Automobile and Tucker Essay

The movie, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, is the story of a man named Preston Tucker and takes place in the 1940’s. Preston Tucker’s dream was to design and build the greatest automobile ever made. At first, he began by bringing home drawings of his dream car, which was to be called the Tucker Torpedo. He showed the drawings to a man who would eventually become his partner, Abe. Initially, Abe doesn’t like the idea of building a car, but he didn’t know anything about cars. Tucker placed an advertisement in a magazine about his car, and the public became excited. The car would have an engine in the rear, a middle headlight that turned with the car, and a windshield that would pop out when the car was in a wreck. In the meantime, Robert Bennington, who was the CEO of Ford, became worried that the Tucker Torpedo may put Ford out of business, so Bennington made a deal with him to allow him to buy a plant to build the car in. This also gave Ford a reason to be involved in building the car. The deal stated that Tucker must make at least fifty cars in one year in order to keep the plant, and the first car needed to be presented to the public within sixty days. Abe invested $6,000 to help Tucker build the first car. On the day of the presentation, the car was built but had no engine. Therefore, they had some problems getting it on stage, but once it was on stage, the thousands of people who attended the presentation cheered. After that, Bennington announced to Tucker that he wanted to change the car. He didn’t want the engine in the rear of the car, and since the ? Big 3†², the three largest automobile makers in the US, were buying all of the steel, there was not enough for Tucker to buy to build his cars. Tucker protested the ? Big 3†². A man named Howard Hughes, who owned a steel company, told Tucker about a helicopter company who needed to sell steel. So Tucker bought a helicopter engine and converted it to a car engine, and the car worked. After Tucker protested the ? Big 3†², he was spied on by people who worked for the ? Big 3†² companies. They accused him of not running his business properly, but it was not true. Abe got scared because he had already served three years in prison for bank fraud and did not want to get caught up in another mess, so he resigned. Then, there were commercials out that told the public that Tucker’s car was built piece by piece from a junkyard. Eventually, the government started a full investigation on Tucker and charged him with fraud. Tucker lost most of his investors from this, and had already spent too much money trying to build the car. He did make all the cars, but he did not make the fifty car minimum in time and lost his plant. He was found not guilty of fraud, but after all the bad publicity, people no longer wanted the cars, and Tucker had lost a lot of money, so no more cars were ever made. Today, some of Tucker’s Torpedo’s are still around; some are in museums, and some of them even still run. After watching the movie, I researched the Tucker Tornado on the Internet. One source, The History of the Tucker 48, at www. gizmohighway. com, says that the car actually had additional features not mentioned in the movie. In addition to the turning headlight, rear engine and the windshield that would pop out, the Tucker Torpedo also had more room inside the car and padded steering wheels and dashboards. Another source, 1946 Tucker Torpedo, at www.cybersteering. com, also says that Tucker applied for a $30 million loan before he was accused of fraud and that in 1956, Tucker died of lung cancer in Brazil while trying to build another car, the Carioca. I also found in the open letter from Preston Tucker, at www. tuckerclub. org, that this is a letter that Preston Tucker wrote to protest the other automobile companies and the investigations that eventually killed his company. In it he says that he actually had 1,872 Tucker dealers and almost 50,000 investors that put $25 million into his company. The definition of an entrepreneurship is a person who organizes and manages a business, assuming the risk for the sake of a profit. Preston Tucker started a company and wanted to build a car for Americans knowing that it would take a lot of money that he did not have. He organized and managed the business and assumed the risk of losing a lot of money for a lot of people. I think that Tucker was not treated fairly by his competition. New entrepreneurs like Preston Tucker should be given the same fair chance to build a business just like the others had to build theirs.