Why the Tucker Tiger Failed
Vložit
- čas přidán 23. 10. 2021
- Supposedly the Tucker Tiger was presented to the US Army before the war, but was rejected for being 'too fast'. Well, let's see what the archives have to say on the matter...
Merchandise (The carousel below seems dodgy)
the-chieftains-retail-hatch.c...
Public facebook page:
/ thechieftainarmor
Financial donations:
Patreon: / the_chieftain
Direct Paypal: paypal.me/thechieftainshat
Given the tire technology of the day, 100+ mph in a vehicle that weighs over 10,000 lbs is a terrifying thought.
I'd be more worried about the rims, Centerline type rims can make even a weaker tire perform well.
100 mph from a V12 putting out less than 200 hp and being armed and armored is something that I still can't figure out how they managed to do pull off.
I figure it had 4 wheel drum brakes so that speed isn't too scary when compared to a 1917 car engined with an aero engine and only rear brakes, aka, the 1917 Fiat Botafogo Special that Jay Leno owns.
@@Hybris51129 sounds like they picked their gear ratios very carefully and made full use of the wide power band that a V12 offers.
Well, true the tires of that time are terryfing.......until you realise that the brakes are even worse.
The description of the proposed track system reminds me of the time when, as a child, I converted a Matchbox dump truck into my seven-year-old idea of a "tank" by putting rubber bands around the wheels. It would never have occurred to me that anyone would have tried that on an actual grown-up vehicle. :)
If you're interested, the Kegresse track system saw a fair bit of use using similar methods, including use on Lenin's Rolls Royce.
To be fair, that's essentially how tracks got their start
I don't think that it was a grown-up vehicle... I looked at the statement that said it could do 114 or so. I was impressed. Then I looked again and it said MILES per hour. Isn't that something like 190 km/h ?!?!
That’s actually pretty common on skidsteers and other such wheeled construction vehicles, instead of buying a new one with tracks you buy tracks that go over the tires
@@Thunderchicken69 also in the logging world for marshy areas
The most important characteristic of any military vehicle is that it must be soldier proof. An I can assure you, any vehicle that is capable of 114MPH is NOT soldier proof - neither then nor now.
Yeah ... when I was doing base security, we had just gotten a "new to us" patrol truck that had a little red light on the top, a little directable search light, a working military radio, a working heater and was not in general all beat to hell (unlike one truck where I had to hold the clutch in with a board, raise the hood and shift the linkage there in order to get it into reverse ...).
I got to drive that "new" truck at least once and it was really nice - especially that working heater ...
And so ... we had this one guy who wanted to see how high it would bounce if he drove it over the rail road tracks at 70mph ... I don't know how high it bounced but it rolled 4 times out into the middle of this field ...
He at least wasn't stupid enough to not put on his seat belt before he did it but that stupid son of a bitch wrecked our new truck. We all wanted to kill him.
He was going to have to stay in the Marine Corps until he paid off that truck on an E-1's pay but that didn't do us any good.
That happened 50 years ago and I'm still pissed off at that ass hole.
.
One only needs to look at Air Force officers to see that! 😆
Nothing is true soldier proof. You can only minimize the damage a soldier might do
Like any army vechles are
@@demonprinces17 Yep.
.
Driving offroad seems like a pretty important requirement for a military vehicle, yeah. Sounds like the designer didn't really understand what it was supposed to do.
Amazing how whenever something was deemed "too [something good]" it is almost invariably bull or there is actually a good explanation as to why that was a problem at the time and place.
Egos...
You mean aside from the fact that Preston Tucker was a PAIN IN THE ASS?
The Tucker Tiger's defects as a combat car are obvious. Yes, Preston was a brilliant automotive engineer with a great deal of innovative ideas, but he simply didn't understand what the Army's requirements were. Not unlike J. Walter Christie, who likewise designed a "fast tank". In fact, his tank was bought by the Soviets in the early 30s, then copied as the "BT" series, which indeed were fast, and some had the ability to switch from wheels to tracks. In combat against the Finns in 1939-1940, they fared poorly, mostly due to tactical misuse, but really got walloped in 1941 in the first several months of "Barbarossa", as they proved "easy meat" for the Germans' otherwise puny Pak 36 37mm anti-tank gun, otherwise derided as the "door knocker". Even the German tanks, slower and with mostly not better main weapons, still took the Soviet BTs out in lopsided numbers in 1941.
