AH Challenge: Save the Tucker, Bricklin, DeLorean, and EV-1

EV1 and DeLorean are easy - the EV1 just has to convince GM brass that its a worthwhile investment, and considering how fanatical EV1 drivers were towards their machines, it just needs to get to GM head office how much they love their electric cars. Get that done, and job finished. GM will by the mid-2000s being lauded for its foresight in how much investment they put into the electric car, and they could easily enough use the EV1's architecture to advance the Chevrolet Volt to 2005-06, thus allowing GM to be seen as the company advancing environmentally-friendly cars, not Toyota.

The DeLorean is also fairly easy - have it be in a couple famous early 1980s movies, and thus have it catch on as a style icon. You may wish to fit it with a more powerful engine, though, as original DeLoreans, especially ones with automatic transmissions, were god-awful slow (10.6 seconds to sixty per Car and Driver in 1981) and the stainless-steel bodywork was both very heavy got scratched and messed up very easily (a good polymer clearcoat could fix that). DeLorean was a wickedly-good salesman, so you could easily have DeLoreans as stars in several major movies that hit about that time (The Cannonball Run, For Your Eyes Only and Beverly Hills Cop come to mind) if you try at it, and once Back To The Future hits, if the above has been done, you could have the DMC-12 as a style icon of the 1980s and thus have plenty of success for it in the marketplace as a result.

The Bricklin is harder, because the company was an enormous clusterfuck from the off. It needed more ponies as well and better engineering, as it was known for mechanical problems. Bricklin might have done well to get better engineers for it, and what it really needed was an engine with a turbocharger, because a Bricklin weighs about 3500 pounds, which with an emissions-choked Ford Windsor V8 for power was going to be very slow. (The doors could take a hand off, too. That needs work, as well.) Use aluminum for structural parts (particularly the doors) and Kevlar bodywork to knock a few hundred pounds off the weight, lose the goofy compressible bumpers and improve the styling somewhat, and a turbocharged version of the Ford or AMC V8 and you're off to a good start. If you're gonna build a ground-breaking sportscar (and that was Malcolm Bricklin's intention), you might as well not go half-assed. While their at it, gets the guys who made it in Atlantic Canada to do a good job. Little experience building cars there, but that was true in Northern Ireland as well, and the guys making the DeLorean learned pretty quickly....

The Tucker is the hardest. Forget the conspiracy theories, the Tucker was a fantastic but incredibly ambitious design, and even if it had all worked considering the nature of 1950s American drivers and the roads they drove on the Tucker would have been cursed almost immediately with reliability problems. You need a lot to make this one work, and I simply don't think Tucker would have gotten far in the business.
 
EV1 and DeLorean are easy - the EV1 just has to convince GM brass that its a worthwhile investment, and considering how fanatical EV1 drivers were towards their machines, it just needs to get to GM head office how much they love their electric cars. Get that done, and job finished. GM will by the mid-2000s being lauded for its foresight in how much investment they put into the electric car, and they could easily enough use the EV1's architecture to advance the Chevrolet Volt to 2005-06, thus allowing GM to be seen as the company advancing environmentally-friendly cars, not Toyota.

The DeLorean is also fairly easy - have it be in a couple famous early 1980s movies, and thus have it catch on as a style icon. You may wish to fit it with a more powerful engine, though, as original DeLoreans, especially ones with automatic transmissions, were god-awful slow (10.6 seconds to sixty per Car and Driver in 1981) and the stainless-steel bodywork was both very heavy got scratched and messed up very easily (a good polymer clearcoat could fix that). DeLorean was a wickedly-good salesman, so you could easily have DeLoreans as stars in several major movies that hit about that time (The Cannonball Run, For Your Eyes Only and Beverly Hills Cop come to mind) if you try at it, and once Back To The Future hits, if the above has been done, you could have the DMC-12 as a style icon of the 1980s and thus have plenty of success for it in the marketplace as a result.

The Bricklin is harder, because the company was an enormous clusterfuck from the off. It needed more ponies as well and better engineering, as it was known for mechanical problems. Bricklin might have done well to get better engineers for it, and what it really needed was an engine with a turbocharger, because a Bricklin weighs about 3500 pounds, which with an emissions-choked Ford Windsor V8 for power was going to be very slow. (The doors could take a hand off, too. That needs work, as well.) Use aluminum for structural parts (particularly the doors) and Kevlar bodywork to knock a few hundred pounds off the weight, lose the goofy compressible bumpers and improve the styling somewhat, and a turbocharged version of the Ford or AMC V8 and you're off to a good start. If you're gonna build a ground-breaking sportscar (and that was Malcolm Bricklin's intention), you might as well not go half-assed. While their at it, gets the guys who made it in Atlantic Canada to do a good job. Little experience building cars there, but that was true in Northern Ireland as well, and the guys making the DeLorean learned pretty quickly....

The Tucker is the hardest. Forget the conspiracy theories, the Tucker was a fantastic but incredibly ambitious design, and even if it had all worked considering the nature of 1950s American drivers and the roads they drove on the Tucker would have been cursed almost immediately with reliability problems. You need a lot to make this one work, and I simply don't think Tucker would have gotten far in the business.
Very interesting!
 
