The 1940s began with America's first superhighway and ended with tailfins, but in between, American carmakers built no civilian cars for more than three years, turning out jeeps, tanks and bombers instead. When peace came, companies large and small raced to be first with something new, from South Bend to Melbourne. These stories follow the machines, the inventions, the people and the moments of that decade.
Every tile in a Cars of the 1940s game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Makes and Models
nine stories
1The small company that beat the Army's deadline
On the tile: Bantam BRC1940
In 1940 the Army asked 135 manufacturers for a light scout car, with a working prototype due in 49 days. Only tiny American Bantam of Butler, Pennsylvania, met the deadline. Detroit designer Karl Probst drew its plans, and the hand-built car reached Camp Holabird, Maryland, with little time to spare. The big contracts still went to Willys and Ford, which built more than 600,000 jeeps, while Bantam built only a few thousand. In 1943 the Federal Trade Commission said the idea had originated at Bantam, not Willys.
In December 1946 Preston Tucker met designer Alex Tremulis in Chicago. Over the next six days Tremulis produced a sketch that set the car's look, reworking an earlier design by George Lawson, and other designers later refined details such as the front bumper. Built in a vast former Dodge plant in Chicago, the Tucker 48 carried its six-cylinder engine in the rear and offered a padded dash and a windshield designed to pop out in a crash. Only 51 were built, a prototype and 50 pilot cars, and 47 of them survive.
After the war, Ford kept selling remodeled versions of its 1942 cars. The all-new 1949 Ford began with a proposal from outside consultant George Walker, and his team drew on Bob Bourke and Bob Koto, who had worked with Raymond Loewy at Studebaker. So stylists from a rival company helped shape Ford's comeback. Unveiled at New York's Waldorf Astoria on June 8, 1948, the slab-sided car also broke with Ford's long tradition of transverse leaf-spring suspension. Historians credit it with setting up Ford's success in the 1950s.
Studebaker boasted it was first by far with a postwar car when its all-new 1947 models debuted in the spring of 1946. Behind the styling was a feud. Virgil Exner led Raymond Loewy's design team in South Bend, and in 1944 Studebaker's chief engineer quietly asked him to design a rival car at home. Studebaker chose Exner's model, Loewy fired him, and Studebaker hired him straight back. The coupe's wraparound rear window drew jokes that nobody could tell if it was coming or going.
5Australia's first locally made mass-production car
On the tile: Holden FX1948
In 1944 Australia's federal government invited General Motors, through its Australian subsidiary, to build a family car for Australian conditions. American and Australian engineers hand-built three test cars in Detroit, and in 1946 they were secretly shipped to Melbourne for more testing. On November 29, 1948, with Prime Minister Ben Chifley at the launch, the first Holden 48-215 rolled off the line at Fishermans Bend. Later nicknamed the FX, it was Australia's first locally made mass-production car. By 1962 a million Holdens had been sold.
6The first car in the Museum of Modern Art's collection
On the tile: Cisitalia 2021946
Italian designer Battista "Pinin" Farina shaped the Cisitalia 202 GT in 1946, and in 1972 it became the first car to enter the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. The museum admired how its body worked as one unified skin, without the separate, ornamented parts typical of cars of the time. The aluminum panels were hammered by hand over wooden forms, a method held over from carriage making, which partly explains why only about 170 were made.
Soldiers called it the Duck. Its code letters, DUKW, meant a 1942 model, a utility truck, all-wheel drive and dual rear axles. It could also swim. Yacht designer Rod Stephens shaped its hull, and GM had a pilot model running in about six weeks. In early December 1942 a storm drove the Coast Guard yawl Rose onto a sandbar near Provincetown, Massachusetts, where rescue boats could not reach her. Stephens took a DUKW through the surf and brought her seven crewmen ashore. The Army brass took more convincing, but GM built 21,147 DUKWs by 1945.
Citroën unveiled the 2CV at the 1948 Paris auto show, but it had nearly launched nine years earlier. French authorities certified it on August 28, 1939, and a first batch was being built when France went to war days later. Citroën quietly resumed work in 1941, and the car that finally appeared had an air-cooled flat-twin engine and a body of thin steel. In 1994 a longtime Citroën employee found three prewar 2CVs in an attic at La Ferté-Vidame. Who hid them, and why, remains a mystery.
