The Coffin-Nose Cord: America's Most Beautiful Failure

On November 2nd, 1935, at the New York Auto Show, there was a car so surrounded by crowds that men stood on the bumpers of other cars to see it. It had no upright radiator grille, no visible headlamps, no running boards; it sat impossibly low and drove its front wheels. People gave its louvered nose a grim nickname: the coffin nose. It was the Cord 810, and it is still on almost every list of the most beautiful cars America ever built. Within about two years the company that made it was gone from the car business forever. This is the story of the Cord 810 and 812 and the designer who drew them, Gordon Buehrig, who shaped the great Duesenberg Model J bodies before he was thirty. The car began as a rejected "Baby Duesenberg," was rushed to the show floor in about 240 days, and stunned everyone: hidden hand-cranked headlamps, a louvered wraparound nose, a Lycoming V8, front-wheel drive, a fingertip semi-automatic gearbox, and a supercharged 812 with chrome exhaust pipes bursting from the hood. Then the troubles came, the transmission that jumped out of gear, the price double a Packard's, the collapse of the whole Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg empire in 1937. Fewer than 3,000 were built. The Museum of Modern Art hung it as sculpture. It was too beautiful, too advanced, and too troubled to save its maker. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 1:46 The Designer 4:00 The Baby Duesenberg 6:06 The Coffin Nose 9:10 Under the Skin 11:59 The Sensation 13:41 The Troubles 16:20 The Collapse 18:19 The Afterlife 20:31 Too Beautiful #automotivehistory #classiccars #enginehistory #musclecarhistory #americancars #hotrodhistory