The Crazy Way 1950s Truckers Fit 5 Cars On Short 35-Foot Car-Haulers

Hauling cars is an art form, and the utilitarian truck are the brushes with which hard-working drivers paint onto the canvas that is the open road. Decades ago, car hauling used to be very different on account of strict length restrictions on trucks. Back in the late 1940s, the state of Illinois had the shortest length restriction of all, so car hauling companies had to get creative to maximize loads. The result was a trio of absolutely insane trucks that towered sky high and packed cars so tightly the trucks had cars parked on top of their engines.

I recently discovered a treasure trove of historical photos about a subject I’m sure that not many of us spend a ton of time thinking about. Every day, countless trucks, ships, planes and trains haul cars to far-flung destinations across America and beyond. But have you ever really thought about where today’s technology came from? How did we arrive at today’s specialized car-carrying tractor-trailers?

If you pay a visit to the Flickr page of Dick Copello you’ll find something special. Dick was a car hauler for around 30 years, and he’s collected countless photos from his trade. His page is full of the amazing ways people have solved problems in car hauling throughout history. Dick’s Flickr page is still active, too, so it’s worth checking in from time-to-time to see what’s new. Also, if you’re looking for some great nighttime reading material, he’s written the encyclopedia of car hauling in American Car Haulers.

Recently, something caught my eyes and the eyes of our secret designer, the Bishop. Among Dick’s historical photos is a set of really strange trucks designed for a specific purpose (above). In decades past, states had strict regulations on what a tractor-trailer’s total length could be, with Illinois having the hardest rule of them all. Trucks were allowed to be no longer than 35 feet.

To illustrate how tiny that is, here’s a modern car hauler. A so-called “stinger” truck, or one designed with axle weights and a structure specifically to carry cars, is a minimum of 75 feet long with its articulating trailer:

So, how did carriers operating in the Midwest get around having to drive shorter trucks? They did it with some of the most convoluted truck designs you’ve ever seen.

A Little History On Car Shipping

The art of car hauling has come so far over the course of automotive history. In the earliest days of motoring, cars were delivered by rail or were just driven to a dealership to be sold. However, as automotive industries around the world grew, there became a need to ship several cars at the same time. One early solution, Curbside Classic notes, was that cars like the Ford Model T were shipped in an unassembled state. Not only did this allow more of them to fit onto a truck or in a railcar, but it meant that the dealer, which was on the hook for shipping, got more cars for the price of shipping.

If a dealer didn’t want to mess with loading cars onto a train, there was also an extreme option. Dealers got anyone they could convince, from employees to family members, to drive cars from the factory to the lot, reportedly resulting in convoys as long as 100 cars.

But that was mostly useful for dealers near factories. If dealers went the shipping route, they were responsible for finding their cars in freight yards, unloading them from trains, and figuring out some way to get them to their dealership lots. As Curbside Classic notes, this was such a resource-heavy task that businesses sprouted up with the purpose of getting cars from the freight yard to the dealership. Many of these businesses would later become auto transport firms as technology and processes evolved.

As Curbside Classic notes, using trucks to ship cars was rare before World War I. Consider that America’s road network back then was miniscule, so it wasn’t really feasible to ship a car across the country by truck. What roads did exist were rough, seriously beating up whatever vehicles braved them. So rail was the preferred method for many. Things changed after the war as auto production entered its stride. Cars soon found themselves on Great Lakes freighters and in ships sailing up and down the Atlantic and Pacific.

The trucking industry started carving out its own spot in the car shipping business. Roads were finally being improved enough to make road-based shipping more feasible. The 1920s were a wild time for car haulers, as there weren’t any regulations governing car carrier safety or design. Companies seemingly put rigs together with whatever they had laying around and the results were reportedly dangerous. How crazy are we talking? Here’s a Ford Model AA car hauler:

Delivering cars by truck was pitched as a revolutionary change. In the past, the car you bought had been driven to multiple ports and yards or maybe even up to 100 miles to the dealership. By the time you finally bought your new car, someone could have totally flogged, farted in, and smoked in your new ride. Delivering cars by truck was marketed as a way to ensure you were the “first” driver of your new car. Though, the marketing did ignore the fact that the cars still had to be driven onto the truck, but at least we’re talking about mere feet here rather than miles.

