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The Dymaxion Car

On 21 July 1933, about 3,000 people gathered outside the old Locomobile plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a factory that had built luxury cars until the company went bust in 1929. Among them was the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. What rolled out of the building was 19 feet long, shaped like a raindrop lying on its side, and skinned in lacquered aluminum. It had two wheels in front and one at the back, and the back wheel did the steering. It had no rear window; the driver looked behind through a periscope. It could turn in little more than its own length. That afternoon its designer, Buckminster Fuller, drove it to 70 miles an hour along the shore at Seaside Park.

Three months later a professional driver was dead at its wheel, and for the rest of his life Fuller told a story about why that was not the car’s fault. The story was mostly untrue. The car is still worth taking seriously, because what Fuller was trying to do in 1933 was what car designers have been trying to do ever since.

The Pitch

In 1933 the American car was a carriage with an engine bolted to the front. It was a box on a frame, upright, with a flat windshield and fenders that stuck out into the wind. Fuller thought this was absurd. As the writer Jonathon Keats puts it in his book on Fuller , Fuller believed the automobile was still stuck in its horse-drawn past. At highway speed most of an engine’s work goes into pushing air out of the way. A car shaped by that fact, rather than by the habits of coachbuilders, could go faster on the same engine, burn less fuel, and carry more people.

His first sketches were not of a car at all. Fuller wanted a vehicle that could drive, float, and eventually fly. The early drawings, as the biographer Alec Nevala-Lee describes them in Slate, had three wheels, a rear wheel that steered like a boat’s rudder, and inflatable wings. Fuller’s own names for it included the “zoomobile” and the “omnimedium plummeting device.” The car that got built was the ground-bound piece of that dream, with the wings left off. The rudder stayed.

He attached to it the word he put on most of his work: Dymaxion, a blend of “dynamic,” “maximum” and “tension.” It was meant to signal the most performance from the least material.

The claims were extraordinary. Fuller said the car would carry up to eleven passengers, reach 120 miles an hour, and get 30 to 40 miles to the gallon, at a time when an ordinary car topped out around 60 miles an hour. It would park nose-first into a space barely longer than itself. It would do all this with an ordinary Ford V8 engine, because the shape would do the rest. Some of the shape claims have held up. A 2011 computer study at Coventry University , modeling the airflow over the body, found it close to the lowest-drag shape a car of that size could have.

It is easy to see why people wanted in. This was the bottom of the Depression. Here was a man promising a car that would do more with less, built by hand in a dead factory, by craftsmen who had nothing else to do.

The People

Fuller was 37 in 1933. Six years earlier, after his building-materials business failed, he had been broke, drinking, and grieving a daughter who had died at four. He came out of it resolved to stop “earning a living” and to work only on what he thought humanity needed. (A longer profile of Fuller on this site covers that turn and what came after.) The car was his first attempt to build one of his ideas at full size, and to show it could work.

The money came from a 30-year-old Philadelphia socialite named Anna Biddle, known as Nannie. In February 1933 she advanced Fuller $1,000, with more promised. Fuller wrote himself what he called an “ice cream cone” clause into the arrangement, according to Nevala-Lee , who found it in Fuller’s papers: “If I want to use all of it to buy ice cream cones, that will be that, and there will be no questions asked.” She put in another $1,500 when that ran out, and later $5,000 more. In Fuller’s later accounts she largely disappears, replaced by other backers or by Fuller’s claim that he paid for the car himself.

His first hire was Starling Burgess, a Boston designer of racing yachts who had built airplanes under license from the Wright brothers before the First World War and had designed Enterprise, the yacht that defended the America’s Cup in 1930. In 1933 he was bankrupt, several marriages in, and suffering from an ulcer he treated with morphine. He was also the man who knew how to build a light, strong hull out of wood and thin metal, which is what the car body was. Burgess spent part of his time on the car and part on a yacht he was designing for a New York lawyer, which Fuller resented.

Burgess also fell in love with the patron. They would marry before the year was out, which left the person paying for the car and the person building it in one household, and Fuller on the other side of the table.

The man who died in the car was Francis T. Turner, a professional driver who worked for the Gulf Refining Company. He was 33, with a wife and two sons.

What Got Built

The work started in March 1933, on the morning of Franklin Roosevelt’s first inauguration, in a rented corner of a Bridgeport machine shop. In June the team moved into the empty Locomobile plant. About a thousand people applied for the handful of jobs. The crew grew to somewhere between seventeen and 27 men, depending on the account: sheet-metal workers, toolmakers, woodworkers, and coachbuilders who had worked for Rolls-Royce.

They bought a Ford for $450 and took it apart. The engine, gearbox and running gear went into the new car, with the drivetrain flipped so the engine sat at the back and drove the front wheels. The frame was steel. Over it went a body of ash wood skinned in aluminum, with a canvas roof stretched over wooden bows. The finished car weighed around 2,700 pounds. It had a single headlamp, a crush zone of balsa wood in the nose, and a cooling system that used dry ice. The first one cost about $8,000 to build. A 1932 Ford V8, fourteen feet long, sold for around $700.

