The Muntz Jet Was Created By The 1950s’ Answer To Elon Musk

Elon Musk is not your usual gray automaker CEO. Whatever you think of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, he’s certainly not boring, lazy or lacking in imagination. And neither was Earl “Madman” Muntz, the entrepreneur behind the incredibly rare Muntz Jet of the early 1950s.

Muntz made his name, and a small fortune, running a California Kaiser-Fraser dealership in the late 1940s, before going off on a complete tangent, and making another fortune selling basic, inexpensive television sets of his own design just as the technology was taking off. And he cultivated his own crazy persona, using jokes and stunts to advertise his products.

But the Muntz Jet was no joke. It was a luxurious sporting convertible designed with the help of legendary race car designer Frank Kurtis, fitted with a removable fiberglass hardtop and powered by a Cadillac V8. It also featured luxuries like an automatic transmission, power-assisted steering and a safety-conscious padded dashboard before some of those features became standard on most cars.

Built between 1949 and 1954, initially in Glendale, California, and later in Evanston, Illinois, the Muntz Jet was developed from Frank Kurtis’s KSC two-seat aluminum sports car, but with the wheelbase extended to make room for two additional seats. Relentless self-promoter Muntz claimed that the $5,500 V8 machines could reach 150 mph (240 km/h), though it appears he might have been exaggerating by a good 30 mph (50 km/h) or more.

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And they weren’t the only numbers he messed up. The cars cost around $5,500 to buy in the early 1950s, but $6,500 to make, and those losses eventually forced Muntz to shutter the operation after fewer than 200 cars had been completed. He carried on with his electronics business, pioneering in-car music systems, and selling those gigantic rear-projection TVs rich people had in the 1980s that were so dim you might as well have been watching a radio.

The 1952 car pictured here is up for auction with Worldwide this Saturday (April 23), and being one of the later Muntz Jets is fitted with a Lincoln flathead V8 developing 150 hp (152 PS). Discovered as an abandoned restoration in 2009, it was rescued, rebuilt, and repainted in the correct Colorado red, and based on previous sale prices, is likely to change hands for close to $200,000.