Of course, the T-34 was a DIFFERENT matter...
I would say that it's more like it did one or two things really well and is okay at best when it comes to everything else.
That is kind of logical after all. Why would anyone turn something down just for being too good unless they were insane or stupid? there is always another reason, good or bad.
It's usually 'everything went into making it as [something good] as possible, and that meant [other good things] were compromised'.
It looks like an armoured rally car .Though I am not too sure that the US military were just being picky when they turned it down as virtually zero soft ground capability is a bit of a design flaw . I would love to know what Tucker was thinking as to how this vehicle was going to be used as apart from speed it doesn’t appear to have any advantages over the greyhound.
In fairness, the Greyhound was three or four years away yet.
@@TheChieftainsHatch My design was a failure. Lol
I wasn't thinking lol
I do wonder what the reaction would have been if they came back with wider (multiple?) wheels to improve ground preassure and added that 4 wheel drive. Or if that was even possible for the design.
it was so fun they had to drive at 75, not 60mph
We have a 100mph armoured car, now we just need a 105 mph infantry-man that can run alongside. 😁
😁.
What's also not realized is that another role of an armored car is OCCUPATION, ie., POLCING work, against civilians and/or irregulars without their own AFVs. Although a decent top speed is a desirable trait if the area to be policed is extensive, such as the German rear while they were in the Soviet Union, much work will take place in towns and cities where top speed is moot. I can well imagine if Preston Tucker had sold some of his "Tiger" armored cars to the Limeys how they would have fared in the "Troubles"...I'll presume not too well.
Those tilted books distract me more than they should.
Poor books. Hurts my heart.
Live with it
He hasnt heard of book stops
@@alexander1485 Needs to spring for an actual bookcase.
They aint tilted,
it's sloped Armor
It needs to show up in War Thunder. The traction sounds just right.
That turret made me laugh; wouldn't want to be the gunner when that smashes into a branch or over overhanging debris!
Or the sunlight... can you say greenhouse? Would be an oven in there, for almost no protection, not surprising the opted for a open ring mount later down the line.
@@SheepInACart Don't forget that armored cars are supposed to be stealthy! A dome of light reflecting glass kinda defeats that purpose.
I saw this meme a week or so ago too. Nice to see some of these things getting attention from learned sources and their claims being put down where needed.
I volunteered at the AACA museum for some time and they have the largest display of Tuckers in the world. And they had a 2d outline and a video about the Tiger but it wasn’t much. But I always got me curious about it. Thanks Chieftain!
When I heard the line about how the Tucker was not picked because it was too fast, my response was basically "pull the other one." I figured that the Army would not value pure speed, above some maximum amount, over any other characteristics and that it was actually not chosen because it was inferior in some way to contemporary vehicles. In engineering, it doesn't matter how good your product is at doing things that are not required, if your product has no capability at all to achieve some requirement. So, the obvious approach is to design for the requirements and make sure you meet them all before adding stuff that your customer isn't going to care about.
Its only downside I can see is no 4 wheel drive, and thus poorer offroad capability than the alternatives.
Put armour in plqce of the glass on the turret, and its a fine scout car till like the 70s.
The reason this was rejected was most likely a result of corruption, as the safety concerns of soldiers joyriding around at 100mph can be easily overcome with limiting gearing.
Rear-wheel drive 5-ton car . . . let that sink in
Pun intended?
Ah...but you can bring a bucket of ice cream home from the creamery BEFORE it melts!
Hold that tiger...
Also available with front wheel drive or all wheel drive
Watching this from Ypsilanti, Michigan! I see a video about the local hero, I click.
