Click on the picture to Z O O M in. 
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.
Click on the pictures to Z O O M in.
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]
© Fred Winograd copyright 2009, 2013