TORPEDOED!

This stunning car was known for advanced engineering and controversy that sank the company – but the Tucker should have been a surefire style icon, as Stephen Bayley uncovers

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In 1948, Harley Earl, Detroit's influential wizard of kitsch, put tail-fins on a Cadillac and set General Motors on the road to becoming the world’s largest and most profitable corporation. Earl's magisterial vulgarity dominated national taste through America’s period of greatest prosperity: the Eisenhower years, when the Interstate network was established and new horizons, actual and metaphorical, became available for all.

In 1948, Preston Tucker (1903-1956) launched his futuristic 'Torpedo', a technically ambitious and aesthetically sophisticated car. It was also commercially devious, with very poor financial handling. He conned his dealers, disappointed his customers, was pursued by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the business collapsed.

Tucker's fraud was more emotional than forensic: he promised very much more than he could deliver. He could not even deliver a fully functioning gearbox. At its launch, the car that looked to the future had no reverse gear: a better metaphor of the propulsive, but often delusional, American Dream cannot even be imagined. Just look forwards, not backwards.

Both men were extraordinary. Earl's life and career were a performance by someone who was continuously auditioning for the role of the-most-astonishing-person-you-ever-met. Tucker was no less impressive a human being. By every account he was elegant, handsome, charming, beautifully dressed... and a salesman of Satanic genius. He occupied a point on the line between genius and charlatan that is hard to identify from afar but becomes obvious once you have passed it. Perhaps he was not unlike a former-day John Z DeLorean.