America’s Craziest Car Company Once Built The 625 HP Wedge-Shaped Convertible Of Your Dreams

American automotive history is chock-full of weird and wacky stories of car companies and executives that rose and fell in such wild ways that they’d make compelling documentaries on your favorite streaming service. The stories of DeLorean, Tucker, and The Dale are so dramatic that you don’t even need to be a car enthusiast to know them. Then there’s Vector Aeromotive, one man’s obsession with building an American Lamborghini. Gerald Wiegert achieved the feat of putting some of the wildest cars into production but he had even bigger ideas. One of them was this, the Vector Avtech WX-3R Roadster Prototype. It was an incredible open-top 625 HP V8 wedge-shaped look into a rad future, but there’s just one of these bedroom poster cars.

If you plug the name “Vector” into a Google Search, you’ll get a workforce training company, a car software company, an alarm systems company, and some mathematics. Heck, I’ve had a Vector mini cooler and warmer since I was a kid. The name Vector has been used for countless businesses, but only one was America’s attempt at beating the Europeans at their own game.

Gerald “Jerry” Wiegert was equal parts visionary and madman. His dreams sounded like that of every vaporware startup company you’ve ever heard of. Yet, at least for a blip of time, he actually put a handful of cars on the road and I’d say his Vector Aeromotive was a good contender for being called America’s Craziest Car Company.

Sadly, Wiegert passed in 2021, so we’re unlikely to ever see anything like his Vectors ever again. However, someone flush with cash, or someone with a ton of friends with a little bit of cash, can drive what looks like a rolling Synthwave desktop background. Out of all of the Vectors ever built, just one was built as a roadster. This beautifully purple 1993 Vector Avtech WX-3R Roadster Prototype is something of a jet fighter for the road complete with an airplane-style panel, a twin-turbo V8, and the raddest display screen this side of a Buick Reatta. Slide on your thin-framed rosy sunglasses and let’s go for a ride.

Briefly Not Vaporware

Perhaps the greatest part about Vector is that at least briefly, it wasn’t vaporware. It seems like every day we hear about some startup with some ambitious plan. Then, years later, they always seem to end up folding after not getting enough money, engineering talent, or both. Jerry Wiegert was another one of those dreamers.

This story takes us back to the early 1970s. The first oil crisis hasn’t happened yet and while America was obsessed with muscle cars, the engineers in Italy were cranking out supercar art. Lamborghini had its gorgeous Miura and Ferrari had its own beauties like the Ferrari 365 GTB4 ‘Daytona.’ To a young Jerry Wiegert, America just didn’t have anything that came close.

As Street Machine magazine writes, Wiegert was born in 1944 and his father was a machinist. Wiegert came to love cars at an early age and by the time he was a teenager he was already souping up GM cars. This love for cars blossomed into Wiegert going to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit for design and he would later intern and consult for Detroit’s automakers. Later, Wiegert graduated from the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. However, Wiegert wasn’t content with working for other companies. In 1971, he punched the clock one last time and decided to create his own car company. Soon after, he teamed up with car body man Lee Brown to create Vehicle Design Force.

To call Wiegert ambitious would be an epic understatement. Wiegert didn’t just want to create the all-American car to destroy the Europeans at his own game. He wanted to create what he thought was the world’s first car actually deserving to be called a supercar. Later that year, Wiegert created a one-fifth scale model of the car he called the Vector.

In 1972, Wiegert, with Lee Brown’s help, unveiled a full-size version of the Vector. The car was cobbled together using fiberglass, foam, and a discarded Porsche chassis. This model had no interior and no powertrain, but the Vector was so bombastic it was given a national platform in the form of the April 1972 issue of Motor Trend. According to Hagerty, the Vector show car was supposed to get a Porsche flat-six or possibly even a rotary, but he and Lee Brown had a falling out. The Vector made its public debut at Auto Expo 72 unfinished. Reportedly, information at the Vector’s public display said the vehicle would cost $100,000 ($764,416 today). Keep in mind that the Lamborghini Miura, one of the cars that Wiegert wanted to destroy, was only $20,000 ($152,883 today) back then. Street Machine notes that Wiegert was forced to give up his one and only Vector show car a few years later, leaving him right back to the start.

As Hagerty writes, Wiegert learned two lessons from the Auto Expo 72 incident. The first was that partnering up with other people meant that he wasn’t really in charge of his own destiny and the second was that making a real car took a ton of cash.

Wiegert’s next project would be called the W2, which translated to “Wiegert twin turbo.” By now, Wiegert renamed his company to Vector Car and this Vector prototype actually ran. The hype machine cranked into life in 1980 when Car and Driver put the W2 prototype on the cover of its December 1980 issue.

