Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Read Free Page B

Instead, it hoped that by building and demonstrating a prototype, it could interest major automakers in using Briggs & Stratton engines to power their own hybrid cars.
    Car Trouble: The idea looked good on paper, but it was more than 20 years ahead of its time—the battery technology that was necessary to make hybrid cars practical didn’t exist. The 12 rechargeable batteries the B & S hybrid carried in its trunk added so much weight to the car (about half a ton) that it needed a second set of rear wheels just to hold them up. The car had only a 60-mile range, after which the batteries needed a full eight hours to recharge. Even when both the gasoline and the electric engine were firing at the same time, it took 22 seconds for the car to accelerate to 40 mph. Top speed: a paltry 68 mph.
    Out of Gas: GM, Ford, and Chrysler weren’t interested. Briggs & Stratton went back to making engines for lawn mowers. The first practical hybrid sold in the United States, the Honda Insight, didn’t arrive in American showrooms until 1999.
    FORD CAROUSEL (1970s)
    Ignition: In the early 1970s, a group of Ford Motor Company executives had an innovative idea: create a van large enough to hold seven passengers, yet small enough to handle like a car and park in an ordinary garage. They were convinced that it would be a big seller and might even replace the station wagon as the suburban family car. In 1972 the company created a full-size clay model of the concept, which it called the Carousel, and the following year commissioned a consumer survey to gauge public interest. Their findings: Demand was so high that Ford commissioned a second survey out of fear that the results of the first study were too good to be true. The results of the second survey were identical—so Ford set to work designing a prototype and made plans to introduce the car during the 1975 model year.
    Bad car-ma? 40% of car theft victims admit they left their keys in the ignition.
    Out of Gas: Ford president Lee Iacocca liked the Carousel, but his boss, Henry Ford II, hated it and didn’t care how well the car tested. “I’m not a big survey man,” he explained years later. “I think that if you’re in the business you ought to know what the hell you want to do and you can’t rely on a survey to pull your bacon out of the frying pan.” On his orders, the Carousel was shelved.
    Aftermath: Henry II fired Iacocca in 1978, and when Iacocca went to work for Chrysler, a lot of Ford execs went with him, including several who had worked on the Carousel. Chrysler commissioned its own consumer survey to see if a Carousel-type van would still be popular. It was, and in 1983 the first Dodge Caravan—which looked virtually identical to the clay model Ford created in 1972—rolled off the assembly line. By 1988 Chrysler was selling more than 450,000 minivans a year, making it one of the most successful automobile launches in history.
    LINCOLN FUTURA (1955)
    Ignition: If ever there was a concept car that was appropriately named, it was the Lincoln Futura. The car looked like something out of The Jetsons: it was a two-seater like the classic Ford Thunderbird, except that it had sharklike headlights, long tail fins and a “double-bubble” windshield—the driver and the passenger each sat inside their own glass bubble, just like a spaceship from a 1950s science fiction movie.
    Out of Gas: As with most concept cars, Lincoln never planned to put the Futura into production; they just built it to test some design ideas and then put it on tour in the car show circuit. The Futura also made a prominent appearance in the 1959 movie It Started with a Kiss , starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford. Then, when Lincoln was done with it, they sold it to a custom car designer in Los Angeles named George Barris.
    Q: What do California, Delaware, Florida, Oregon, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wyoming all have in common? A: They are all cities in Ohio.
    Aftermath: The Futura might never