A Vision

Is a single-track car feasible? Many inventors, designers and future orientated engineers have already tried to get to the bottom of this question. What all these projects had in common was that they did not meet with acceptance and failed in the market. All single-track vehicles were designed to take advantage of the so-called gyroscopic effect. Generally, this effect is better known by the term gyro effect, i.e. a fast rotating body.

In the time after World War II, this principle for automobile construction fell into oblivion, but in 1961 the visitors of the Detroit Motor Show were reminded of it again at the exhibition booth of Ford. A vehicle called Gyron was on display, which deviated from all the well-known cars of the Detroit-based company, because it had the look of a single-track car. If some visitors got the impression that Ford was experimenting with such a new design of automobiles and might even thought that Ford planned a series production in the long term, they were wrong. For Ford the single-track car was just a concept car. It was the era in which the US car manufacturers in particular liked to dream of futuristic, even very utopian vehicles, and many people gave thought to the automotive locomotion of the future. This creativeness was influenced by the aspiration to conquer the space, which was constantly and everywhere present in the USA at the time.

The Gyron was completely destroyed in a fire in 1962. Only the studio model, created as a 55 cm long visual scale model by designer Alex Tremulis, was preserved.