![]() He car is…an interesting example of the kind of creative cross-pollination that was happening between automotive designers and customizers in the postwar era. The public hasn’t seen the Manta Ray in 60 years. ![]() It’s like a 1949 Ford on steroids, with a neat jet airplane nose cone. This jet-age car, with a freestyle fiberglass dash seemingly borrowed from the Flintstone chariot, was constructed on a 1951 Studebaker chassis by Glenn Hire and Vernon Antoine. The Manta Ray was a product of the jet age-but it crashed and burned. I told the full story of it in the New York Times here. It didn’t work, but the Exemplar stands as an endearing tribute. The car, built in Italy in 1967, was supposed to make Ford, GM and Chrysler forget all about chrome. Inside the Exemplar-all that brass trim was custom made. Every one of these entrepreneurs wanted to be Elon Musk, but there’s a reason Tesla is the only really successful automotive startup since Chrysler in the 1920s. They began with big dreams-series production!-and ended with a few, or just one, built. ![]() The category was “Concepts Beyond Detroit,” meaning these were visions unfettered by the Big Three. So in the spirit of Amelia Island I won’t write about the high-end, million-dollar cars-of which there were many-but about the screwy one-off concepts that were abject failures in their time (but pretty fascinating now). ![]() The Exemplar I was a noble-but failed-attempt to bring back brass trim circa 1967. This year I finally made it down-it helps that my brother moved to Fernandina Beach five miles away-and I found that founder Bill Warner sets the tone-it’s pretty down to earth, with Southern hospitality the keynote. AMELIA ISLAND, FLORIDA-The Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance is, as the name implies, elegant, and thus far too toney for the likes of me. ![]()
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