Muntz Car Company
The Muntz Jet was a car design of the American racing car designer Frank Kurtis.
The Muntz Car Company was founded in the early 1950s in Glendale, California, by Earl " Madman " Muntz, an electronics and used car dealers. He assisted Frank Kurtis, who had previously tried to create sports cars under the brand Kurtis Kraft ( the Kurtis Kraft Sport, which could be sold by 1950 just 36-fold ).
In 1949, the businessman Earl Muntz Appendices and the sports car project. The body of the Muntz Jet was made of plastic and was powered by a 5.4 -liter Cadillac V8 engine.
In 1950, Muntz moved to Evanston, Illinois, in order to expand the production can. There, the car got a steel body, engines and an engine of Lincoln. Also the automatic Hydra-Matic dual -range gearbox bought Muntz as well as Lincoln by General Motors. The Muntz Jet was built from 1951 to 1954.
1951 Kurtis sold the license to manufacture the car at Muntz, who quickly with new emblems knew as " Muntz Jet" and the body enlarged, so that the car was a four-seater, and replaced the Ford engine with a larger V8 from the Cadillac. Later this machine supplied by General Motors was replaced by a less expensive side valve engine of Lincoln (again, from the Ford group ).
The company produced only 400 cars from 1951 to 1954, and due to the high production costs estimated a Muntz himself that he loses $ 1,000 to each car produced. This financial bloodletting meant that he joined the company.
Because the cars were in their design exceptional, carefully built and of unusual power, nowadays the Muntz Jets rare and valuable collectibles have become.