Original subtitles

Hi, everyone. Jeff Dunham and Bubba J here

at Dunham Family Motors.

Hi, everybody in TV land.

This next car is what happens when someone builds a vehicle

with no oversight and a whiteboard that just

says, "Yes."

It has the attitude of a black ops project, the silhouette of

a stealth fighter, and the kind of cockpit

that makes you say, "Should I even be in here?"

The car is a legend, but the story is even better.

How about this?

Our unbelievable 1 of 17

W8 First American supercar-- The Vector.

Throughout time, humanity has been obsessed with getting

places using anything but their own two feet.

We've tried all kinds of things.

Until finally, the greatest invention

of all time, the automobile.

Moron!

These are the cars that drove us.

Ah, Europe in the '70s,

a sophisticated hotbed of art,

cuisine, culture,

and...

...speed.

Lamborghini Countach, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari,

Maserati, Jaguar.

Not to be outdone, Americans stood toe to toe

with art, cuisine, and culture.

But when it came to speed...

In the United States, we've had fascinating design,

but in the 1970s, we had 55 mile an hour speed limits.

And there were fuel economy standards,

there were emission standards, crash regulations.

Safety first...

- Yeah. - ...made America...

last.

We have the highest technology.

We put people in space.

We build the fighter aircraft the rest of the world wants.

Why can't America have their own exotic sports car?

Well, we actually did. And it was...

Built like a jet fighter as exotic as they come.

That's right. The Vector W8.

A car that the rules didn't apply to.

Mostly because...

It wasn't designed to be an automobile.

It was designed to be aircraft or spacecraft.

And if that doesn't make any sense, it's because it doesn't.

Because Vector visionary Jerry Wiegert

and his automotive accomplices made their own rules.

We just had different priorities.

Leaving some to wonder if these car men were con men.

But Jerry didn't let that stop him.

If he just set out to do something, he would just do it.

So when it came to getting this jet-fighting, space-faring

supercar to take off, how did Jerry just do it?

Well, as most American automotive stories do,

this one begins in the Motor City.

Jerry grew up in the Detroit area.

He was a really creative guy. Think outside of the box.

So he ended up doing an internship

with General Motors, that made him realize

he didn't really want to work

for a giant corporation taking orders.

He had this dream of building an American supercar

that could compete with Ferrari or Lamborghini.

Which is easier said than done.

One of the hardest things I think you can do in the world

is start a car company.

And he didn't have a lot of financial resources himself.

Some people might say that you need a little narcissism.

Or in Jerry's case...

carcissism.

He had a ton of confidence, and he believed

that he could make this car come into production.

He was a showman.

He knew how to attract attention.

And Jerry's best marketing angle

was a literal angle.

Jerry came up with the name, "Vector."

But at this point, the Vector was only

highly performing on paper.

Need a car.

And he'd get one by partnering with Lee Brown,

who customized the iconic '68 Mustang GT

in the Steve McQueen classic, "Bullitt."

While Lee worked on the mock-up, Jerry got the word out.

Hawking it just like in Barnum and Bailey.

And while it may not have been the circus,

the '72 LA Auto Expo was the perfect place to debut

Jerry and Lee's engineless Vector mock-up shell.

But that's all it was. It was a mock-up.

The mock-up definitely turned heads.

But as the attention was heating up,

Jerry and Lee's partnership was cooling down.

Both guys had the same big ego and wanted to claim

the ownership of the project, so that mock-up

got taken by Lee Brown.

Leaving Jerry...

- Need a car. - There's no cars left.

...right back where he started.

Jerry still owned the Vector name and design,

but with no mock-up, this motor was trending downward.

And after several years of no car, Jerry kind of dropped

a little bit off the radar screen.

The Vector was starting to feel more like vapor.

2 Without a proof-of-concept mock-up to drum up

investment capital, Jerry Wiegert's Vector project

was nearly dead.

But then he met this man.

I changed my name since the original days of Vector.

But now he goes by Rob Portil.

I was making a lot of money in real estate at the time,

so I put essentially the first money in the company,

and we formed Vector Aeromotive Corporation.

Jerry now had the funds to do one better

than Lee Brown's mock-up shell and instead built

a fully-functional Vector prototype.

The most innovative thing about the car was that whole

use of aerospace technology.

