The Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation was an automobile company started by entrepreneur Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael in 1974. The company's flagship vehicle was the Dale, a prototype three-wheeled two-seater sports car designed and built by Dale Clifft. It was powered by an 850 cc air-cooled engine and featured a claimed 70 mpg (3.4 L/100 km; 84 mpg) fuel economy and a $2,000 (in 1974 U.S. dollars) price, which were popular specifications during the mid 1970's US fuel crisis.
Carmichael, 37 in 1974, claimed to be the widow of a NASA structural engineer, a mother of five, and a farm girl from Indiana. In reality, she was actually a transsexual undergoing sexual reassignment to become female. Her former, biological male identity, Jerry Dean Michael, had been wanted by the police since 1961 for alleged involvement in a counterfeiting operation. The company would ultimately prove to be fraudulent when Carmichael went into hiding with investors' money.
Read more about Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation: Fraud
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, twentieth, motor, car and/or corporation:
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious “retreat” of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The motor idles.
Over the immense upland
the pulse of their blossoming
thunders through us.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Fifty years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account, or what your clothes looked like, But the world may be a little better because you were important in the life of a child.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in The Winning Family, by Louise Hart, ch. 1 (1987)
“It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)