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| 10:30 PM | ||
| Users Online Now: 1,984 (Who's On?) | Visitors Today: 1,863,409 | |
| Pageviews Today: 2,754,119 | Threads Today: 745 | Posts Today: 15,642 |
| 10:30 PM | ||
Presenting the 1975 Dale | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 63590456  United States12/27/2014 06:48 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 06:49 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Liz talked a very convincing game, and had amassed $30 million for the company and produced a few prototypes, one of which at least seemed capable of self-propulsion and at least one other non-running one, which was shown at the 1975 Los Angeles Auto Show. At the show they claimed they would be able to ramp up to high-volume production by June of 1975, which, like getting the car crash-tested and EPA approved, seemed an insanely lofty goal. During the time when one would imagine they'd be developing prototypes and testing the cars extensively, the company had been busy doing other things. Like selling stock shares without a permit, and selling dealerships and as-yet hypothetical cars to dealers, again without a manufacturer's license. Things got even more exciting in the company when, according to research done by Petersen museum curator Leslie Kendall, In late January 1975, TCMCC salesman and former public relations representative William D. Miller was found murdered in his Encino office, the victim of four gunshot wounds to the head. The prime suspect was fellow employee Jack Oliver who, it was soon discovered, had previously served with Miller in San Quentin prison. ... since there's nothing like a suspicious murder to put California state investigators at ease. Local SoCal TV news channels started investigating the woman, the company, and the car, and found all to be vastly different than how they were portrayed. With the shit on a clear collision course to fan impact, Liz bolted from LA and went to the Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch, where she re-established the company, cleverly re-naming the Dale the Revette to throw anyone off the trail. You know, people would probably just think it's some other startup automobile company run by a transwoman who's developed a revolutionary three-wheeled car. [link to jalopnik.com] |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 06:50 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Thanks to Kevin Gibbs, I recently got to pen one of the most interesting stories I’ve written lately. Certainly the strangest. See, Kevin wrote in asking us whether we’d heard of a fiberglass three-wheeled car from 1974-1975 called the Dale – he keeps a scrapbook of such oddities, but had yet to collect photos of one for his scrapbook. [link to blog.hemmings.com] |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 06:54 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | That company, Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation (a not-very-subtle, but still perplexing Ayn Rand reference), very quickly had an office in Encino, California, a half-dozen or so employees and a few prototypes of the Dale, a three-wheeled, two-seat sports car. Carmichael said the Dale, weighing in at 1,000 pounds, would sell for less than $2,000 and be good for 70 miles per gallon, thanks to its 40hp two-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine and its lightweight body made of Rigidex, a material supposedly nine times stronger than steel. After the Dale (named for its designer, frustrated inventor Dale Clifft), Twentieth Century planned to introduce two other three-wheeled cars: the Revelle, a sedan, and the Vanagon, a station wagon. The company's factory, a rented hangar at the Burbank airport, would support the manufacture of 250,000 cars a year once fully operational, and cars would start rolling off the assembly line in June 1975. Starting in November 1974, Carmichael's promises began to attract national attention, no doubt buoyed by the human interest aspect of her story: Raised a farmer's daughter and tomboy, she built her first car at the age of 18, got a degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University, and married a NASA structural engineer whose death left her a single mother of five. The National Observer put her on its front page, and newspapers and magazines profiled her in glowing prose. She even convinced the producers of The Price is Right to offer the Dale as a prize on one of the episodes. [link to www.hemmings.com] |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 06:59 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
beeches
 User ID: 28167778 United States12/27/2014 07:05 PM  Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | i searched a while back here for a thread on this and was shocked to not find one Quoting: Boris the Cat this is a crazy story, ayn rand, the price is right, a tranny, murder, three wheeled fake car more than a trifecta - that's a pentafecta! Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face – Thomas Sowell |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 07:06 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | i searched a while back here for a thread on this and was shocked to not find one Quoting: Boris the Cat this is a crazy story, ayn rand, the price is right, a tranny, murder, three wheeled fake car more than a trifecta - that's a pentafecta! might be people here that remember this, couldn't believe there were no threads on the Dale |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 49509890 United States12/27/2014 07:08 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Useless Cookie Eater
User ID: 29696048 United States12/27/2014 07:09 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Nikola Tesla
User ID: 61053943 United States12/27/2014 07:12 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | First came the gas crisis. The price of oil and gas skyrocketed across America and people started looking everywhere for a way to ease the pain on their pocketbooks. Many Americans traded their big-engined pickups and sportscars for smaller, more fuel-efficient compacts from Toyota and Volkswagen that promised better MPG and lower operating costs. Quoting: Boris the Cat At the same time, the economy nose-dived, and thousands of Americans lost good-paying factory jobs at Ford and GM plants. Out of that chaos came a visionary with plans for an innovative 3-wheeled car that promised nearly 70 mpg, made incredible safety claims, and all for a pricetag about half that of the cheapest cars of the day. The biggest promise, though, was the promise of jobs – jobs that would reinvigorate economically depressed areas and give hope to those who’d been hurting the most after the factory closings. People rallied around the company’s charismatic CEO, and invested millions of dollars to get the car certified and crash-tested. Big name CEOs were brought in, and Ayn Rand was heavily quoted by supporters of the company who insisted that there was a huge demand for exactly this kind of vehicle. I’m talking, of course, about the 1975 Dale three-wheeler. Back in 1975, 37-year-old Geraldine