Playboy Motor Cars: America’s Other Playboy

In postwar America, a small company called Playboy Motor Cars believed it could change the entire American auto industry. Long before Hugh Hefner and the famous magazine, Playboy was the name of one of the strangest automotive startups of the late 1940s. Its creators wanted to build a compact American car with a retractable hardtop, modern engineering, and a price ordinary people could actually afford. This is the story of a forgotten company that tried to challenge Detroit at the peak of America’s automotive golden age. A company that predicted the future far too early and disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. In this video we’ll talk about the rise and fall of Playboy Motor Cars, the world’s first American retractable hardtop production car, postwar Detroit, and the strange connection between a tiny automobile company and one of the most famous magazine names in history.