From the point of view of an MP: young Soldiers are notorious for speeding in any type of vehicle, especially if it is owned by the taxpayer.
I worked over 250 traffic accidents in Germany during 37 months. Each TA was preventable including the fatalities.
Thank you for your service. But what is the relevance? Do you think the Tucker Tiger (if adopted) would have caused even more traffic accidents in West Berlin?
So true even with the brit army
@@1970DAH Any Soldier who gets into a so called traffic accident, the chain of command is held accountable up to company commander for lack of training, lack of direction via SOP and lack of supervision. If a Soldier is speeding and kills a host nation civilian then all hell breaks loose.
A Soldier was killed as a TX National Guardsman while in a military vehicle. He was not licensed for that type. His chain of command was relieved of duty no matter how spotless a record.
Young people especially men think they are invincible, or lack imagination, that’s why they speed, take part in high risk sports and join the forces. Ultra cautious guys are not much good in the forces.
@@donaldpaterson5827 I am 59 and retired two years ago as an ICE agent and TX National Guard Military Policeman. 14 years of active duty:
Yes, young men behave irrationally and act as immortals but I observed over the decades that Darwin's Theory works quite well in order to prevent 'stupid' DNA from entering the human gene pool.
I felt no sympathy for young Soldiers dying after driving on the autobahn whilst consuming an ocean of beer beforehand.
If I had any feelings about their deaths, I would have became an alcoholic and be no good to the American people as an Military Policeman. Logic prevails at all times. Good night.
"...so go ask Drach...." Classic.
"Go ask Drac". You know what we're all gonna do now right?!!
"We need a Tiger built by the US!"
"We have a Tiger at home."
Tiger at home:
It certainly looks impressive in those demo videos. It's too bad no one told Tucker it'd be ok to sacrifice speed for off road capabilities. The 37mm was probably too big for it really and a 20mm Oerlikon would of been perfect in an open top turret.
Drach sat there wondering why suddenly loads of people are asking him about a tucker turret (whatever that is he thinks) !!!!!!!
The early 77 foot PT boats built by Elco had two pleixiglas bubbles that housed twin-50 cal Browning MGs that looked a lot like the Tucker design but were actually built by Dewandre. These proved troublesome and were quickly removed and replaced with simpler Scarff ring style mounts by early 1942. These became standard fittings on the much more common 80 foot Elco boats and 78 foot Higgins boats.
Order of St. George on the wall behind you? Outstanding!
"sharp objects interacting with the crew". LOL. Great understatement, great video.
Ah yes, the usual "my thing was rejected because it was too ahead of the time and everyone around is an idiot" argument people leave in their memoires and books... and then people wonder why army has a reputation for sticking with tried and tested WORKING solutions for too long:\
Oh, you want a _working_ solution. Why didn't you say so?
Well, military institutions ALSO have a deserved reputation for testing (and sometimes adopting) ill-thought-out, wackadoodle designs (hello, Convair Model 49) in the name of speed, budgetary constraints or good-old governmental corruption (looking at you, Sergeant York.)
Thing is, the US military, and the British to an even greater extent, have a very bad habit of rejecting designs which are being fielded by dozens of their contemporaries and which have long records of use showing them to be better than their own system. For example, autoloaders. Fielded by dozens of countries in multiple different configurations. All currently serving autoloaders are far faster and more reliable than any human loader could ever hope to be, and they don't get tired or consider surrender during exceedingly long engagements. They also mean that with the exact same amount of men, you can field significantly more tanks, or have more support personnel for your existing tanks. Despite this, America has rejected autoloaders time and time again for increasingly ridiculous reasons
@@filmandfirearms many US vehicles have autoloaders.
@@filmandfirearms Autoloaders are not a straight upgrade. a human loader is more like a jack of all trades outside of combat, helping with any tasks the crew comes across when not loading the gun. some repairs are much easier to do when an extra pair of hands is available.
there is also the case that, if something fails, you are now stuck with a tank that has only the shot loaded in the gun until you can get to a maintenance company, while loading a gun by hand is something anyone can do if the design allows. I think most AL are made so that you can load by hand in an emergency, but it is in the 2-3 rounds per minute range, much lower than most tanks.
and rate of fire does not matter much anymore, since most tanks are capable of crippling each other with a single shot, and whoever shoots first wins most of the time.