EV1 and DeLorean are easy - the EV1 just has to convince GM brass that its a worthwhile investment, and considering how fanatical EV1 drivers were towards their machines, it just needs to get to GM head office how much they love their electric cars. Get that done, and job finished. GM will by the mid-2000s being lauded for its foresight in how much investment they put into the electric car, and they could easily enough use the EV1's architecture to advance the Chevrolet Volt to 2005-06, thus allowing GM to be seen as the company advancing environmentally-friendly cars, not Toyota.

The DeLorean is also fairly easy - have it be in a couple famous early 1980s movies, and thus have it catch on as a style icon. You may wish to fit it with a more powerful engine, though, as original DeLoreans, especially ones with automatic transmissions, were god-awful slow (10.6 seconds to sixty per Car and Driver in 1981) and the stainless-steel bodywork was both very heavy got scratched and messed up very easily (a good polymer clearcoat could fix that). DeLorean was a wickedly-good salesman, so you could easily have DeLoreans as stars in several major movies that hit about that time (The Cannonball Run, For Your Eyes Only and Beverly Hills Cop come to mind) if you try at it, and once Back To The Future hits, if the above has been done, you could have the DMC-12 as a style icon of the 1980s and thus have plenty of success for it in the marketplace as a result.

The Bricklin is harder, because the company was an enormous clusterfuck from the off. It needed more ponies as well and better engineering, as it was known for mechanical problems. Bricklin might have done well to get better engineers for it, and what it really needed was an engine with a turbocharger, because a Bricklin weighs about 3500 pounds, which with an emissions-choked Ford Windsor V8 for power was going to be very slow. (The doors could take a hand off, too. That needs work, as well.) Use aluminum for structural parts (particularly the doors) and Kevlar bodywork to knock a few hundred pounds off the weight, lose the goofy compressible bumpers and improve the styling somewhat, and a turbocharged version of the Ford or AMC V8 and you're off to a good start. If you're gonna build a ground-breaking sportscar (and that was Malcolm Bricklin's intention), you might as well not go half-assed. While their at it, gets the guys who made it in Atlantic Canada to do a good job. Little experience building cars there, but that was true in Northern Ireland as well, and the guys making the DeLorean learned pretty quickly....

The Tucker is the hardest. Forget the conspiracy theories, the Tucker was a fantastic but incredibly ambitious design, and even if it had all worked considering the nature of 1950s American drivers and the roads they drove on the Tucker would have been cursed almost immediately with reliability problems. You need a lot to make this one work, and I simply don't think Tucker would have gotten far in the business.
I agree with a lot of this.

I think both DeLorean & Bricklin, as companies, didn't have enough work done in design of the car or the production process, or enough money in actually building the cars: that is, the basics were good, but parts fit-up a bit haphazard because there isn't good enough design in the tooling/manufacturing or enough money in the process. It goes beyond bad quality control: GM can fix these problems on the line, because the line is built right to fix it; it seems to me DeLorean & Bricklin never had a hope of fixing it, because their production processes were too badly engineered.

Tucker had that in spades.:eek: Some of the engineering decisions were downright nutty: converting from aircooled to watercooled?:confused: The preselector trans wasn't ideal, nor adequately debugged. Building in a former B-24 plant, which was far from ideal for car-building, wasn't really a good idea, either.:rolleyes:

That said, when you say "survive", would you accept having the cars produced, but not the companies created? The prospect of a Tucker-designed sedan at, frex, Kaiser in '47-8 doesn't seem unreasonable. Nor a DeLorean at AMC, in place of the AMX, or a Bricklin as a Corvette competitor at AMC or Chrysler.
 
I agree with a lot of this.

I think both DeLorean & Bricklin, as companies, didn't have enough work done in design of the car or the production process, or enough money in actually building the cars: that is, the basics were good, but parts fit-up a bit haphazard because there isn't good enough design in the tooling/manufacturing or enough money in the process. It goes beyond bad quality control: GM can fix these problems on the line, because the line is built right to fix it; it seems to me DeLorean & Bricklin never had a hope of fixing it, because their production processes were too badly engineered.

Tucker had that in spades.:eek: Some of the engineering decisions were downright nutty: converting from aircooled to watercooled?:confused: The preselector trans wasn't ideal, nor adequately debugged. Building in a former B-24 plant, which was far from ideal for car-building, wasn't really a good idea, either.:rolleyes:

That said, when you say "survive", would you accept having the cars produced, but not the companies created? The prospect of a Tucker-designed sedan at, frex, Kaiser in '47-8 doesn't seem unreasonable. Nor a DeLorean at AMC, in place of the AMX, or a Bricklin as a Corvette competitor at AMC or Chrysler.

On Tucker you read my mind. Since American Motors Corporation (AMC) was formed in 1954 maybe form it earlier and scale back the car a little.:)
 
fscott said:
On Tucker you read my mind. Since American Motors Corporation (AMC) was formed in 1954 maybe form it earlier and scale back the car a little.:)
:) As I understand it, Tucker was quite the salesman, so it'd be a good thing for *AMC. It might also have butterflied some of the dubious decisions around the Henry J, which was a pretty good car all in all, but was aiming too low: it couldn't compete with used cars, & wasn't targeted against the Chevys & Fords it might've stolen market from.

Something like the Tucker Torpedo at Kaiser, aimed at Buick, tho...:cool:
 
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