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1948 Tucker Movie Replicar for sale on BaT


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Here's another unusual one.  This Tucker was one of 5 made for the movie: Tucker: A man and His Dreams.  It was painted several different colors for different scenes in the movie.  It's built on a 1974 Ford LTD chassis, with brakes, steering, and suspension, but no drive train.  The driver's door is the only one that opens.  Not a whole lot of interior other than a seat, steering column, brake and accelerator pedal.  Lots of spray-on expanding foam showing, which was used as a filler to mate the fiberglass body.  It was displayed at the 2018 Tucker reunion held in Pebble Beach.  With six days to go it's bid to $4k.

 

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1948-tucker-model-48-movie-car/

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First reasonably priced thing I have ever seen that says Tucker on it. At 4 grand.........you can actually have some fun with it. 

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2 hours ago, edinmass said:

First reasonably priced thing I have ever seen that says Tucker on it. At 4 grand.........you can actually have some fun with it. 

Agreed.  It probably could be made to run with less work and $ than a lot of the other cars being advertised lately.  But with 6 days to go, it's bound to go much higher. 

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12 hours ago, alsancle said:

So why do you suppose they needed a life like but working version of the tucker for the movie?

I'm guessing on reason  might be that the guys who have real ones might not have wanted them painted 5 times to look like different cars. Its been a while, but as I recall, there were scenes with lots of tuckers shown at once and I remember wondering how they did it...

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I think they just needed more Tuckers than they could find to make the film.  In the final scene where Preston Tucker goes on trial at the federal courthouse in Chicago (actually filmed in San Francisco), there is a parade of Tuckers around the block -- based on something that apparently really happened.  They were trying to show the public that the cars really existed and that it was not a "fraud," as the government was charging.  I think the replica cars were needed for the filming of this scene because they wanted to have an actual parade of Tuckers and they didn't have enough real ones.  (Nowadays, they would just digitally create as many Tuckers as they needed!)  Another use for a replica car was a reenactment of a roll test on the proving ground -- they weren't about to roll a "real" Tucker.

 

As I'm sure some of you know, Coppola is a car enthusiast himself, and owns a Tucker.  I will never forget the day in the late 70's when I saw Coppola's Tucker driving down Franklin Street in San Francisco.  It completely blew my mind because I had never heard of them at the time and I was amazed to see such an unusual vehicle.

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On 12/13/2020 at 8:49 AM, neil morse said:

I think they just needed more Tuckers than they could find to make the film.  In the final scene where Preston Tucker goes on trial at the federal courthouse in Chicago (actually filmed in San Francisco), there is a parade of Tuckers around the block -- based on something that apparently really happened.  They were trying to show the public that the cars really existed and that it was not a "fraud," as the government was charging.  I think the replica cars were needed for the filming of this scene because they wanted to have an actual parade of Tuckers and they didn't have enough real ones.  (Nowadays, they would just digitally create as many Tuckers as they needed!)  Another use for a replica car was a reenactment of a roll test on the proving ground -- they weren't about to roll a "real" Tucker.

 

As I'm sure some of you know, Coppola is a car enthusiast himself, and owns a Tucker.  I will never forget the day in the late 70's when I saw Coppola's Tucker driving down Franklin Street in San Francisco.  It completely blew my mind because I had never heard of them at the time and I was amazed to see such an unusual vehicle.

The car that rolled in the movie was a mocked-up Studebaker.  It still exists.

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On 12/12/2020 at 7:08 PM, neil morse said:

I would say good luck on getting this car to the point where it could pass DMV inspection to actually drive on the street!

 

It just sold for $100k...yes, $100,000.00.  Which one of you guys who claim to not be rich bought it?

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4 minutes ago, Aaron65 said:

A hundred grand????  Wow.  Is Bring a Trailer the new Barrett-Jackson?


 

I can see it now......some thirteen year old kid is asking his mother for her credit card number.........

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By the way......it’s not a Tucker, and it’s not a replica. I have seen better work from a high school body shop class. Look at the photos.

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I can see the movie art department spending 50K to build it.  It had a great base and would have been fun to bring it to life with Ford parts, would have been a great replica for 30K running and driving.  Hope the ticket sales cover the 100K sounds pretty optimistic to me...

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5 hours ago, alsancle said:

 

Where was the 2k coming from?    I HAVE to meet the guy that paid 100k for this.  I will be in the garage today plastering tucker nameplates on to stuff I need to foist on someone else.


 

Opening bid was 400 bucks, and the posting was at 4K here.....so I picked 2k as my number.

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9 hours ago, edinmass said:

By the way......it’s not a Tucker, and it’s not a replica. I have seen better work from a high school body shop class. Look at the photos.

Yeah, but for $2k, it would have been as close to owning a Tucker as I ever would have been.

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On 12/19/2020 at 11:50 AM, Graham Man said:

would have been a great replica for 30K running and driving.

 

Dude, the thing only has one door that actually opens, no trunk, no interior, no dash, no actual headlights or taillights -- it was never intended to be an actual car.  It's a movie prop, and that's it.  Insane price.

