A video from @avantsofficial gives a close-up tour of one of the strangest production cars ever built, with a caption that reads like a spec sheet from another planet: “Meet the car with a helicopter engine, three headlights, six exhaust tips, and six mufflers… This 1948 Tucker 48 is chassis 1029, Preston Tucker’s personal car. Today, it belongs to Avants member Matt from @caretakerscollection… After an eight-year restoration, it went on to win Best in Class at Pebble Beach in 2026.” The clip has pulled in 816,000 likes, 1,950 comments, and 14,500 shares.

The Tucker 48’s rarity is a big part of why a car this old still stops scrollers mid-feed nearly 80 years after it was built. According to the Tucker Club, only 51 Tucker 48s were ever produced before Preston Tucker’s company collapsed under federal fraud allegations in 1949, and 47 of those original cars are still known to survive today. That survival rate, well over 90 percent, is unusually high for a car this old, largely because collectors have treated every known Tucker as an irreplaceable artifact almost from the moment production ended, rather than letting examples get scrapped or quietly disappear the way countless other low-volume cars from the era did.

The Tucker Club’s own technical records describe the engine as a horizontally opposed, overhead-valve H-6 unit displacing 335 cubic inches and producing 166 horsepower and 372 lb-ft of torque, a layout chosen in part because Tucker’s engineering team adapted it from an aircraft and helicopter powerplant design rather than starting from a conventional automotive block, which is exactly the kind of unconventional engineering choice that gave the car its reputation. Paired with features like the triple headlight setup, where the center “Cyclops eye” lamp swiveled with the steering, the Tucker 48 wasn’t just unusual for its era, it was actively ahead of mainstream safety thinking by over a decade.

That combination of extreme rarity and genuine engineering ambition is why a well-documented, well-restored Tucker 48 like chassis 1029 can win Best in Class at a show as competitive as Pebble Beach and why values for the model have climbed into the seven figures at auction in recent years. An eight-year restoration on a car this scarce isn’t unusual, it’s close to necessary, since sourcing period-correct parts for a model built in the hundreds rather than the thousands means much of the work has to be fabricated rather than simply ordered. Watching this particular example roll on camera is as close as most people will ever get to seeing one of the most audacious failed experiments in American automotive history still running exactly as its creator intended.

More from Steel Horse Rides

• Owner Says the Seats in a 1986 Toyota 4Runner Smell Exactly How You Would Imagine, Then Pulls Out the Carpet and Asks Followers to Pick the Color for the New Kit
• Mechanic Pulls a Snapped Crankshaft Apart in Two Pieces on the Shop Bench, Says the Car Drove In Like That and Jokes the Customer Only Wanted an Oil Change
• Narrator of a Repair Clip Says a Car That Shook Every Time the Owner Hit the Gas Had an Engine Mount Cracked Clean in Half, Then Explains Why the Impact Wrench Is Not the Last Step