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I've been watching old episodes of Top Gear (I *cough* acquired the entire series up to now and have been watching from the start after looking at all the specials and other novelty stuff in each episode, which are always hilarious) and in Season 3, episode 4 they do a Lamborghini anniversary episode.

In it, they mention Lamborghini LM002 - curious about this thing, I looked it up.

Apparently, in 2004, Uday Hussein's LM002 was unwittingly blown up by members of the US military to simulate the effects of a car bomb.

How they didn't notice a freaking Lamborghini badge on the thing, I don't know, but obviously it was ill-conceived. Wikipedia says they didn't appreciate the cars value, but on Top Gear they said one can be had for about 35,000GBP, so I don't know if I'd call that terribly valuable. However, Uday's one may have been pimped, I don't know.

Anyway, any other stories anyone knows about the cars of famous historical figures? For example, Hitler's car, maybe?

That thing always has and always will be ugly as fuck and deserved to be blown up, and I’m certainly not surprised no one recognized it. 35,000 pounds isn’t much, considering that a stock unarmored HMMWV already costs over 75,000 dollars and the armored ones are a quarter million. Never mind all the more expensive stuff the Army drives around.

Several cars and limos used by Hitler survived the war, as well as a number of racecars built on his order. One of them, a Auto Union Class D has gone up to auction several times in a row recently and still has failed to find a buyer, the initial reserve price was something absurd like 17 million dollars, but they can’t even move it at 6 million reserve.

Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan has a number of historic cars.

In Band of Brothers the paratroopers tested how bulletproof one of Hitler's cars was after they captured his mountain retreat. Apparently armor-piercing bullets finally did the trick.

The car Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed and killed in survives to this day and is owned by a resort as I understand.

It is riddled with bullet holes, however.

James Dean's famous, supposedly haunted, well-named Little Bastard, a customized Porsche 550 Spyder, was sadly cannibalized and destroyed over the course of a decade or two after his death, and today the largest known bits to survive are one door and the engine.

According to the comment track of Last King of Scotland, one of Idi Amin's Mercedes 600 was found rotting in a government garage in Uganda and used in the making of the film.

Vympel wrote:
Anyway, any other stories anyone knows about the cars of famous historical figures? For example, Hitler's car, maybe?

From my trip to the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart:


Hirohito's car


Kaiser Bill's Car

I don't think Uday Hussein counts as a famous figure. He's more of a footnote.

Wow, Kaiser Wilhelm had a car?

It's kind of creepy how Mercedes-Benz museum has those cars - Wilhelm isn't that controversial because he was hardly a warmongering monster, but Hirohito might hit a little closer to home (not that he was a monster, more of an ineffectual fop) - I assume they have some sort of tasteful section where those things are displayed.

Yeah, Uday's not really famous, but that's the story how I got to thinking about it, so ... yeah.

Vympel wrote:Wow, Kaiser Wilhelm had a car?

It's kind of creepy how Mercedes-Benz museum has those cars - Wilhelm isn't that controversial because he was hardly a warmongering monster, but Hirohito might hit a little closer to home (not that he was a monster, more of an ineffectual fop) - I assume they have some sort of tasteful section where those things are displayed.

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I think he had that car when he was in exile. The museum had this in the main hall:

What strikes me is the quote from Wilhelm's car. "I do believe in the horse. The automobile is no more than a transitory phenomenon".

I find it hard to believe that any person who has witnessed and tried an automobile would seriously consider horses as anything more than a pastime.

Tolya wrote:What strikes me is the quote from Wilhelm's car. "I do believe in the horse. The automobile is no more than a transitory phenomenon".

I find it hard to believe that any person who has witnessed and tried an automobile would seriously consider horses as anything more than a pastime.

The car shown is from his exile in the thirties. The quote is actually from 1886, when Benz unveiled his first car; at the time an automobile was a frame with a noisy, slow, unreliable engine, and definitely not a match for the horse in any real fashion.

Hmm, Kaiser Wilhelm II's car does look a bit too modern for the pre WWI era. I do recall that he brought some automobiles with him to exile in Doorn.

It's a 770 in the picture, which didn't even go on sale until 1932. There's nearly half a century between the quote and the car.

I know some stuff about Lenin and Stalin cars.

Lenin owned a quite interesting Kegresse track transport which used to be his only line of communication from Gorki in winter. Incidentally the only Kegresse-mounted Rolls-Royce in the world, IIRC.


Stalin's post-war main automobile:

Stalin's ZIS-115

Stalin's fastest car from the GON (Special State Garage):

1934 Packard Twelve

There's a lot of interesting stuff about them. I could compose a few posts I guess.

I heard that Armand Hammer gave Stalin a car once. Was that the Packard?

Tolya wrote:What strikes me is the quote from Wilhelm's car. "I do believe in the horse. The automobile is no more than a transitory phenomenon".

I find it hard to believe that any person who has witnessed and tried an automobile would seriously consider horses as anything more than a pastime.

To be honest, he didn't say cars were better, just transitory. The horse is positively ancient as a mean of transport, after all

It may yet turn out that cars were, indeed, a temporary luxury, depending on the exact time when our civilization collapses

What are the specs on Stalin's cars? Those doors alone look like they're about six inches thick.

Falkenhayn wrote:What are the specs on Stalin's cars? Those doors alone look like they're about six inches thick.

Armor - uniform 8mm thick (fully armored hull), windows - 75 mm thick bulletproof glass. The rest is just the hull of the car. A total of 40 such armored limousines were built, of which only one (#18) survived.

For a moment, I thought Stalin had his own personal JS-2 tank to drive him around. That is a real thick armor door. Did they soup up the engine?

Stalin had good taste in cars. Were those imported, or domestically manufactured?

Most of them were domestically manufactured or heavily modified from foreign models, I think. The Soviets wouldn't trust foreigners that much.

The motorcycle T.E. Lawrence was killed on is currently at the Imperial War Museum in London. Not so much as a scratch on it.

RedImperator wrote:Stalin had good taste in cars. Were those imported, or domestically manufactured?

They were domestically manufactured. However, much of the domestic Russian car production consisted of cars that were heavily inspired by earlier Western models. The ZIS from the photo was built from a Packard template and later models wouldn't have looked out of place in a Cadillac showroom; in the small car segment, Fiat had a deal to supply licenses to build their models and mechanical parts in exchange for cheap steel.

There were exception, of course (Tatra never stopped making very original cars) but it seems like Soviet car production was more concerned with making incremental changes to existing models, or importing designs, than actually sinking time and effort in making innovative homegrown designs.