One thing that made Vector stand out was its heavy use of aerospace technology. Wiegert’s dream was to become a fighter pilot, but his poor eyesight blocked him out of the role. But if Wiegert couldn’t be a fighter pilot, maybe he could bring fighter jet tech to cars? Look inside of a Vector and you’ll find an aircraft panel, not a car dashboard. This panel had aviation-style circuit breakers on said panel, all sorts of aviation-inspired toggles and switchgear, and even electroluminescent lighting. Even the wiring of Wiegert’s vehicles were said to be of mil-spec. This was a time of analog sports cars and Wiegert was intentionally going as far in the opposite direction as possible.

Unfortunately, all of this cost a metric tonne of money, cash that Wiegert didn’t have. However, he did have an ounce of fame from the Car and Driver article, so he took that fame and spent the 1980s grinding it out with celebrities and investors in hopes of getting money. As Hagerty writes, he was able to score plenty of deals, but they often fizzled out before Wiegert even had a check he could cash. Allegedly, Wiegert was so strapped for cash that he drove the W2 show car practically as his daily driver because he couldn’t afford to trailer it around.

Eventually, just like with startups like Elio and Aptera today, the magazines stopped being excited and became skeptical. Reportedly, Autoweek ran a story pointing out that Wiegert had been working on his world-beating supercar for 15 years and you still couldn’t buy one. The publication went as far as comparing Wiegert to P.T. Barnum, which had to sting. To make matters worse, the W2 was supposed to hit 200 mph and its top speed was never verified.

Wiegert had another ace up his sleeve for making money. He sued Goodyear for making a tire called the Vector. He also sued Autoweek for the article. Wiegert won his suit against Goodyear, but lost against Autoweek. The Goodyear suit put millions into Vector Car’s coffers, but it wasn’t enough and the company folded.

Failing twice in a row didn’t deter Wiegert, and he founded Vector Aeromotive and managed to score $6 million in a public offering. The W2 was also dead, now replaced with the W8 Twin-Turbo. Amazingly, this one actually went into production for the 1990 model year.

The W8 was something out of this world. It rode on a semi-aluminum monocoque chassis with epoxy bonding, an aluminum honeycomb floorpan, and all of it held together with 5,000 rivets that would normally be used for aircraft. The fantastic wedge body on top was made out of carbon fiber and Kevlar.

The madness continued in the engine bay, where a 6.0-liter Rodeck aluminum block V8 racing engine was found. The engine’s internals featured Carillo stainless steel conrods, a dry-sump oiling system. a forged crank, TRW forged pistons, stainless-steel valves, roller rocker arms, and smaller bits like stainless steel oil lines plus anodized fittings. Toss in a pair of Garrett turbos and the W8 was advertised to make 625 HP. There was also the unique addition of a boost knob on the panel and when turned up to 14 PSI, the W8 was supposed to make a mind-melting 730 horsepower.

All of this is honestly epic, but then you get to the transmission and start scratching your head. Wiegert paired all of this custom and high-tech work with a modified GM Turbo-Hydramatic 425 three-speed automatic. Yep, that’s a transmission meant for something like an Oldsmobile Toronado, not exactly a world-beating supercar. However, Vector Aeromotive beefed up the transmission for the huge amounts of power.

All of this was wrapped up with an interior befitting a king. You know what, I’ll just let Hagerty quote Wiegert himself on the W8:

“There was no compromise,” Wiegert says. “Everything was the best. There was no cheating. Ferraris and Lamborghinis had cheap seats. Vectors had the best seats—all electronic, inflatable lumbar, power backs, heaters. Vectors had mil-spec wiring and tactical military aircraft switches. They had Bosch sound systems, which were beyond anything ever put in a car before. We didn’t have to crash-test three or four cars. One car passed every single crash test at the highest levels—rollover tests, side-impact tests, all of that. It was considered the safest car that had ever been tested. I had this attitude that the Vector was going to be superior to Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. And it was. Fact.”

Wiegert advertised the W8 with a top speed of either 218 or 242 mph and magazines tried to reach it with the company’s prototypes. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a scandal when Car and Driver tried to see what a W8 could do. The transmission failed in one W8 in the publication’s hands and the engine of another W8 failed a silly four times during Car and Driver‘s testing. Somehow, Car and Driver even managed to have another transmission failure as well.

Ultimately, the W8’s top speed claim was never verified, but one person managed to get one to 193 mph, which is still crazy fast back then. When the W8 prototypes did work, the buff mags did show that the W8 was seriously quick. For example, Car and Driver was able to get one to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds and down the quarter mile in 12.0 seconds at 118 mph. Mind you, we’re talking about the prototypes here. Customer cars were supposedly better.

