Tucker Combat Car
"Long before the Tucker 48, Preston Tucker had partnered with the legendary Harry A. Miller to apply his ideas on automobile engineering to Indianapolis race cars and through that venture established himself within the automotive community; so he was certainly no unknown factor when, shortly before the United States became involved in World War II, he approached the U.S. Army with his prototype for a high-speed all-terrain combat car. According to Charles T. Pearson’s The Indomitable Tin Goose, Tucker envisioned the combat car a couple of years prior while recuperating from an appendectomy, and set up the Tucker Aviation Corporation in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to develop it. Along with designer Wesley Casson (and, according to some sources, Miller himself), Tucker specified a car with a 175hp, 478-cu.in. Packard V-12 driving the rear wheels and an innovative all-welded 9/16-inch armor plate system that reduced the car’s overall weight to a mere 10,750 pounds, or at least a couple thousand pounds lighter than contemporary armored car designs. It rode a 109-inch wheelbase, incorporated only one door at the rear of the car, and included a pair of .30-caliber machine guns protruding diagonally from each A-pillar, a .50-caliber machine gun pointed straight out from the windshield, and perhaps the Tucker’s most revolutionary innovation, a 37mm machine gun in the power-operated dome that rotated 360 degrees and elevated as much as 75 degrees. All glass was bulletproof, and Tucker claimed that it could be fitted with dual rear wheels, four-wheel drive, and even tracks. - See more at: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/08/02/another-tucker-of-the-future-the-tucker-tiger-tank/#sthash.Sl1BIeRY.dpuf