As the U.S. Department of Transportation wrote in 1997, it wasn’t entirely a wild west out there. In 1913, at least four states had truck weight limits. A truck driving through Maine couldn’t weigh more than 18,000 pounds while a truck in Massachusetts was allotted 28,000 pounds. Pennsylvania’s and Washington’s limits were 24,000 pounds. These early weight limits, which are nothing compared to what limits are today, existed because heavy trucks tore up the earth and gravel roads of the era.

DOT notes that it wasn’t long after that states began imposing limits on truck lengths, widths, and heights. By 1929, most states had some sort of regulation limiting the size of a truck. While length limits were all over the place, most states agreed on 92 inches as a maximum width of a truck or a bus. This would remain the case until 1982 when the federal government increased widths to 102 inches maximum. By 1933, every U.S. state limited truck size in some way.

In 1935, Congress passed the Federal Motor Carrier Act, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to regulate the trucking industry on a federal level. Eventually, carriers had to file as private, common, or contract carriers. By 1938, the ICC regulated the number of hours a trucker or bus driver could drive in a single shift. Yet, the states still had the power to impose limits on truck length and weight. Even back then this was a huge headache because a truck that was perfectly legal in one state wasn’t legal in another, and in 1941 the ICC conducted a study on the impacts of this. Here’s a snippet of what the DOT found, as it was presented in the 1997 U.S. DOT Comprehensive TS&W Study:

. . . wide and inconsistent variations in the limitations imposed by the . . . States. . . [and that]. . . limitations imposed by a single State may and often do have an influence and effect which extend, so far as interstate commerce is concerned, far beyond the borders of that State, nullifying or impairing the effectiveness of more liberal limitations imposed by neighboring States.

The 1941 study concluded that the only logical path forward was federal regulations on size and weight limits because state laws were so wildly different that trucking companies ended up just building trucks to fit the laws of more restrictive states, anyway. After all, if your truck was built just for a looser state, it wasn’t legal to operate it in a strict state. Federal regulations on size and weight limits didn’t come until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, so laws were still wild until then.

As Curbside Classic notes, the railroad lobby successfully convinced Illinois to limit the total length of a truck to just 35 feet, or about the length of a full school bus. Of course, the idea here is that if trucks were kneecapped, more freight could be shipped by rail. This would remain the law in Illinois until those federal rules finally kicked the restrictions to the curb.

However, during the period when trucks were limited to just 35 feet, trucking companies operating in Illinois had to get creative to maximize profit from loads. In the 1940s, a truck and double-decker trailer totaling 35 feet was good enough for four cars. But what if there was a way to sneak just one more car in?

Doing More With Less

In the late 1940s, the Arco Auto Carriers of Chicago, Illinois figured out a wild hack. Donald Mettetal, Jr, on behalf of Arco Auto Carriers and Dealers Transit, Inc. of Chicago, invented a shorty truck that carried one extra car through a fun trick. Donald’s truck started life as a Ford F8, but his idea called for sawing off the cab just above the doghouse and moving it high enough to permit a car to occupy the space the cab once stood.

Take a look, and take note that the only way this car hauler works is if you pack the cars in at weird angles and leave little clearances:

You can probably forget about fitting a modern car on this contraption.

Your eyes also do not fool you. That really is a set up where you have a cab, a car, and then the engine and steering gear under the car. Doing this gave Arco just a few more feet to work with, but it was just enough to squeeze one more car into a truck that would normally carry only four vehicles.

The DeArco car carrier was born and it was turned into a real vehicle, too. Sadly, Donald never discussed how the driver of the DeArco steered the rig from the suspended cab. In the patent, Donald says the innovation in this truck isn’t in how the cab is connected with its disemboweled drivetrain. Based on the information shown in photos, the steering gear and controls were pushed as far forward as possible to clear the car that now sat where the cab did.

