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The Stout Scarab was conceived by one William Stout, the man who gave us the first all-metal plane and devised the first regularly scheduled passenger air service which, in 1929, became United Air Lines. The Scarab was his idea of what a car should be: a sort of aircraft fuselage on wheels. It was powered by a rear-mounted Ford V8 engine placed above the rear axle and feeding its power to the clutch and then down via a chain to the gearbox and differential. For suspension it used something that looked very much like an early form of MacPherson strut (not used on a production car until the '50s).
Essentially the Scarab was the first people-carrier, its spaceframe construction body offering double the interior space of a Ford V8 in a shell that was only marginally longer. You could throw a party inside one of these cars. The long wheelbase gave a superb ride and, despite the extreme rearward position of the engine, the handling was undramatic. It was light, too, so the big Ford V8 was understressed. Nine were built including the original prototype, plus a single final glassfibre example - not only the world's first glassfibre car but a monocoque, too, built up out of only eight separate pieces and featuring air suspension.
The snub nosed Yank tank you see here on this page is probably one of the earliest known examples of what we know today as the MPV. One could be forgiven for thinking of it as a bloated Volkswagen Beetle with a large slow revving American V8 at the rear but the nearest the Americans had then seen of the Beetle was in Nazi propaganda pics and America hadn't been dragged into the second world war yet!
With shades of the Chrysler Airflow streamliner, this is the Stout Scarab, a vehicle very much ahead of its time and even though aerodynamically proficient, it was patently ugly. The brainchild of inventor, motoring journalist and aviator William B Stout, the Scarab was brimming with innovation. Not only did it have a unit construction body made out of light aluminium, it featured the famous Ford flathead V8 placed at the rear driving the rear wheels via a Stout built three-speed manual transaxle. In an era plagued with boxy designs, conventional drivelines and cramped interiors, the Scarab came across differently. Stout, once editor at 'Motor Age' magazine in the USA, had first designed a cyclecar sometime in the period 1913-15 but this couldn't attract backers for putting into production. A stint as chief engineer at the Scripps-Booth Company followed only for him to join the aircraft division of the Packard Motor Car Co. Here he was credited with inventing the first cantilever-winged, internally braced aircraft in the US. He also had a hand in the design of the famous Ford Tri-Motor aircraft. In 1932 he set up the Stout Engineering Laboratories in Detroit and built the first Scarab that year. This was followed by another couple of protos before he built a batch of six in 1936.
Thanks to there being no running boards on either side - so typical of all large American cars of that time - allowed the interior to be wider than normal. And thanks to there being a near flat floor - no prop shaft remember! - and a long 135-inch wheelbase, it probably had the most spacious cabin of any American car of its time. With its low sloping hood, forward visibility was superb. The Scarab featured independent suspension - using coil springs - on all four corners, providing a smoother quieter ride. The rearward weight bias coupled to the coil spring suspension endowed the Scarab with very good handling and traction. The Ford V8 provided strong and reliable power and was the only 'conventional' component in this avant garde creation. More than anything else, Stout was particularly pleased with his rear-engine, rear drive feature. "We have stuck by the front-engine car partly because our engineers have made the front-engine car workable, but also partly because of the horse-and-buggy tradition," he had explained at the time of the launch of the Scarab.
But it was in its interior that the Scarab stood out, thanks to its flexi-seating arrangement which is now being touted as a great thing on cars like the Renault Espace, the Opel Zafira and others. Only the driver's seat was a fixed one in the Scarab while the rest could be moved around or removed altogether as the situation warranted. There was also a small card table which could be fitted anywhere among the passenger seats if so required. The Scarab sold for the princely sum of $5000 then and in an age of opulence with marques such as Duesenberg, Auburn, Cadillac, Pierce-Arrow, Packard, Lincoln, etc, this was a very large amount. The jury is out on the subject of how many units of the Scarab were built but a majority of experts do suggest a figure of nine units built over the period 1934-39. The car in pic is a 1936 model and was caught on film sometime during the 1990 Great American Race. It was surely a car ahead of its time, an inventor's view of personal transportation of the future. William Stout's design might not have stood the test of time but as a precursor of things to come, his vision was pretty well focused.
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