Preston Tucker, the designer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq54a8yWu50&w=420&h=315]

Also, have a look at this film which does a good job documenting the rise and fall of The Tucker Car Company.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oouOTsFcISE&w=420&h=315]

1955-1956 Packard Patrician

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It was during the summer I went away to Boy Scout Camp that Packard released this series of cars. I lived in a large urban complex right across the river from New York City and one of my friends and my pass times was car hunting. We would ride our bikes around the city and spot the unusual cars as they drove by or were parked. One of the new features on these cars was the Torsion Level suspension and related road leveling technology. This allowed the car to be close to level as it went up or down steep hills. When we found one parked, we would stand on the front or rear bumper and allow the car to lift us up to level the car. Then we would jump of and hear the leveler take over again and move the end of the car back to level again. Luckily, the batteries were good enough to have enough juice left to start the cars when the owners got into drive away.

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This car marked the last car that Packard made under their name. This last-gasp vehicle tired unsuccessfully to save the brand with new innovative engineering and new features. It did not work. The link below has some interesting information on this, the last of the Packards.
Click Here for more information.

The video below concentrates on this era in the life of The Packard Car Company and its demise.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT1l8raV8wM&w=560&h=315]

Also, have a look at the following vedio which centers more on the car in this article. View the 2nd clip in this video it is about the 1955-1956 Packard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgUaSwO0bV8

1973 Saab 96 V4 From New Orleans

Click on the picture to Z O O M in. So, I was on my way to Safeway with my dog and I saw this gem pulling into the parking lot. I knew a little bit about this era and asked the driver about the car. “Is this the three cylinder version?”, I asked. “I don’t know, it’s my wife’s car”, he replied and opened the hood. We looked and saw it was a V4. He explained that his wife purchased the car new in Louisiana and had driven it here many years ago. The car is in really good shape, considering.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahs_tKEjacM&w=420&h=315]

The following was extracted from Wikipedia.
Click Here for more information.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Saab 93, Saab 95, Saab 96, and certain DKW automobiles were powered by inline-three-cylinder, two-stroke engines. Also, the Wartburg automobiles manufactured in Eastern Germany, and FSO Syrena manufactured in Poland, used this kind of engine. Between 1962 and 1964 Kjell Knutsson and Ingvar Andersson under Rolf Mellde tested three different engines, Lloyd Arabella 897 cc and 45 hp, a Morris Mini 848 cc, 33 hp engine and a Lancia Appia engine of 1089 cc and 48 hp. However Rolf Melldes view that Saab needed to switch to a four-stroke engine was stopped higher up by CEO Tryggve Holm. Mellde then went behind the back of Holm and made contact with Marc Wallenberg, son of Marcus Wallenberg, Saab’s major stockholder. The coup succeeded and testing could begin.

The testing was done in secrecy. Rolf Mellde took a leave of absence and said he was going to run his father’s paint shop. In reality he went to Desenzano in northern Italy with a 96V4 prototype for testing. With five months to go before production only seven persons knew about the new engine. To maintain secrecy they rented a house west of Kristinehamn. To keep purchases of V4 specific parts secret they started the companyMaskinverktyg AB. The ordinary purchase department at Saab was oblivious to what was going on, something that caused an incident when Rune Ahlberg cancelled the orders for cables for the two-stroke engine and the purchase department called the supplier and sharply told them to keep their deliveries.

The last week of July, just before the summer holidays, the information about the new engine was given to some more people and they were informed that full scale production would start in four weeks. To keep secrecy, 40 of the ordinary staff was told to report to work to fix a problem with the disc brakes. The secret was kept until a journalist some days before the official introduction noticed a lorry loaded with 96s that had V4 stickers on the front bumpers.[1] The first V4 engines produced 55 hp (48 kW) and 65 hp (48 kW) from 1967-1980. The car managed 0–100 km/h in 16 seconds. The two-stroke option continued into 1968. In the US, the two-stroke engine was called the ‘Shrike’ at that time. Its displacement was reduced slightly, to 819 cc to avoid emission regulations which exempted engines under 50 in³, while the V4s used in US cars had a 1700 cc low compression engine.