Elizabeth “Liz” Carmichael launched the Dale on a hopeful public at the LA Auto Show. Claiming to be a mother of five and a widow of a former NASA structural engineer, Carmichael was a fraud. The Dale, itself, was a fraud, and there was no way a knowledgeable look at the company – or the man! – could reveal otherwise. That’s right, Liz Carmichael was a man. A man named Jerry Dean Michael who used a “Made in the USA” message coupled with extreme promises and an unconventional vehicle that was just different enough from a normal car to convince people who knew a lot less than they thought they did that the people who knew the car business didn’t “get it”. In the end, Jerry Dean Michael fleeced big-time CEOs, investors, and hopeful would-be employees who plunked down significant deposits on a Dale out of some $30 million dollars. [link to gas2.org] Quite a scam! From reading, it sounds like he took a lot of people to the cleaners. "One person with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson "You’ve heard that we are what we eat. But we also are what we think". “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." -William F. Buckley Jr. |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 66275131  Georgia12/27/2014 08:15 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 63326103 United States12/27/2014 08:35 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 08:36 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| I HAVE QUESTIONS
User ID: 17325476 United States12/27/2014 08:45 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 11581663 United States12/27/2014 08:53 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | First came the gas crisis. The price of oil and gas skyrocketed across America and people started looking everywhere for a way to ease the pain on their pocketbooks. Many Americans traded their big-engined pickups and sportscars for smaller, more fuel-efficient compacts from Toyota and Volkswagen that promised better MPG and lower operating costs. Quoting: Boris the Cat At the same time, the economy nose-dived, and thousands of Americans lost good-paying factory jobs at Ford and GM plants. Out of that chaos came a visionary with plans for an innovative 3-wheeled car that promised nearly 70 mpg, made incredible safety claims, and all for a pricetag about half that of the cheapest cars of the day. The biggest promise, though, was the promise of jobs – jobs that would reinvigorate economically depressed areas and give hope to those who’d been hurting the most after the factory closings. People rallied around the company’s charismatic CEO, and invested millions of dollars to get the car certified and crash-tested. Big name CEOs were brought in, and Ayn Rand was heavily quoted by supporters of the company who insisted that there was a huge demand for exactly this kind of vehicle. I’m talking, of course, about the 1975 Dale three-wheeler. Back in 1975, 37-year-old Geraldine Elizabeth “Liz” Carmichael launched the Dale on a hopeful public at the LA Auto Show. Claiming to be a mother of five and a widow of a former NASA structural engineer, Carmichael was a fraud. The Dale, itself, was a fraud, and there was no way a knowledgeable look at the company – or the man! – could reveal otherwise. That’s right, Liz Carmichael was a man. A man named Jerry Dean Michael who used a “Made in the USA” message coupled with extreme promises and an unconventional vehicle that was just different enough from a normal car to convince people who knew a lot less than they thought they did that the people who knew the car business didn’t “get it”. In the end, Jerry Dean Michael fleeced big-time CEOs, investors, and hopeful would-be employees who plunked down significant deposits on a Dale out of some $30 million dollars. [link to gas2.org] Quite a scam! From reading, it sounds like he took a lot of people to the cleaners. Reminds me of Elio motors. They are taking deposits now. I have a feeling they will take a lot of people to the cleaners as well. lol |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/27/2014 09:04 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 27651743 United States12/27/2014 10:27 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 11581663 United States12/27/2014 10:56 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | is the Elio car a real product or just a scam?...any body in Shreveport check out their factory, what activity is happening?? Quoting: Anonymous Coward 27651743 They have not even started productions. They keep on "pushing it back." They wanted financial backing of some sort from the city of Shreverport, but I'm not sure if the company received any. It seems fishy as can be, but the higher ups in Shreveport are stupid as hell. |
| Nikola Tesla
User ID: 61053943 United States12/27/2014 11:02 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | is the Elio car a real product or just a scam?...any body in Shreveport check out their factory, what activity is happening?? Quoting: Anonymous Coward 27651743 They have not even started productions. They keep on "pushing it back." They wanted financial backing of some sort from the city of Shreverport, but I'm not sure if the company received any. It seems fishy as can be, but the higher ups in Shreveport are stupid as hell. Let me guess, the CEO of Elio Motors is named Seymour Von SlipShyster "One person with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson "You’ve heard that we are what we eat. But we also are what we think". “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." -William F. Buckley Jr. |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 18248583 United States12/28/2014 12:00 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 66157061 United States12/28/2014 12:01 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 46692495 United States12/28/2014 12:27 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 46692495 United States12/28/2014 12:38 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 63590456 United States12/28/2014 12:38 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| NaughtyTinkerbell
User ID: 66404064 United States12/28/2014 03:11 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | I remember reading several articles on this episode in "Competition Press and Autoweek." I was 22. And the pictures--the Dale looked more like a car than Liz looked like a woman. But this was about the time of the Mercedes C-111 and the Bricklin. So cars were weird.  Last Edited by NaughtyTinkerbell on 12/28/2014 03:12 AM People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 65965792 United States12/28/2014 03:48 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Citizenperth
User ID: 48332321  Australia12/28/2014 04:10 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | uncanny tranny with a spammy car  It's life as we know it, but only just. [link to citizenperth.wordpress.com] sic ut vos es vos should exsisto , denego alius vicis facio vos change , exsisto youself , proprie |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 79496354 United States05/04/2021 11:07 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
