Muntz Car

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Muntz Jet in "Mars Red"
Muntz Jet in "Stratosphere Blue"

The Muntz Car Company was an American company.

description

The company was founded in Glendale , California in the early 1950s by Earl "Madman" Muntz , an electronics and used car dealer. He was assisted by Frank Kurtis , who had previously tried to create a sports car under the Kurtis Kraft brand (the Kurtis Kraft Sport, which was only sold 36 times by 1950).

In 1949 the businessman Earl Muntz took over the facilities and the sports car project. The body of the Muntz Jet was made of plastic and was powered by a 5.4 liter Cadillac V8 engine .

In 1950, Muntz moved to Evanston , Illinois to expand production. Here the car got a sheet steel body as well as aggregates and an engine from Lincoln . Muntz also bought the automatic Hydramatic dual range transmission from General Motors, as did Lincoln . The Muntz Jet was built from 1951 to 1954.

In 1951, Kurtis sold the license to manufacture the cars to Muntz, who quickly re-branded them as "Muntz Jet" and enlarged the body so that the car became a four-seater, replacing the Ford engine with a larger V8 from Cadillac . Later this machine supplied by General Motors was replaced by a less expensive side valve machine (flat cylinder head) from Lincoln (again from the Ford concern).

The car, a sports coupe, was made in Evanston. It embodied an independent design with aluminum sheets and a removable fiberglass roof that was produced in-house. Other parts, such as the engines, were procured from other manufacturers. The car drove over 185 km / h (112 mph), a striking figure for a street-legal car of the time. It was featured on the cover of the September 1951 issue of Popular Science , along with a Jaguar and MG .

The company produced only about 400 cars from 1951 to 1954, and due to the high manufacturing costs, Muntz himself estimated that he would lose $ 1,000 with every car produced. This financial bloodletting caused him to close the company.

Because the cars were exceptional in their design, carefully built and of unusual performance, the Muntz Jets have become rare and valuable collector's items these days.

literature

  • Harald H. Linz, Halwart Schrader : The International Automobile Encyclopedia . United Soft Media Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8032-9876-8 , chapter Muntz.
  • George Nick Georgano (Editor-in-Chief): The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile. Volume 2: G – O. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, Chicago 2001, ISBN 1-57958-293-1 , p. 1086. (English)

Web links

Commons : Muntz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harald H. Linz, Halwart Schrader : The International Automobile Encyclopedia . United Soft Media Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8032-9876-8 , chapter Muntz.
  2. ↑ George Nick Georgano (Editor-in-Chief): The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, Chicago 2001, ISBN 1-57958-293-1 , p. 1086. (English)
  3. ^ Ed Heat: The Kurtis-Kraft Story . Interstate Printers, 1993, OCLC 7670426 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e David Lillywhite (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of Classic Cars . Thunder Bay Press, 2003, ISBN 1-57145-990-1 .