Monday, November 23, 2009

DeBiase Motor Co.

Back in High School -- and Mike Sokol can back me up here -- I started an ironic car company called DBMC (DeBiase Motor Company). It was not much of a company beyond me talking about it to Mike. I managed to spec out a few cars while on study hall at the library. The spec sheets were drawn on lined comp paper and usually featured a poorly drawn profile of the car. DBMC did little more than poke fun at other cars out there.

Example: DBMC Bunyon - a gigantic SUV that requires JATO rockets to get it going, as well as a six-mile long driveway. On the dashboard GPS monitor, 'PURGE' will flash when the correct mixture of jet fuel has been reached. That way, the driver knows to sit back while the vehicle accelerates to several hundred miles per hour. Eventually the Bunyon settles to a normal highway speeds, where it maintains fuel mileage of 4 gallons : 1 mile.


I had another concept car named the Fission that ran on uranium and/or plutonium (I never did well in Chemistry). The car was extremely fuel efficient, in that it could drive about a million miles without replacing the radioactive core, but it was terrible in head-on collisions. Two Fissions, moving at speeds of 25 mph, colliding head-on, could level 20 city blocks. Rear end collisions fared slightly better, with 5-10 blocks damage.

I guess I am not the first one to have stumbled upon this nuclear car idea. Ford had it in the late fifties. Their atomic car, the Nucleon, never got beyond a concept, but it was intended to get a measly 5,000 miles before refueling. Ahem, the Fission fares, much much better in that department. I came across the Nucleon while paging through a coffee table book of mine: Automobile Year 1958-1959. This got me thinking about the Fission -- kind of a postmodern Nucleon, if you will.


The Nucleon:
















Here is a preliminary sketch I dug up from the deBiase archives:












And a more recent rendering, inspired by my run in with
Auto Year '59:













I imagine this car doing immensely well in sales in the mountainous region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. For some reason those Pakistanis/Afghans can't get enough of the Fission. Always buying them up in pairs though. We just can't seem to ship them fast enough. Word is Iran is still attempting production on it's own Fission-like vehicle, much to our chagrin at DBMC.

At DBMC, we intend to control all markets, from the Midwest to the Middle East.

2 comments:

Charles said...

I love, love, love this post. Probably the best of NaBloPoMo 2009 anywheres.

Jake said...

You missed (or ignored?) another precedent:

Mr. Fission

http://unambig.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/mr_fusion.jpg?w=470&h=300