Have you ever heard of the 1956 Renault Dauphine or the Waterman Aerobile?
If you have not heard of the Dauphine or the Aerobile then there is a reason it slipped through the ever popular and quick automobile evolving world.
You might think it has to do with mechanics, speed performance or design, so this week we will look at how these cars survived during their time and what made them less favourable than the rest.
Website www.carophile.org highlights why these cars are listed in its Worst Car of All Time list.
1956 Renault Dauphine
The Renault Dauphine is a French made vehicle that originally was to be named the Corvette. Luckily that name was used for a much better vehicle.
The Dauphine was so rickety and the metal used was so paper-thin that rust was guaranteed. The design was similar to other cars of the time;
it just used low quality materials. Worse than the shoddy construction was the Dauphines performance, it took the drivers of Road and Track32 seconds to reach 60 mph.
That’s slower than even the weakest vehicles sold today. Somehow this super cheap, poorly built vehicle managed to sell more than two million units around the world. Just goes to show that at the time people would buy any car, just to say that they had a car.
1957 King Midget Model III
In the 50s, Caud Dry and Dale Orcutt, of Athens, Ohio, decided that they were going to create cars that everyone could afford.
They started with the Model I, offering the vehicle as a home-built kit. The kit contained a frame, axles, and sheet metal patterns that needed to be crafted by someone with fabrication skills.
Any single-cylinder engine would power the vehicle.
It was like a giant do-it yourself model that you could drive down the road after you built it.
Somehow they remained in business until the late 60s, with their crowning achievement being the Model III. The Model III was a folded steel box with a 9 horsepower motor.
1957 Waterman Aerobile
Waldo Waterman once heard aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss remark how he would like to drive and an airplane away from the airfield.
After hearing this Waterman went to work and spent years developing the Aerobile. In 1934 he flew a prototype, the “Arrowplane”, which was a high wing monoplane with tricycle wheels.
The wings folded against the fuselage when it was on the ground, like an insect’s wings. The fact that the wings folded backwards is terrifying to think about, considering a failure in the air would just fold the wings back and plunge you to your death. Decades later in 1957 Waterman perfected his design, the Aerobile.
No one wanted to tempt death by buying one of these machines, so the one working prototype resides in the Smithsonian as the first flying car.
