Tag: Alex Tremulis

The Tucker Story (No, It Wasn’t the Car to Beat Detroit)

The Tucker Story (No, It Wasn’t the Car to Beat Detroit)

For all his brilliance, Preston Tucker "was out of his pond. He remained a stranger and perhaps even a threat to the SEC, and he didn’t know anyone in government. Preston was careless in some of his pencil-work, perhaps in a bit of his talk, too. Nevertheless. Tucker conceived an amazing automobile. Nevertheless, the government did overreact, despite all he did to earn it.

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The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 3: Streamlining and Speed

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 3: Streamlining and Speed

Con­clud­ed from Part 2. My Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

Alex Tremulis in the 1950s

When Kaiser left Wil­low Run, Alex Tremulis decid­ed it was time to work for a com­pa­ny with a future. In Dear­born, Ford Chief of Design George Walk­er hired him with an unchanged job descrip­tion: chief of advanced styling. There he joined Bob Thomas, who wrote warm­ly of him in 2008. “Alex thought he was back in the Army Air Corps, turn­ing out scores of 3/8th scale mod­els of futur­is­tic things like fly­ing cars and nuclear-pow­ered vehi­cles.…

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The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 2: Tucker to Kaiser-Frazer

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 2: Tucker to Kaiser-Frazer

Con­tin­ued from Part 1. My Alex Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

Alex and Tucker

Like Bob Bourke’s famous 1953 Stude­bak­er “Loewy coupe,” the 1948 Tuck­er was almost entire­ly the work of one design­er. Of course many helped, and both Bourke and Tremulis gave them cred­it. But as near as one comes to design­ing a car by one­self, they did.

Alex set to work in a stu­dio at Tucker’s large, ex-Dodge plant in Chica­go. As chief design­er he had to inject prac­ti­cal­i­ty into Pre­ston Tuck­er’s enthu­si­asm. First con­cepts includ­ed a car with cycle fend­ers that turned with the wheels, a periscope rearview scan­ner, and vast expans­es of com­pound-curved glass.…

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The Greatness of Alex Tremulis: A Car Designer from Another Era (1)

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis: A Car Designer from Another Era (1)

My Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

“That was a dif­fer­ent time,” Alex Tremulis told me, recall­ing his hey­day in car design. “The For­ties through the Sev­en­ties. Back then a sin­gle per­son could often influ­ence the shape of a car. Some­times the whole car. Of course, lots of our ideas were sheer rub­bish. But now and then, by luck or force of per­son­al­i­ty, we put some­thing good into production.”

Many famous auto­mo­tive designs did have whim­si­cal begin­nings. Bill Boy­er put port­holes on the rear roof quar­ters of the 1956 Ford Thun­der­bird to recall “the coach­work her­itage.”…

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Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History, Part 2

Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History, Part 2

Transcript of a speech to the Kaiser-Frazer Owners Club, 30 July 2015. Continued from Part 1. Delving in

While I received no extra pay for writ­ing the Kaiser-Fraz­er book, I did have the use of an expense account for trav­el. That was where Bill Tilden came through again. He helped me track down and inter­view many of peo­ple respon­si­ble for the cars Kaiser-Fraz­er built. Oth­ers were locat­ed through the deep ten­ta­cles of Auto­mo­bile Quar­ter­ly, its many con­tacts in the indus­try. We also searched for archives, large and small.

Our great­est archival find was at Kaiser Indus­tries in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia: the Kaiser-Fraz­er pho­to files, placed on loan for AQ’s use.…

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