#Ford mustang 2007 lemon stripes series#

Cultural critics speculated that the car was a flop because the vertical grill looked like a vagina. Ford’s marketing mavens had led the public to expect some plutonium-powered, pancake-making wondercar what they got was a Mercury. But what else? It was the first victim of Madison Avenue hyper-hype. True, the car was kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive, particularly at the outset of the late ’50s recession. But why? It really wasn’t that bad a car. That’s why we’re all here, right? To celebrate E Day, the date 50 years ago when Ford took one of the autodom’s most hilarious pratfalls. Government safety standards, at long last, put the King Midget out of our misery. The crown jewel was the Model III, introduced in 1957, a little folded-steel crackerbox powered by a 9-hp motor. Amazingly, Midget Motors continued to develop and sell mini-cars until the late 1960s. The result was a truly crap-tastic little vehicle, the four-wheel equivalent to those Briggs-and-Stratton powered minibikes. Any single-cylinder engine would power it. In the late 1940s, they began offering the single-seat Model I as a home-built, $500 kit, containing the frame, axles and sheetmetal patterns, so that the body panels could be fabricated by local tradesmen. King Midget’s cars made the Model T look like a Bugatti Royale. Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt, of Athens, Ohio, buddies from the Civil Air Patrol, wanted to sell bare-boned utility car that anybody could afford, unlike that bloody elitist peacenik Henry Ford with his fancy Model T. The King Midget story reminds us what a middle-class nation the U.S.

#Ford mustang 2007 lemon stripes series#

Though unworkable, this three-wheeled suppository was the boldest of a series of futuristic, rear-engined cars of the 1930s, including the Tatra, the Highway Aircraft Corporation’s “Fascination” car and, everybody’s favorite, the Nazi’s KdF-wagen. A fatal accident involving the car - cause unknown - doomed its public acceptance. The third car had a stabilizer fin on top, which did nothing to cure the Dymaxion’s acute instability in crosswinds.

The next two Dymaxions were bigger, heavier, and only marginally more drivable. The first prototype had a wicked death wobble in the rear wheel. Okayyyy…Deprived of wings, the Dymaxion was a three-wheel, ground-bound zeppelin, with a huge levered A-arm carrying the rear wheel, which swiveled like the tail wheel of an airplane. It would be one link in his vaguely totalitarian plan for the people to live in mass-produced houses deposited on the landscape by dirigibles. Buckminster Fuller was one of the century’s great nutjobs, a walking unorthodoxy who originally conceived of the Dymaxion as a flying automobile, or drivable plane, with jet engines and inflatable wings.