Testing turned up problems almost immediately. On 19 April a run produced what the crew called a “death wobble,” a violent shimmy coming from the rear wheel’s mounting. Burgess fixed it by adding a hinge to the frame. Other problems stayed. The gearing made the steering heavy. Most of the weight sat over the back, which twisted the frame and wore through tires. At speed the tail could lift off the road, and the car was unstable in crosswinds. The original blueprints show seating for four, not eleven.

Once it was running, the car was a sensation. After the Bridgeport unveiling Fuller drove editors from Fortune and The New Yorker down Fifth Avenue, collected a speeding ticket, and stopped traffic. At Roosevelt Field on Long Island, the aviator Frank Coffyn took it to 90 miles an hour. That was the real top speed, not 120.

By then the money was gone. Biddle had stopped funding the project, and Fuller needed cash. Al Williams, a former Navy racing pilot who ran Gulf’s aviation department, offered $2,500 for the first car, less than a third of what it had cost, to use in advertising. Fuller took it. A second car was under way for Alfred Taylor, a London engineer who had agreed to pay $5,000 for a demonstration model he could show to buyers in Britain.

Three cars were built in all. The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, which later built a replica of its own, puts the second car’s cost at $7,688. The third was commissioned in January 1934 by Evangeline Stokowski, wife of the conductor Leopold Stokowski, and finished that October.

How It Died

On the morning of 27 October 1933, Gulf’s car was in Chicago, where the Century of Progress world’s fair was in its final days. The German airship Graf Zeppelin had flown in to visit the fair. Aboard was William Forbes-Sempill, a Scottish aviation pioneer, and he wanted a ride in the car everyone was talking about.

Around 8 a.m. Turner drove south on Lake Shore Drive near the fairgrounds, with Forbes-Sempill and Charles Dollfus, a French balloonist and aviation official, as passengers. They were going about 40 miles an hour. Near the fair’s entrance Turner turned sharply to the left. On a road that may have been wet or greasy, the car went over. On its second roll it was struck by a car driven by a man named Meyer Roth, who was traveling in the same direction. Forbes-Sempill and Dollfus, who were not belted in, were thrown out; Dollfus was cut up, and Forbes-Sempill fractured his skull. Turner was wearing his seatbelt. It held him in place while the canvas roof and its wooden bows collapsed onto him. He died at Mercy Hospital of a fractured skull.

The newspapers blamed the car. The headlines were about the strange three-wheeled vehicle that had flipped and killed its driver.

Fuller had not been there. He went to the hospital with Samuel Halsted, a Gulf engineer, and that day he wired the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a friend and supporter, a conclusion that was as close as he would ever come to admitting a design fault: “Steel bows would apparently have saved all hands.” Williams agreed to rebuild the car with a metal roof frame. “I believed in the car,” he said, “and I still do.”

The inquest was delayed until 16 November, partly to let Forbes-Sempill recover enough to testify. Witnesses said Roth’s car had hit the Dymaxion only after it had begun to roll. Dollfus remembered no collision at all. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death and assigned no blame. The certificate recorded that Turner had died while “driving odd type car for publicity.”

The damage was in the order book. Taylor, the London buyer, no longer wanted the second car, and when it was finished in January 1934 Fuller kept it as a demonstrator. In December 1933 Nannie Biddle had gone to Reno, divorced her husband, a Philadelphia lawyer, and married Burgess straight afterward. Fuller and Burgess fought over control of the company, and over Burgess’s delays on Taylor’s car, and Burgess was bought out. The third car went to the Stokowskis, who sold it within a year. Nobody ordered a fourth. Fuller tried to interest carmakers; Walter Chrysler looked at the design, but no manufacturer bought it.

In May 1935 Fuller was driving the second car to his Harvard reunion, with his wife Anne and their daughter Allegra aboard, when a part in the steering broke. The car ran up an embankment and turned over. Nobody was badly hurt. According to the design magazine Metropolis, the accident shook Fuller’s faith in the car, and his daughter later suggested he may have turned away from it afterward. The Dymaxion company closed in 1936. Fuller sold the cars.

The first car, repaired, went from Gulf to an engineer at the federal Bureau of Standards who had tested it, and it ended its life advertising soft drinks. In 1943, Nevala-Lee writes , it caught fire while being refueled and burned. That same year the industrialist Henry Kaiser asked Fuller for a new version, and Fuller drew one with three small engines, one at each wheel. It was never built . The third car changed hands for a decade and was most likely scrapped in the 1950s.

Fuller spent the rest of his life improving the story of the crash. He told Stefansson that Turner and Roth had been “apparently having a race.” Later he said both cars had been doing 70 miles an hour, that Roth had clipped the Dymaxion’s bumper, and that Roth was a powerful Chicago parks commissioner whose people had hauled the car away before reporters arrived. Roth was a shoe salesman. Fuller also said he had repaid his investors, which Nevala-Lee found he had not. Decades later Fuller was still insisting, “She was the most stable car in history.”

