Vintage Cars: antique car, bantam jeep, kaiser frazer

Question
I saw a progman on an old car that an individual built a long time ago that when you turned the steering wheel the head light move and he had a real strong will for putting safety things on cars and if I remember right he wante to put seat belts in cars back then and the big 3 more or less forced him out of business.   I can not remember the name of the car or the builders name. Thanks and I hope you have a Blessed Day

Answer
You're referring to the 1948 Tucker Torpedo - this car, as originally designed, had "pop-out" windshield glass, a front seat passenger area completely devoid of any knobs, buttons or other injury-producing protrusions, disc brakes, fuel injection (dropped after the prototype stage), and had the "cyclops" center headlight which turned with the steering wheel.

The Tucker was an interesting automobile at worst, and at best, could have truly been the car of the future. However, Preston Tucker was not able to raise sufficient capital to produce his car, and the whole enterprise collapsed after constructing 52 cars. The movie, starring Jeff Bridges as Mr. Tucker, was filled with fantasy and inaccuracies, but is fairly accurate in it's depiction of the car. The stylist who molded the car into it's final, productionized configuration was Alex Tremulis. Previously, Mr. Tremulis had worked for Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, GM, Lebaron, and had consulted on the American Bantam Jeep project, the Crosley, and had worked with "Dutch" Darrin on the 1941 Packard Clipper before joining Tucker. After Tucker, he moved on to Kaiser-Frazer, then moved on to Ford. He formed a consulting firm in the 1960s after leaving Ford, and his final automotive design was the Subaru Brat pickup truck. A very interesting fellow, to say the least.

For some spectacular photographs of a genuine Tucker, check out this website:

http://www.laubly.com/1948Tucker.htm

As an aside to how much it cost to build a car company from the ground up, I can quote Henry Kaiser from sometime in 1949 speaking about it - and saying something along the lines of "I knew it was going to be expensive starting up a car company, but I didn't expect 100 million dollars to disappear without a ripple". He was speaking, of course, of the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, which started in 1946, was flying high in 1947 and 1948, and by 1952 was almost completely bankrupt. Preston Tucker had only managed to raise about 30 million dollars, and he was building a dramatically new and different automobile, while the Kaiser and Frazer were completely conventional in every way, and a LOT cheaper to build.