On January 17, 1949, Dutch car dealer Ben Pon arrived in New York with two Volkswagens, the car the world would come to call the Beetle. Pon's company had become Volkswagen's authorized importer for the Netherlands, its first export market, two years earlier. In America he had little luck finding a partner to import and sell the odd little car. The next year New York importer Max Hoffman took up the idea, and by 1960 more than half a million Beetles were on American roads.
When the 1940 Oldsmobiles appeared in late 1939, buyers could order the Hydra-Matic for $57: a transmission that shifted through its four gears by itself, with no clutch pedal at all. Oldsmobile sold around 60,000 of the transmissions for 1940. Buick's chief engineer was unconvinced and called it the Hydra-Jerk. The war gave it tougher work, when Cadillac's M5 Stuart light tank used twin engines with Hydra-Matic transmissions. GM built its millionth Hydra-Matic in January 1949.
For its 1940 models, Packard became the first American automaker to offer air conditioning as a factory option. The unit, built by Bishop and Babcock of Cleveland, put its evaporator and blower behind the rear seat, where they took up about half the trunk, and it recirculated the same cabin air. With no thermostat and no compressor clutch, the only control was the blower switch, and in cold weather the drive belt had to come off. It cost roughly $275 to $310, and car air conditioning did not really catch on until the early 1950s.
On June 17, 1946, a driver in St. Louis pulled a handset from under his dashboard and placed a call on a new mobile telephone system opened by Southwestern Bell. The vacuum-tube equipment weighed 80 pounds and filled much of the trunk. Callers pressed a button to talk and released it to listen, and an operator placed every call. With a single transmitter, no more than three customers in a city could talk at once. Service cost $15 a month, plus 30 to 40 cents a local call.
At the end of the 1930s, Michelin engineer Marius Mignol tried a radical tire. Instead of crisscrossing cords, its sidewalls had wires running straight out from the center, spaced well apart. Because of that open structure, Michelin called the prototype the fly trap. The design gained a steel belt under the tread, and on June 4, 1946, Michelin applied for a patent on the Michelin X, its radial tire. The tread lasted around twice as long as a cross-ply tire's, and radials are now found everywhere.
On May 11, 1947, the B.F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, announced a tire that needed no inner tube: the tire itself held the air. It was the product of more than three years of work, and engineer Frank Herzegh is credited as its inventor. While the patent was pending, the tires were tested at high speed, on a fleet of taxis and on Ohio state police cars. Earlier tubeless designs had mostly been abandoned, but this one caught on. By 1955 tubeless tires were standard on new cars.
Before the war, GM stylists got a look at the Army's new Lockheed P-38 Lightning at Selfridge Field in Michigan, a fighter with twin tail booms topped by prominent fins. Frank Hershey's designers carried the idea onto the 1948 Cadillac, whose rear fenders rose into small fins; Cadillac's literature called them rudder-type. Not everyone at GM liked them, but buyers did not mind, and Cadillac sold 92,554 cars for 1949. The fins kept growing until they peaked in 1959.
The Tucker 48 had a third headlight in the middle of its nose, nicknamed the Cyclops Eye. It moved with the steering, coming into play once the wheels turned past about 10 degrees, so it lit the car's path around a corner. There was a legal snag: seventeen states had laws against cars with more than two headlights. Tucker's answer was a cover that owners in those states could fit over the center light.
In 1949 Crosley, a maker of very small cars, became the first American automaker to put modern caliper-type disc brakes on its production cars, fitted to all four wheels. The Hydradisc system came from Goodyear-Hawley, which built brakes like it for aircraft. They went on cars including the Hotshot, a little roadster priced at $849. The trouble came in winter: Midwestern snow and road salt ate the aluminum calipers and froze the pistons, and in 1950 Crosley went back to drum brakes.
