He Built the Car That Killed Him on a Mountain Road

In 1926, E.L. Cord gave engineer Friedrich Haas one instruction: build the finest automobile in the world. Not the finest American car. The finest car, anywhere. Three years later, the result stood on the floor of the New York Auto Show -- a DOHC 32-valve inline-eight producing 265 horsepower, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, and hand-built coachwork that cost twenty thousand dollars at a time when the average American wage was one thousand dollars a year. Nine months after the debut, Black Tuesday arrived. By 1932, one in four Americans had no work. Men stood in bread lines outside the Indianapolis factory. Inside, they were still taking orders -- from Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable. The orders did not stop. On July 2, 1932, Friedrich Haas drove his personal Model J into the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Near Ligonier, on a three-mile sustained mountain descent with no guardrails, the car's Lockheed hydraulic drums accumulated thermal fade. On the third mile the pedal went two inches further than expected. The car entered a switchback carrying more speed than the road could absorb. He was found severely injured. Twenty-four days later, he died of pneumonia. The era had no antibiotics. The factory continued without him. The cars continued to be delivered. In 1937, the Cord Corporation collapsed and the factory closed. Approximately 470 Model J chassis had been built. The phrase that became its a doozy entered the American language from this car -- borrowed directly from the Duesenberg name. Friedrich Haas never heard it said that way. Today, approximately 425 of those 470 chassis survive. They regularly bring four million dollars at auction. The DOHC inline-eight he designed remained unmatched by any American production car for more than a decade after his death. The road in western Pennsylvania is still there. So is the curve. Subscribe for more American car stories built around a real car, a real road, and a life that changed somewhere on the asphalt. #vintagecars #americanroads #vintagecarstoriesusa #americancarhistory #goldenageamericancars #eraofchrome #americancarera