The most important reason I believe was Politics and Political Influence . As usual .
Oh no, our good Chieftain, please don't give WG ideas to start a US clown car line! 😁
Yeah ... I was doing base security, driving old Navy pick up trucks on patrol - and - we did not even have Positraction - so we were prohibited from leaving the Hard Surface Roads. They'd had to many get stuck.
This smacks of someone who doesn't understand what they're getting involved with. Being able to go 100mph ... is not nearly as valuable as being able to go off road. The thing with the steerable headlights ... that strikes me as something else that some one who didn't know any better would think was cool.
What it sounds like to me - is that they built a pick up truck with an enclosed bed, a turret in the bed and a lot of thoughtful things about crew comfort. Even though it had two wheel drive - this is still essentially a civilian vehicle they may have slapped some armor on. Having an unarmored turret with great visibility .... again smacks of people who don't really know what they're doing.
I don't know what happened with any further efforts to produce an actual "military" vehicle.
The film they produced on the vehicle - is basically a car commercial with some false claims in it that would fit right in with civilian car commercials. Of course - in having a defense contractor make out like their product was better than it really was would not be something that was unknown before or after the Tucker Tiger.
.
Steerable headlights sounds like one of those armchair general ideas: "at night the crew won't have to leave the protection of the vehicle to bring a lantern light on suspicious bushes"
@@Palora01 We actually had a search light built into the supports on the left side of the wind shield on some of our trucks with a little handle inside to swivel it about. There are Cop Cars that have these. These vehicles had in fact been built to be MP Vehicles - rather than the old beat up Navy pick up trucks we used a lot. I don't remember any of our vehicles having a siren though. Some of them had a rotating read light on the top - again - these are on the trucks that had been built for police work. Most of what we had were just regular old, gray pick ups that were all beat to hell.
.
@@BobSmith-dk8nw hence why it's an armchair general idea, there are better/cheaper/simpler solutions to that problem :D
@@Palora01 It was more a Tucker thing, he put them on his civilian cars too.
@@Palora01 Oh yes. We had a station wagon that had lights on the sides of the head lights - which would come on when you used the turn indicator. So if you were turning left, had the lights on - and used your Turn Indicator to signal that you were turning left - this light on the left side of the head lights - would come on and light up the road to the left side. I don't know if there's any vehicles out there now that do something like that - but we had a '72 Chrysler Town and Country that did it (iirc ...). Worked great and required no moving parts or additional monkey motion by the driver.
You could also use that functionality if you were doing something with one of the front tires, like putting air in it, to light up the area a bit. I didn't have occasion to do that a lot but when I did - it was handy.
.
been seeing this video in my feed and meaning to watch it for months. Here we go.
Would have been interesting if it was made 4x4 and/or with the dual rear tires.
And resubmitted for further testing.
It may have gone somewhere
Short wheel base vehicle that is top heavy going 100 mph.
SLGI payouts waiting to happen.
SGLI didn't exist, AFAIK, in WWII, but yeah, just imagine the DISABILITY payouts to soldiers injured instead.
The Tucker Tiger was rejected because they have "white walls."
Amidst the WWII rubber shortage, it would've had to have been _twice_ as effective as a half-track carrier to justify itself.
@@TristanMorrow well....half-tracks tracks are made of rubber...100%
@@nikkibaugher2427 ya know... you're right about that.
White walls protect the tires from sun damage, especially when the vehicle is stored outdoors.
Be a good commute car for some areas ... ;)
Ahhh, so THAT'S why "Hold That Tiger" was played in the movie when the family got in and raced to the ice cream parlor!
Alas, Tucker probably wasn't a military-minded engineer, otherwise it would've been better armored, maybe wider, and 4-wheel drive.