9A steel station wagon dressed up to look like wood
On the tile: Steel Wagon1946
Station wagons of the day had wooden bodies that were fragile, expensive and slow to build. For its postwar Jeep Station Wagon, Willys told designer Brooks Stevens to make the body entirely of steel, using shallow pressings that shops outside the usual body suppliers could produce. The 1946 result was the first mass-market all-steel station wagon built as a passenger car. Stevens still pressed shallow panels into the doors and painted them beige and brown to suggest wood. More than 100,000 were built by 1950.
Preston Tucker raised money partly by selling dealer franchises for a car that did not yet exist, and the Securities and Exchange Commission took a hard look. On June 10, 1949, he and several associates were indicted on mail fraud, securities and conspiracy charges. At the trial, which opened that October, the judge told jurors that truly trying to build the car was not a crime. The jury found them not guilty, but the company was finished. At its 1950 bankruptcy auction, one wrecked Tucker went for $950 in a lot labeled Cars & Parts, Assorted.
Helene Rother studied art in Germany, and in Paris she designed miniature animal pins that women wore on hats and dresses. She fled Nazi-occupied France in 1941 and worked in New York as a comics illustrator and textile designer. In 1943 General Motors hired her for its interior styling staff, where upholstery design was her passion. In 1947 she opened her own studio in Detroit's Fisher Building, and from 1948 she helped design Nash cars. The Automotive Hall of Fame inducted her in 2020.
Audrey Moore Hodges, from Plymouth, Michigan, studied fashion design in Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan's industrial design program in 1943. The next year Virgil Exner hired her for Raymond Loewy's Studebaker studio in South Bend, Indiana, where she worked among the stylists behind the radical 1947 Studebaker. Alex Tremulis later hired her to design interiors for the Tucker. For comparison, Ford did not hire its first female designer, Leota Carroll, until June 1945.
When the war ended, the Volkswagen factory came under British control. On August 22, 1945, Major Ivan Hirst took charge as senior resident officer, and that same day the British Military Government ordered 20,000 Volkswagen sedans to meet occupation transport needs. Hirst worked through the technical and organizational problems of turning an armaments plant into a carmaker. Mass production began on December 27, 1945, and by March 1946 the plant made 1,000 cars a month. In October 1949 the British handed the company to the new German federal government.
Bombing raids on Stuttgart drove the Porsche design firm to Gmünd, a small town in Austria, where it worked in the buildings of a former sawmill. After the war Ferdinand Porsche was interned by the French from December 1945 until 1947, leaving his son Ferry to steer the company. A design contract with the Italian firm Cisitalia helped pay for Ferry's dream car, and on June 8, 1948, the 356 No. 1 roadster received its operating permit. It used modified Volkswagen mechanicals under an aluminum body.
6The racer who found weeds growing through Indy's bricks
On the tile: Wilbur Shaw1944-1945
In late November 1944, three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Wilbur Shaw drove a 500-mile test of Firestone's synthetic rubber tires at the Speedway, which had been padlocked since 1942. He found weeds pushing up between the bricks, rotting wooden grandstands and talk that the track would be sold off for postwar housing. Shaw found a buyer in Terre Haute businessman Tony Hulman, who bought the Speedway in November 1945 for about $750,000 and made Shaw its president. The 500 returned in May 1946.
7Ferrari's first Le Mans win, driven mostly by one man
On the tile: Luigi Chinetti1949
At the 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans, Luigi Chinetti drove a Ferrari 166 MM with a two-liter V12 engine. He shared it with Lord Selsdon, but Chinetti did nearly all the driving; his partner went to bed at his hotel on Saturday night and drove only a few laps on Sunday morning. They won, giving Ferrari its first Le Mans victory and Chinetti his third, after wins in 1932 and 1934. Chinetti went on to represent Ferrari in the United States for decades.
After the war, Robert E. Petersen was laid off from the publicity department at MGM Studios. He and fellow veteran Robert Lindsay formed a publicity firm and were hired to promote a show of hot rods, rebuilt cars tuned for speed that many people saw as a menace, at the National Guard Armory in Los Angeles. They launched the first issue of Hot Rod to coincide with it in January 1948, when Petersen was barely 21. His company went on to publish Motor Trend and many other titles, and he later founded the Petersen Automotive Museum.