It’s believed that just one example was produced, and the DeArco featured corrugated siding and three vehicles rode in a longer truck with just two cars in the smaller articulated end.

I think it goes without saying that the DeArco was an ugly beast and it had the overall look of a high school shop project. I mean, the fuel tank is in the dome behind the cab, perched high above the engine. No commentary is given from Donald on the powertrain, but it’s possible that the car carrier had a Ford flathead V8 making 145 HP that was bolted to a five-speed manual and a two-speed rear axle. Yet, it worked. At a time when you couldn’t get a longer truck, the DeArco just reconfigured the truck itself. Apparently, the DeArco was also around long enough for the company to update the only known example with more windows for better visibility. Reportedly, the grille came from a Nash.

Sadly, Arco wasn’t granted a patent for the design until 1956. By that time the length restrictions were already becoming a thing of the past. Weirdly, Arco wasn’t the only company trying to beat length restrictions. Another weirdo from the late 1940s and the 1950s was the truck by the La Crosse Trailer Corporation.

This truck had a similar idea to pack five cars into a space that normally held three. The La Crosse truck took a different path. This truck added space in the same footprint by going with a front-wheel-drive design. It’s not known how La Crosse achieved this, but a popular method to create FWD back then was to lock a 4×4’s transfer case before removing the rear drive. At any rate, by removing the rear drive components, La Crosse was able to lower its car carrier enough to permit having a vehicle parked on top of the cab, not unlike today’s stinger car carrier trucks.

The Competition

Reportedly, the reason this one looks like a stunner, compared to the DeArco anyway, is because it was designed by Brooks Stevens Associates (that’s who designed the Original Jeep Wagoneer, the Willys Wagon, the Wienermobile as we know it today, and much more). It’s believed that just a few of these were built and presumably, La Crosse Trailer Corporation, which normally built heavy utility semi trailers, ran into the same issue Arco eventually did with the easing of length restrictions.

Finally, there’s one more oddball worth discussing here and it’s the Skyscraper for Commercial Carriers, Inc. (CCI) by Whitehead & Kales.

From what I’ve been able to find, CCI was founded in the mid-1930s and would later become a subsidiary of Ryder. It was a transportation company like Arco and it sought to find a way around the tough length restrictions. This truck’s design is credited to P. J. Huebshman, patent 2,647,009, and it would appear that this rig might have been the inspiration for the later DeArco design.

While information is hard to come by for most of the companies in this piece, I was able to find something on Whitehead & Kales.

This company was formed by mechanical engineer William R. Kales and structural iron engineer James T. Whitehead. The company started in the late 19th century in Michigan and its business was in steel. W&K was involved in building car hauler railcars in the 1890s and it also pounced on what was then the emerging market of car hauler truck trailers in the 1920s. Among car haulers, W&K also produced the structural steel used for such buildings as a Chrysler stamping plant in Sterling Township. The company is also to believed to have remained in the car hauler construction business until the 1980s.

Like the DeArco, Whitehead & Kales started with a regular truck, in this case, a Dodge, and then bisected it. Once again, by elevating the cab, CCI’s car carrier was able to slide a car into the space just above the truck’s engine. But also, just like the DeArco, I could find no explanation for what work was done to connect the cab to the engine feet below.

The Skyscraper also had a bit of a different approach, where the truck itself carried just two cars and the articulated section hauled three more. W&K and CCI also managed to create a “polished” version with a panoramic cab and proper bodywork. Yet, even these trucks wouldn’t last.

Ultimately, all of these trucks were a stop-gap solution. The oddball car carriers of the late 1940s and 1950s became obsolete the moment length restrictions were eased in the Midwest. Then, car carrier builders were able to pack more cars onto trucks without resorting to any creative hackery.

Still, these three trucks are an awesome part of car hauling history. The business and engineering behind hauling cars are things most people never have to think about today. But several decades ago, getting lots of cars from one place to another was a huge deal, and engineers were always looking for the next big thing to make the job a little better. At one point, that even involved parking cars on top of truck engines.

(Images used with permission from Dick Copello.)