Tucker, being born in 1903, was too young to have enlisted during WWI. Therefore, it's not likely he'd have had any military experience.
Maybe had they dropped the turret and associated equipment entirely, fitted a decent 4WD system, and maybe it would have been a potential messenger vehicle, able to race behind the front lines delivering important documents, orders, and sometimes materiel between units, when sending a Jeep might have just been slightly too vulnerable/slow.
But then you would have to redesign the whole thing.
@@naamadossantossilva4736 I'm not sure why, I mean the 4WD transfer box should effectively bolt on to the frame, underneath the chassis, with only relatively little modification required for the front end. Deleting the turret, likewise means not cutting a hole in the top armor, or installing any of the requisite equipment. Most of that could relatively easily be retrofitted to the original to give the Army a Proof of concept to work with. A second, optimized prototype, if the army decided to pursue it would likewise be not terribly hard to build.
But anywho, all this is irrelevant, since tucker didn't try to go that route, and the Army didn't apparently suggest it themselves.
Fitting an AWD was probably not enough. At first glance, the clearance from ground is low, while the centre of gravity is already high. The axles are very low too. And the weight of a proper turret would have unbalanced it on a side of a slope, as the car is somewhat narrow.
Maybe they could have turned it into something equivalent or slightly better than the M3, but it would have required some extensive redesign just to do that.
And that's just by looking to it, as there might have been other hidden flaws.
The car was not well thought from the start.
@@Skyfighter64 You need to consider their wasn't space in a RWD design for the transfer case, front drive shaft, front diff, front axle ect. This is far from "little modification for the front end" effectively mandating complete new suspension, steering links, likely engine bay rearrangement, and not least of all, lifting an already top heavy narrow design even higher to make the extra equipment fit under the engine/gearbox/frame. Being even less stable would be an issue on uneven ground, and in a short wheelbase vehicle, render your crazy high on-road speeds even less usable.
Likewise dropping the turret but keeping the armor doesn't work well, the car is vulnerable to well placed shots regardless, and without returning effective suppressing fire its going to be immobilized , even if the armor is never defeated directly. A lighter caliber gun would have been a solid option for defense against infantry, but would leave you vulnerable to other scout cars, which are one of your principle opponents.
Nor would AWD have made it magically great offroad... it'd be less completely horrible, but its high speed narrow wheels, the excellent anti-body movement suspension design, high axle gearing ect that allow speed and road manners all actively work against its low speed offroad capability.
The issue with the Tucker Tiger is it was a solution looking for a problem, not the other way around. Tucker made something cool and hoped it would be useful (or at least a halo product to make other sales), rather than trying to assess what vehicle capabilities where needed and fill one or two mission profiles extremely well. Also even if you shed an entire ton, a 4t messenger vehicle in place of 1t Jeep is going to be extremely expensive, require far more fuel/maintenance, need more driving skill, have more requirements regarding trail quality, cause far more trail wear.. keep in mind in this era a military "heavy truck" was a 4.5t vehicle that moved 2.5t cargo, even a far more modern HMMWV is only 3.7t, so pre-ww2 something this large was the next tier down from a tank, not a light combatant suitable for secondary non-combat roles.
@@SheepInACart It was mentioned in the video that Tucker did have a 4x4 version planned.
Swiveling headlights are useful if the vehicle is going to be operating in countries where they drive on the opposite side of the road as headlights are generally slightly tilted to focus the beam towards the centre of the road, some British vehicles had the feature to swap left-right focus.
Keep in mind the era, this was 1930's, very few cars had any sort of headlight beam shaping at all (and normally totally symmetric placement), they where just circular pools of light. Indeed driving at night wasn't even that common outside city spaces with street lighting, without the sort of well marked or aheared to "lanes" (although centerlines having appeared in most denser areas, and edge marking the the best roads), nor was it done at the sorts of speeds we expect, your inter operating with horse drawn carriages, tram tracks, and animals/people not carrying lights.
Looks like it could have been a good police and security vehicle.
All I really got from this was a new appreciation for how much Preston Tucker had pissed off the wrong people.