The Autopsy

The car didn’t work. A car steered by a single rear wheel is unstable at speed, and nothing Fuller had in money, materials or talent could have changed that.

The problem is geometry. A rear-steered car turns by swinging its tail out, the way a forklift does. That is fine at walking pace and dangerous at sixty, when a small correction at the wheel throws the back of the car sideways before the driver feels it. Worse, the steering wheel is the one carrying the least weight when it matters. Under braking, weight shifts forward onto the front wheels and off the rear one, so the wheel that steers loses its grip exactly when the driver needs it most. Fuller’s car made this worse by putting most of its weight at the back and then letting the tail go light at speed. The tail lifting on the road, the trouble in crosswinds, and Turner’s rollover on a sharp turn at 40 miles an hour are three symptoms of the same thing.

The steering layout came from the flying machine. A rudder at the back is how you steer a boat, or an airplane taxiing on the ground. Fuller’s first idea was a vehicle that would taxi, float and fly, and for that a rear rudder made sense. When the wings and the water went away, the rudder stayed, and a feature that belonged to one vehicle was left in charge of a different one.

Modern drivers have tested this directly. In 2010 the architect Norman Foster, who had worked with Fuller in the 1970s, paid British racing-car restorers to build an exact copy, and in 2015 the Lane Motor Museum finished another after eight years of work. Both are faithful to the original, and both drive like it. The Wall Street Journal’s car critic Dan Neil took the Lane car out and called it the “Fuller death-mobile” . Jamie Lincoln Kitman, testing it for the radio show Car Talk, said , “You’ve pushed shopping carts with broken casters that handle better.”

The strongest case against this reading is Fuller’s: that the car was viable and a crash it didn’t cause destroyed it in the press. Part of that is true. The headlines were unfair to the extent that they ignored Roth, and the publicity did cost the project its buyers. But the inquest’s evidence is that the Dymaxion was already rolling when Roth hit it, and Dollfus, one of the two passengers, didn’t notice a collision at all. A car that turns over on a city boulevard at 40 miles an hour, with nothing touching it, is not a sound car that met bad luck. The modern replicas, driven carefully by professionals with no other traffic involved, confirm the handling without any help from the press.

A second reading is that the car simply ran out of money, and that a well-funded project would have fixed the handling. Money was certainly short; Biddle’s withdrawal is why the first car went to Gulf below cost. But the two later cars were built with the problems known, and both kept the rear steering. Money would have bought more cars with the same layout. Ninety years on, almost nobody builds a highway car steered from the back, which is a fair indication that the problem was in the layout and not in the budget.

The part of the idea that was right was not Fuller’s alone. Chrysler engineers had been testing streamlined shapes in a wind tunnel since 1930, with advice from Orville Wright, and in January 1934 Chrysler put the result on sale as the Airflow, a conventional four-wheeled car with a rounded body. It sold poorly , mocked for its looks and slowed by production defects, and was dropped in 1937. Streamlining arrived anyway, gradually, over the next decades. It came on four wheels, steered from the front.

What Survived

One car survived. The second car, the one Fuller rolled on the way to Harvard, is the only one left , according to the state history magazine Connecticut Explored. It passed through a series of owners and spent years on a farm being used as a chicken coop. In 1968, as Keats tells it , engineering students from Arizona State found it there and paid the farmer, Theodore Mezes, who had bought it for a dollar, $3,000. They couldn’t get it running and sold it to the casino owner Bill Harrah, whose car collection became the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. The interior had rotted so badly that the museum painted over the windows. Foster restored it in exchange for borrowing it as the model for his replica, which he called Dymaxion Car No. 4.

Starling Burgess went back to yachts. In 1934 his Rainbow defended the America’s Cup, and in 1937 Ranger, which he designed with the younger designer Olin Stephens, beat the British challenger four races to none. It was the last America’s Cup raced in the giant J-class yachts.

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, a friend of Fuller’s, had carved the plaster models used to work out the car’s shape in 1932. One of them, painted by Fuller, survives and was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2008 .

The patent survived too. Fuller filed it nine days before the crash, and it was granted in December 1937. Nobody licensed it.

The Ghost Today

The closest living relative of the Dymaxion is a company in Carlsbad, California, called Aptera. Its car is a three-wheeled teardrop meant to use as little energy as any road vehicle ever has, with solar cells in the body. It has promised a range of up to 1,000 miles on a charge.

The first Aptera company raised $24 million and collected thousands of deposits, then was liquidated in December 2011 . Its application for a federal loan had been turned down at first because the Department of Energy’s rules didn’t count a three-wheeler as a car. Its founders restarted it in 2019 and raised about $140 million, most of it in small amounts from tens of thousands of fans through online crowdfunding. By late 2025 it had nearly 50,000 reservations . Deliveries were first promised for 2021.

Aptera kept the teardrop and the three wheels and put the single wheel at the back, as Fuller did. It steers with the two in front. On 1 October 2026 the company announced that it planned to start building its first 40 production cars by the end of the year, with customer deliveries in early 2027, subject to raising the money. The same release said the company’s survival as a going concern depended on raising more capital.