Unfortunately, money was always a problem for Vector. Each W8 took 5,500 man-hours to build entirely by hand, but engineer David Kostka got that number down to 3,500 hours. Chopping a whopping 2,000 man-hours off of production time should have helped, but Vector had to raise the price of the W8 to $450,000, yet, the company still couldn’t make any money. It also didn’t help that the vehicle had a negative reputation. Tennis star Andre Agassi paid $400,000 for a W8, only to demand his money back after the vehicle got so hot it burned its own trunk carpet. Just 17 production W8s were built.

Wiegert tried to help his company by attempting to buy Lamborghini from Chrysler. He also decided to drive some hype by developing an even more bombastic car, the Vector WX-3 and the Avtech WX3.

Vector would briefly see a cash infusion from Indonesian company MegaTech, but the money quickly dried up and Wiegert was fired from his own company. MegaTech also bought Lamborghini and moved Wiegert to Florida. The next Vector-branded car would be the M12, which was largely based on the Lamborghini Diablo.

In 1999, Wiegert won back the rights to Vector, and in 2007, he announced the WX8 hypercar. At its craziest, the WX8 was claimed to have a 1,850 HP 10-liter V8 and a top speed of 275. There was also supposed to be a hybrid version, too. However, this vehicle never really materialized outside of a concept car, and with Wiegert gone, it’s unlikely to ever become reality.

This Vector Avtech WX-3R Roadster

So let’s go back a bit to before Vector began folding up after 1993. RM Sotheby’s is selling the vehicle in Monterey this Friday and gives us some information:

Buoyed by the W8’s success, Vector undertook development of its next model beginning in 1991. The company subsequently unveiled a silver-clad, fully trimmed display model of their Avtech WX-3 Coupe Prototype at the 1992 Geneva International Auto Salon. Evolving from the W8’s fighter jet-inspired design, the WX-3 coupe featured a sleek, organic aesthetic, while still relying heavily upon aerospace industry technologies.

The following year, Vector returned to Geneva with the completed WX-3 Coupe (now painted Aquamarine), and a surprise, this WX-3R Roadster in Amethyst purple! Both featured scissor-style doors and Rodeck twin-turbo V-8 engines positioned behind the passenger compartment, highlighting Wiegert’s commitment to stunning design and performance. At the time, Vector’s Director of Manufacturing, Markus Rufer, and Chief Engineer Dave Kostka both went on record through a number of US-based publications to comment that the WX-3 was “built like a spaceship” from “aerospace-grade materials” with aerospace industry quality control and build standards.

The WX-3R shared many characteristics with its prototype coupe counterpart, yet it distinguished itself with an even sleeker design. This was achieved through an impressively angled windshield that seamlessly extended into the lightweight side windows, divided by a section of the door’s Kevlar composite skin. Adding to its aerodynamic profile, the WX-3R also featured a lower rear spoiler than the coupe. Inside, the cabin boasted snug individual Recaro bucket seats, a departure from the coupe’s spacious three-wide bench seat.

The powertrain under the body was the same as the W8, but now advertised to pump out 1,000 HP and once again, Wiegert claimed top speeds well over 200 mph. Vector then advertised a price of $765,000 in 1993. However, neither vehicle went into production. Wiegert kept both prototypes for 25 years. Then, he put the vehicles up for sale in 2018 to fund the WX8.

Reportedly, the WX-3R’s odometer reads over 89,000 miles, but Wiegert rarely drove the vehicle. Apparently, Wiegert rolled the odometer forward so that when you looked at the odometer at an auto show you would think that a Vector was a reliable car. It’s also unknown whether this car makes the advertised horsepower, or is just the same 625 HP tune found in the W8.

Anyway, in 2019, RM Sotheby’s sold the vehicle to a collector, who had the vehicle restored to the tune of $116,000. Now, it’s up for grabs again and it’s expected to sell for $1.3 million to $1.5 million. That’s a ton of money, but this car is special. Vector built a total of 34 or so production cars over its entire run. None of those cars left the factory as a roadster. This car isn’t a production car, but it does come with a title and a VIN, so registering it shouldn’t be too hard.

Sadly, it’s likely this car will disappear from the public eye, so this will probably be the last time you see it for a while. If you’re like me, you’re already saving these pictures for your desktop. The Vector story is one of the craziest in American automotive history, but you have to admire Wiegert for actually putting some of these cars on the road.

(Images: RM Sotheby’s auctions, unless otherwise noted.)