So to you this thing sounds like a perfectly feasible, rational, acceptable vehicle, and it was only declined because Tucker "pissed off the wrong people"? So the total lack of off road capability, the unsafety of driving at high speeds, the fact that they didn't need a car that went 100mph, the brakes that wouldn't hold on a slope, those were all just fine, not really problems at all, and the fact that they offered to let him fix the problems and bring it back and try again but he just abandoned it entirely instead, this is all evidence that they were "just out to get him" in your head?
Why didn’t they just crank the armor up to counter the speed “problem” or just use it for supply purposes
Because neither the armor nor the the speed were the problem. It couldn't do offroad driving to save its life even at current tonnage, and adding weight would just make it sink deeper, faster, while ruining handling and making it even more top-heavy. It's also excessively fast as a cargo vehicle, while lacking the space the existing trucks had. Trucks that COULD already deal better with muddy ground, mind, because 4x4 or half track.
Trying to address its shortcomings would inevitably just turn it into something very close to what the army already had - the M3 scout car. So they didn't bother.
What chowderbrain at Tucker sent a 2WD car to an off-road test?
Poor Preston Tucker couldn't catch a break. Even after the war.
One of those things I had heard about, but never followed up on. Having spent 20 years in the Air Force, I am not surprised they did not give Tucker any acknowledgment.
That is assuming they actually copied something from him, which is doesn't appear they did. Did you not watch the video? this is some ad-men's claim from the 1950s trying to promote Tucker Motors. So they just tossed in some crap about the USAAF "copying" his turrets (without any details). As if the glass turret had not already been around for a long time. Moran searched for any technical details that might have been what he meant, and found nothing.
"We want an army just like we have now but better." ~ U.S. Army
"Hold that Tiger, hold that Tiger..."
The comment about asking Drach about naval issues is noted...
Yeah.
.
Some early PT boats used the Dewandre turret, and that looks a bit similar. But I can find no mention of the tucker turret on any PT boat. All always goes back the single line in the article Chieftain mentioned and already partially debunked.
Sounds like the Tiger had the usual teething problems, and Tucker himself lost focus to some extent. Your description makes it sound like the Tucker was told “not bad, let us know when you get these certain issues fixed, and we’ll give it another test run.”
Honestly, that vehicle, but in AWD and with better tires WOULD be awesome to drive.
You mean the M3 scout car?
@@Erdanya No, he means proper vehicle, not that useless garbage...
Without doubt Preston Tucker could design anything that was fun to drive. But to make that armored car anything of real use to the Army, 'he'd have had to go back to the drawing board. The hemispherical turret was a great idea, but the car itself had a gear box ratio ill-suited for the combat role, and it was too narrow to be stable enough with that turret. Plus, it really needed wider tires which may not have been readily available, in order to have a ground pressure that made it able to go off-road and/or not get stuck on dirt (MUD) roads, which Europe and even rural American at the time abounded in.
Being "too fast" is a perfectly reasonable disqualifier. Prior to this breakdown, my impression had been that the Army figured putting the keys to an armored hot rod like that in the hands of Pvt. Schmuckatelli would end up killing more GI's than it would the enemy.
Given how the guys at Aberdeen didn't even try running it up, down, or across hillsides because they could see how badly the tiger did off-road even on the flats, it seems my guess wasn't all that far off...
"Over hill and valley the banana buggies go-" -Banana Splitz
So if it was *capable* of going 114 mph, it *must* be driven at that speed? What unmitigated garbage.
We watched the Tucker movie in my highschool econ class. Dude had a lot of cool ideas and a lot of bad business sense.
1st mad props for the Jordan T-shirt
Oh - you beat me to this! :D I saw probably the same image and then the 10000 comments of people saying: "if only they used this thousands of americans would have survived" i was going to make a video on why this thing was not going to work... of course only 30 people would have seen my video so glad you did it first :p
I believe it was a reproduction of Preston Tucker's armored car, which sported the gun turret that later he got a contract to manufacture, featured in the 1988 Francis Ford Coppola film "Tucker: The Man and His Dream". Fittingly, the accompanying music to the Tuckers piling in the armored car is "Hold that Tiger".
