Hemmings Motor News Blog

Oft misstated fact of the day: John DeLorean didn't want to copy the Corvette with the Pontiac Banshee. Yes, he wanted a two-seater sports car, but he didn't want it to be an American-style nose-heavy V-8 sports car; instead, he wanted a European-style lithe small little thing with the OHC six that he championed.

You could see this yourself, in person, if you bought the Banshee prototype currently for sale on Hemmings.com by 2 Shores Classic Cars. From 2 Shores's description . . .

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"It's been said that true genius is but a hairbreadth removed from insanity; that sheer brilliance and all sorts of abnormal behavior are so intimately and closely related that eminent psychiatrists are frequently hard put to decide which is which".

This very closeness pervades every walk of life, so it isn't surprising to see that from the earliest days of motoring here would be a growing number of potential purchasers who wanted something different from the norm."

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The Tucker Sno-Cat is a fairly unique and easily identifiable vehicle, but one which we've not really read much about until recently, when we added the January 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated to our growing collection of MI issues. In that issue, we not only find a flight-of-fancy story on interchangeable bodies for cars (which Ryan at the Jalopy Journal highlighted last year), but also a four-pager on the history of the Tucker Sno-Cat, the invention of Emmitt Tucker.

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A bit of trivia for ya this morning – If you happen to have an old sawbuck, of the series first issued in 1929, pull it out and examine the car on the back, placed in front of the U.S. Treasury building. What car is it – or, more appropriately, what car is it meant to be?

Answer: Not a production car. It was apparently meant to be a composite of the various automobiles on the streets at the time.

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Spotted this one in North Adams, Massachusetts, not far from Hemmings HQ. It's got a funky, cartoony, so-ugly-it's-cool look for sure, and unless you spent a lot of time in a freightyard, you're not going to recognize it as an Ottawa Steel Products Commando, a rig used primarily as a yard truck – for moving trailers around as they're transferred among ships, railcars and over-the-road trucks.

One Hemmings user has heard them referred to as "yard goats". Ever seen one?

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