Ginger ninja

 

 

Beauties on the boulevard

Benny and the Jets

Bugatti bones

When cars were cars

The thumbnail YouTube provided was inadequate, so this one is the wrong colour, but no less extreme. 1959 was the year of Utmost Fins, when they just couldn't get any more aggressive. This '59 Cadillac seemed to go on for blocks.

Sky blue, two-tone, shiny chrome: '56 Chevy Bel Air

Flying egg: the car from space

Schlörwagen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Schlörwagen in 1939

Schlörwagen from the front

The Schlörwagen (nicknamed "Egg" or "Pillbug") was a prototype aerodynamic rear-engine passenger vehicle developed by Karl Schlör (1911–1997) and presented to the public in 1939.

Schlör, an engineer for Krauss Maffei of Munich, proposed an ultra-low drag coefficient body as early as 1936. Under Schlör's supervision at the AVA (an Aerodynamic testing institute in Göttingen) a model was built. Subsequent wind tunnel tests yielded a drag coefficient of only 0.113, incredible then and still extremely impressive today. For a functioning model, a Mercedes-Benz 170H chassis, one of their few rear-engine designs, was used. The aluminum body was built by the Ludewig Brothers of Essen. Subsequent tests of the motorized model showed a slightly higher but still impressive drag coefficient of 0.186.  A year later it was unveiled to the public at the 1939 Berlin Auto Show. The project was shelved with the onset of World War II and mass production was never realized. In 1942, the prototype was fitted with a captured soviet propeller engine. The whereabouts of the sole functioning model remain unknown.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. Would that they had found this thing! I have no idea how they would ever fit this little pillbug, which looks as if you could pick it up with one hand, with a "captured Soviet propeller engine", or what happened to it after that. Did they end up with a flying egg/pillbug/two-door Schlor, or just one big splat?

This was the only photo I found which presumably illustrates the hybrid, but as usual there is no information with it.

I also found a couple of photos of grey men in grey hats looking at the (mostly-grey) car. Things were pretty grey, back then.

Cars Of The Future from 1948

Three plug-ugly cars which never got beyond the prototype stage. The first one, a 1948 Davis Divan, looks like a cross between a bedroom slipper and a steam iron. It might also pass as a Bob Clampett cartoon character. Supposedly it could hold four people across, or two people from 2017 in a tight pinch. I saw someone on YouTube (Jay Leno - see video below - I found it finally) try to drive a reconstruction, and he complained it kept tipping over.

The second one is oh, oh, my God, just horrible to contemplate, as lumpy as the Elephant Man, an airstream trailer with a horrible disease. I guess it sort of looks like someone's idea of a futuristic rocket, but it somehow does not get off the ground. 

The third one commits the sin of being merely dull. It's a kind of '40s  race-car-type-thing, but why the wheels are encased like that puzzles me. Wouldn't that make them more susceptible to damage? 

There were hundreds of "futuristic" designs like these, and in many cases the designers found backers, pocketed the money, then got out of town fast. 

Abandoned Edsels

Obsession: the case of the Bentley Embiricos

The 1938 Bentley Embiricos.

Ginger ninja