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The whole Tucker mystique is a mystery to me.  They were interesting cars selling for 10 or 15K, the movie came out and all of a sudden the price was 200K. Now, of course, well above that.

 

Why did the movie make them so popular, that is, valuable?  Or, rather than saying valuable, why did it suddenly make them bring all that money?  Just a movie can affect the market like that?  I don't think the value is there.

 

Of course, as I type this I think about a Mustang that supposedly sold for mega bucks recently, just because it was in a movie.

 

Our fascination with celebrities seems to know no bounds.

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10 hours ago, trimacar said:

The whole Tucker mystique is a mystery to me.  They were interesting cars selling for 10 or 15K, the movie came out and all of a sudden the price was 200K. Now, of course, well above that.

 

Why did the movie make them so popular, that is, valuable?  Or, rather than saying valuable, why did it suddenly make them bring all that money?  Just a movie can affect the market like that?  I don't think the value is there.

 

Of course, as I type this I think about a Mustang that supposedly sold for mega bucks recently, just because it was in a movie.

 

Our fascination with celebrities seems to know no bounds.

 

 

Have you ever thought about the possibility of creating a false market  (like diamonds)?    We pick out some obscure car that there is relatively limited supply of.   Buy up for nothing as many as we can.   And then start peddling them to each other via public auction for bigger and bigger prices.   Eventually we start letting them to outsiders.   Next thing you know some guy is staring at his 1.5 million dollar Tucker.

 

Btw,  I swear this is currently going on with W72/Y84 Trans Ams.

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1 hour ago, alsancle said:

Have you ever thought about the possibility of creating a false market 

 

I can see that happening, and unlike manipulating the stock market, there's really no laws against doing just that.

 

The secret is, just like any pyramid scheme, you want to come in next to last, so that it's the LAST guy holding that 1.5 million dollar car, when the market has corrected back to the 5 or 6 digits....

 

I tried to buy an Avanti once here in Virginia, fellow was a postal worker and had put his car in a friend's shop, sat there for 30 years.  I asked the guy one day if he'd take a reasonable offer on the car as it sat, he said "No, I'm waiting for them to make a movie about the Avanti so that it's worth hundreds of thousands, like the Tucker".

 

He was serious, it wasn't a joke.....

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26 minutes ago, trimacar said:

The secret is, just like any pyramid scheme, you want to come in next to last, so that it's the LAST guy holding that 1.5 million dollar car, when the market has corrected back to the 5 or 6 digits....

 

This is keeping me from jumping in to the Tucker market.   That and the fact that I hate them.

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Isn't that pretty much what happened with two seater T-birds about forty years ago? It worked out well for a good friend of mine. He somewhat overpaid for a decent original car at around three thousand dollars. Two years later he was turning down offers of seven to eight thousand dollars. He had serious health issues (died at 39!), and sold the car for about seventeen thousand (still just a decent unrestored car!). People that I knew very well that followed the auctions told me all the high dollar sales were owners trading cars with auction house's permission to forgo sales fees. A few years later, prices for the best cars were hitting forty-five thousand, decent cars were going for twenty-five. Next thing you know, many people had spent tens of thousands of dollars restoring to high end and couldn't sell the best of them for twenty-five. Decent original cars were sitting around for years not selling for fifteen. It was years before prices went back up much, and frankly, I have no idea what they sell for these days. They are too new for my interests, and nobody I know really well has one.

 

This "Tucker" thing was interesting, as movie memorabilia. I can see someone wanting to own it for several potential reasons. But THAT kind of money? I cannot imagine having that much money to throw away. (I do know that there are a lot of people like that out there. I wish one of them would adopt me and give me a suitable allowance!)

Edited by wayne sheldon
I DID proofread! (see edit history)
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Movie car notwithstanding...dollar-for-dollar, isn't that what happened with the entire car market?  In the late 1980s when the Tucker movie came out, you could buy a decent, matching numbers, split-window Vette or an early E-Type for $10-15k.  Look at their prices now.  An early E-Type coupe project just sold on BAT for $211k.  Comparisons can be made with practically all other vintage car prices, although not to that extreme.  So yeah, the movie mystique may have contributed, but overall, hobby prices have increased many fold.  

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1 hour ago, George Cole said:

Movie car notwithstanding...dollar-for-dollar, isn't that what happened with the entire car market?  In the late 1980s when the Tucker movie came out, you could buy a decent, matching numbers, split-window Vette or an early E-Type for $10-15k.  Look at their prices now.  An early E-Type coupe project just sold on BAT for $211k.  Comparisons can be made with practically all other vintage car prices, although not to that extreme.  So yeah, the movie mystique may have contributed, but overall, hobby prices have increased many fold.  

 

 

George,  you are not wrong.    But the Tucker has really out run the graph of the other cars.     And a flat floor external latch E-Type is attractive AND iconic.

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Completely agree...and boy would I love to have one. I was transferred to the UK in 1978. Before leaving the US I was telling everyone I was going to buy one there. Found out they were considerably more expensive there, and harder to find.  And that's when they were selling for $10-15k here. Life goes on, and once again I missed the boat.

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