That classic B+H Jordan shirt gave me a big dose of late 90s nostalgia!
Go on then Drach. You know what to do.
I think we need to go ask him on a Q&A just to be certain, Drach isn't omniscient and we'll never have his opinion if he doesn't see this video in the first place.
Thank you.
Not having 4 Wheel Drive with high ground clearance and narrow wheels wouldn't be much of a problem if this cars weight wasn't so much. I could see the Tucker being stuck on the beaches of Normandy and getting American soldiers killed.
Why would someone be driving a Scout Car across "the Beaches of Normandy"? These are for recon missions ahead of the army, not for active combat. How stupid do you think the military was?
Thanks. I knew nothing about the Tucker Armored Car before.
Thank you. This was extremely interesting and informative. 👍
Nice T-shirt on a Grand Prix weekend! Choice of Jordan makes perfect sense.
Oh and yeah ... just looking at the picture of the thing - they went to the trouble to camouflage it - but as others have mentioned then they put White Walls on it. I mean - they even camouflaged the wheel hubs - inside the White Walled Tires(!!!!). If ever there were a sign that these people only had a cursory understanding of what they were doing - that picture would tell the story.
.
Re the Tucker 37mm turret as shown, the idea that the gunner sits at a righ angle to the direction the gun is pointing and aims trough a periscope looks like a recipe for nausea
High speed in the military is good. Because we want to get out of trouble faster than we got into it!
Yeah, if you can handle the high speed. If the car can't safely do it, then it is pointless. In any case, like he said several times, they didn't turn it down _because_ of the speed they just mentioned they didn't really want it much. they turned it down for being shit off road. Being able to go 70mph (I don't beleive it would actually reach 100mph for a moment) is useless if you are bogged in mud under the enemy's guns unable to move, or if you can't move off the road to avoid a trap, or just plain get stuck trying to turn around to escape one they open fire on you.
Reason Tucker promoted the idea of it being too fast. Was to attract the attention of civilian drivers.
I think hydraulic turrets predate electrical ones. They developed the electrical ones to fix some of the problems with the hydraulic ones, but then they figured out a way to get around the hydraulic issues, and so developed some better models.
It´s look like an airsoft tank.
Wonder if the foam lining to the interior had an anti-spalling properties?
I don't think it was quite the intent, but probably.
My first thought, too.
After the Tiger was failed , Tucker used it to take his Family out for Ice Cream runs at 80 MPH!
1936 or so, the Army starts getting more money for R&D, since having almost none since WW1. Before it was great idea, can you do it for free?
I know your more of a tracked focused person but more information about the age of the armored car would be fascinating.
the armored car is roughly 120 years old this year. You are welcome ;)
This again proves how stupid governments can be.
how?
The government was send a hinking pile of garbage and correctly avoided buying it.
Like hearing about the vehicles that were failures. Interesting information
So glad you untook this topic cheiftan. Ive been wanting to know about it for a long time. I wonder if it would have been a good escort for supply convoys.
Why, because supply convoys travel at super high speeds and they need something faster than a M3 Scout Car or M3 Half-track to protect them? What exactly can this machine do _better_ than what we already had is what you need to ask, and is that capability something that we can actually use? The answers are "no". Certainly not since we have to build them all, ship them all overseas and then across the channel. How is a car that travels at the same speed as the convoy, but can't leave the road lest it get stuck, but which CAN go 100mph (although it will probably crash and kill you) better than a truck with a .50cal on top, or a armored car, which also travels at the same speed as the convoy, but which can go off the road without getting stuck. Or you could just crank out a bunch more M8 Greyhounds, with 6x6 drive and 37mm gun, if you really think that 37mm is essential.
A link to the public document about turrets would be appreciated....
The military during the Civil War, also did not want repeating rifles, this trend remained until the Great war, only after they were being wiped out by the German repeating arms. We were also slow in adopting machine guns until the Mexican American war when one of the Generals mounted them on automobiles on his own, not with the blessing of the Army.
