We started a trivia thread over at another forum and it has been a lot of fun.
Here are the ground rules. It starts with one question. The first reply with the right answer gets the floor for a new question. It continues like that unless, A) the person who has the floor doesn't ask a new question, or B) no one gets the correct answer. In that case, the person with the floor asks a new question. No more than one question on the floor at a time, and discussion/clarification is welcome until the floor is taken over by a new question.
First question: In the 1952 Indy 500, what type of fuel was burned in the record-setting pole-position #28 car? Hint: it won pole position by a full 4 mph over the second-place Ferrari
Ok I've tortured you enough. They were known as the American Mercedes. The name Mercedes Benz didn't come about until 1926. The American Mercedes was assembled by the Steinway Piano people but all came to a end when the factory burnt down. The3y were manufactured from 1904 to 1907. Interestingly they were in direct competition with Mercedes Import CO. The company name in the USA was Daimler Manufacturing CO.I'm not sure what a imported Mercedes cost but a American Mercedes cost a mere $7500, in 1904!
I was talking world wide production cars. This car also had another first for that automobile world. None of these cars were officially imported to the USA. The antilock braking system in these cars predated any US car by four years. Mercedes was not the first and Cadillac wasn't the first US car with a form of antilock brakes.
I just found a inflation calculator site (ain't the internet handy?) and was able to get a figure. Seventy five hundred dollars in 1904's money is valued in 2012's market at, hold onto your shorts!, $192,307.69!!
I've got to find out how many of these cars they produced!
BB
It gets better! Apparently they offered more than one model!
That is hilariously out of whack for the SF bay area! My home cost about half that when it was built in the 40's and it's now worth $350K at least. And our grocery's for the month in 1904 would have been about three or five dollars, I just can't believe it's only $200K
The first production vehicle to incorporate ABS was the Jensen FF of Great Britain. It was not a high production vehicle. The Jensen FF was also the first non all terrain vehicle to use FWD. this all happened around 1966. I kind of wonder about the FWD claim.
Correct, it was the first to have ABS and the first road car to have four wheel drive. It was a low production vehicle with just over 300 units produced over the five years Jensen made the FF. It was not cheap, we're talking a 4x4 supercar though.
The first American car to have an antilock brake system was the 1970 Lincoln Continental.
That's partially right Brian. They weren't all actually kit cars but full size replicas of their model cars. Also they built a number of vehicles for TV and movies.
The Piranha that you showed was designed by a company called Marbon Chemical, a division of Borg-Warner and Centaur Engineering Corporation as a way to promote the use of plastic in the automotive world. AMT bought the rights to the vehicle with the intention of going int production and marketing it! They also were going to sell it as a "kit car" as you said. Who was heading up the AMT Speed and Custom Division? Gene Winfield. One of the Piranha's was used in the TV series Man From Uncle. About fifty cars were built most of them prototypes. The vehicle under went a lot of design changes. Here's the sport racing version.
We had a question concerning the Stout Scarab a couple of weeks back. I ran accross this video todat and it is very informative on the Scarab. Takes about 6-7 minutes. Take a look. The man who designed this vehicle is the same person who designed the Ford Tri-Motor.
Its my wife who says I'm psycho but not psychic. She says if I was psychic, I'd be "more in tune with...." but anyone who spends THAT much time looking at old cars must be psycho
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