John Cobb earned his fortune as managing director of companies in the fur trade, and he spent it going fast. On September 16, 1947, on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, he drove the Railton Mobil Special, powered by two secondhand Napier Lion aircraft engines, one driving the front wheels and one the rear. His return run through the measured mile was timed at 403.135 miles an hour. But a land speed record averages runs in both directions, so his official record was 394.196.
Early in 1941, Willys-Overland showed off its new Army scout car by driving it up the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The story goes that when a Washington Daily News reporter asked test driver Irving Hausmann what it was called, he said it was a jeep, a word he had heard soldiers use, and her article that February carried the name to readers. Nobody knows for certain where the word came from. The favorite suspects are Eugene the Jeep of the Popeye comics and the letters GP.
On February 10, 1942, Ford workers gathered as the company's last civilian V-8 car rolled off the line; from then on they would build jeeps, bombers and gliders. Ford had built 691,455 automobiles in 1941 but only about 160,000 for civilians in 1942. The government stockpiled unsold new cars and rationed them to essential drivers such as doctors, police, firefighters and farmers, and to qualify a buyer needed an older car with more than 40,000 miles on it.
Japan's wartime conquests cut the United States off from roughly 90 to 95 percent of its natural rubber, and suddenly every tire on the road mattered. The answer, starting in 1942, was Victory Speed, a nationwide limit of 35 miles an hour, because driving at 35 made tires last about twice as long as driving at 60. Civilians were allowed to keep five tires and had to surrender any others. The limit stayed in place until the war ended in August 1945.
4The first superhighway reused a railroad's tunnels
On the tile: PA TurnpikeOctober 1, 1940
In the 1880s William Vanderbilt's South Pennsylvania Railroad finished more than half its roadbed and dug miles of tunnels, then stopped work in 1885. About fifty years later, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission reused the old right-of-way and six of those half-built tunnels. The turnpike opened on October 1, 1940, running 160 miles from Irwin to Carlisle as the nation's first long-distance limited-access superhighway. Planners expected 1.3 million vehicles a year, but early traffic reached 2.4 million a year, with as many as 10,000 vehicles on some days.
In March 1942 the U.S. Army began building a road roughly 1,700 miles long from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska, and finished at the end of November. Among some ten thousand soldiers were the Black troops of the 93rd, 95th and 97th regiments and the 388th battalion, often given picks, shovels and axes instead of heavy machinery and barred from nearby towns. They still built a longer stretch than their white counterparts. On October 25, 1942, crews from both directions met at Beaver Creek in the Yukon.
After breaking out of Normandy in the summer of 1944, American armies raced across France faster than supplies could follow, and the French railroads were wrecked. The answer was the Red Ball Express, named for the red dots that marked priority express trains in the United States. From August 25 to November 16, 1944, its trucks ran a loop of one-way roads closed to civilian traffic, carrying supplies toward the front. At its peak it used 5,958 trucks and moved about 12,500 tons a day. About three-quarters of its drivers were Black.
On July 3, 1945, Henry Ford II drove the first postwar Ford car off the assembly line. Ford had built no civilian cars since early 1942, and its first postwar models were simply restyled versions of its 1942 cars. That September, Henry Ford II presented the first new Ford, a 1946 Super Deluxe Tudor, to President Harry Truman. The same month, his grandfather Henry Ford resigned as president and recommended him for the job, and the board agreed.
In April 1947 the Rouge River, which flows through the grounds of Fair Lane, Henry Ford's estate in Dearborn, Michigan, flooded and cut off the house's electric power. That night, April 7, Ford died there of a cerebral hemorrhage at 11:40 p.m., at 83. Kerosene lamps and candles were the only light in the house, a scene much like his birth in the same county many years before. His grandson, Henry Ford II, had been running the company since 1945.
On October 22, 1948, newlyweds Harry and Esther Snyder opened the first In-N-Out, a hamburger stand barely 10 feet square at Garvey and Francisquito in Baldwin Park, California. At a time when carhops usually took orders, drivers here spoke into a two-way speaker box at the front of a gravel drive-thru lane and got their food without leaving their cars. The Snyders' insistence on quality and fresh ingredients kept growth slow. A second stand opened in Covina in 1951, and there were only 18 when Harry died in 1976.