White sidewall tires! Purrr-fect for the Tiger!
Advertisements are NOT unbiased??? Shock!!!! 😱
when you thought "WRC" meant "Wartime Rally Championship"
Thanks
Love the Jordan shirt- buzzin and hornets!
Wonder if he has a Bitten and Hisses to go with it
Sounds like this really, really needed to have been tested in the 4x4/duallies configuration and could have benefited from the practice of putting the spare wheels on the front axle for dual wheels there as well when extreme terrain needed to be traversed, assuming two spare wheels could be carried.
A cool looking vehicle! Would love to drive one.
Also, Chieftain has a new logo! :)
Ah, the Packard V12. Its actually what inspired Ferrari to make his own V12
Grate video!
Very interesting thanks and I have subscribed.
I remember a song about a fellow of this name and I wonder if it the same chap. It went something like "There was a young man named Tucker who was a wonderful ...." but I cannot remember the rest. Maybe someone else does.Cheers.
Very nice, only thing I want to throw out is that the report was likely referring to the Brewster XSB2A Buccaneer, a naval dive bomber from the same folks who brought us the Buffalo (not that bad of an aircraft) and the XA-32 (that bad of an aircraft). It was standardized as the SB2A is regarded by many as one of the worst dive bombers of the war. So much so that it was deemed unsuitable for combat and relegated to target tug duties.
Makes me think of Batman's tumbler at 9:59..? Four tires at the back, remember?
Wife's great uncle owned Batman Car and invented the LRV that became the Jeep...he made about 300 of them before willys and Chrysler took over...he made every trailer for every jeep and became mega rich from it.
Wow! Those whitewall tires look sharp.
found this very interesting and informative, Tucker was a fascinating individual for sure.
Excellent! Now I have a rebuttal to those damn memes...
And can adjust the stats of the vehicle in any games I play it in.
I get that they tested a whole lot of things on this armored car, but what about the track tensioning system ? No mention of that ? The folks at Aberdeen clearly weren't thorough in their job !
The dangers of not running the test article through the entire course. By modifying the sand course and not even running it through the mud or incline courses, the army gave Tucker the ability to honestly state that they passed what was tested.
A 4x4 version of this, perhaps with the turret replaced by a large two-piece hatch and a pintle for God-knows-what, might have done well in North Africa. Open spaces, relatively flat... Imagine the LRDP with a 100-mph rally car armed with a Ma Deuce.
I'm also surprised an unarmed version wasn't offered, as a light, fast transport or ambulance. The lack of a heavy turret, gun, and ammo might have improved it's stability, and it certainly wouldn't have been the worst light truck of the war.
So looking at the pictures, The head of R&D for the Daleks decided more power was the answer.
Just be glad certain government chemical monitoring agencies never saw one, or the "Ballad of Thunder Road" would have been real, real short. Geoff Who is in a weird mood after pizza and doing laundry most of the day.
Great song, that is.
Thanks Chieftain. Always like your videos. Major Chieftain is it now? Or Lt. Col Chieftain?
Have you thought about going back and doing an inside the hatch on the m1a1 at the collings foundation?
I had to re read the title to make sure I wasn't reading what I thought I was reading
I guarantee if they rejected it for "being too fast", it was was for being too fast for the suspension to safely handle, etc, not just because they really didn't want their troops going fast. You can make a stock sedan do 200mph by adding more power, but you can't do it safely.
I see you are quite the thread commenter; I have been skimming through and reading all the comments. Gotta say while I am tempted to rectify this vehicle's faults, I would rather turn it into another vehicle as a redesign: the aerosani. A bit of foreign investment goes a long way, if this were to pop up in the oversea's market. I have ideas to arm a fictional White Russia emigre army with this vehicle, heavily modified as it were, into an aerosani.
Sounds like an interesting technology testbed, but perhaps lacked the resources to be developed further due to competing designs that were more mature/easier to build & maintain.