Right down to the Vector's chassis.

The semi-monocoque aluminum honeycomb chassis.

Uh, spell check, please.

Semi-monocoque aluminum honeycomb chassis.

So, what exactly is

a sell-my-lama-cocka-million honeycrumb-jazzy?

Think of two skins of aluminum,

maybe three-quarters of an inch apart,

and then there's a honeycomb of aluminum in between the two.

It's really, really innovative.

And Dave Kostka knows innovation when he sees it.

After all, he's an engineer.

I was living not that far from Venice,

where the Vector Project was taking place.

I went by there, and they had pushed the car

out of the garage.

And then he saw it. - Oh.

You know, the, uh, that thing.

Aluminum honeycomb monocoque chassis.

Which made his heart skip a beat.

Wow, what a cool place to work.

So then Jerry Wiegert comes out, and next thing I knew...

Jerry hired this random guy

off the street to sweep the floors or something?

- No, no. - Uh.

- Jerry's assistant? - No, VP of engineering.

I was volunteering 60 hours a week

on top of my 40-hour-a-week job, and I was glad to do it.

And good thing, too, because the Vector prototype's

development had already burned through all the seed money

put up by Rob Portil.

Luckily, he had an elite secret weapon up his sleeve.

Wealthy individuals.

The main source of funds was deposits for cars.

Are these cars in the room with us now, Dave?

And so Jerry had to put that

patented Wiegert marketing magic to work.

The primary reason the Vector was designed

was to be a challenge to European dominance

of the exotic car, luxury car market segment.

The fastest European cars were 175, 180-mile-an-hour cars.

Could we build the first real 200-mile-an-hour vehicle?

Well, could they?

For us to get the kind of horsepower we needed

to get out of this engine, we were using aircraft turbos.

That, coupled with the lightweight of the semi...

...could potentially get them up to those speeds.

Nobody's ever done it before on, like,

a production street-driven car.

But Jerry was a very special salesman

with a very special pitch.

It's a very special machine for a very special person.

And very special people began

placing very special deposits

of over $100,000.

The number one car was an ex-Saudi prince.

And the second order came from another Saudi prince.

That oil money does run deep.

Third order came from a wealthy American businessman.

Which allowed this less-wealthy American businessman

to finally finish his prototype.

Jerry christened his supercar the Vector W2.

The W was for Wiegert.

And went into marketing overdrive.

He maximized his press coverage,

and there was this sensation created that the Vector

was a real car and in production.

There was only one.

We just painted it a lot of different colors.

In fact, there were journalists that made fun of us.

They go, "Oh, they're trying to pretend

there's a lot of different cars."

They said that because you were Rob,

and you could forgive them for wondering if there was

some other pretending going on.

Vector was on the cover of "Car and Driver,"

but the guy who wrote the story didn't get a chance

to drive the car because, while the styling was almost complete,

the mechanicals were not all that complete.

And the claims, well, we'd seen them already before.

600-plus horsepower and potential top speeds

in excess of 200-miles-per-hour.

And you just wondered,

"Hey, man, you going to build some cars?"

Things came to a head with a 1987 write-up

in "Autoweek," 15 years after Jerry had first conceived

of his fighter jet for the streets.

The guy blasted us,

saying that "This is never going to happen.

It's all a big scam, it's a con."

It was not flattering, and it characterized Jerry

as somebody who was raising money

but never gonna produce cars.

2 It was clear that Jerry needed help getting this fighter jet

for the streets off the ground.

So he found a fighter jet manufacturer

from Northrop Grumman.

I was working on the F/A-18 and F-5 fighter program.

And he was used to managing production.

Something Jerry...

You gonna build some cars?

...could use some advice on.

I said, "Not only are you not ready for production,

I don't think you really understand what it is."

But doing things Mark's way?

Rent facilities, hire people, set up benefits packages,

accounting system, tooling, equipment.

Would be more expensive.

Through the '80s, the total amount we'd raised

was less than a million.

So Vector Aeromotive went to the capital

of investment capital.

The stock market.

Jerry found an underwriter to take us public.

Blinder, Robinson & Co. had 2,000 brokers.

They were the biggest penny stock firm in the country.

He was very good at manipulating stock.

- Say what? - You know, we knew this.

That's OK.

Ah, stop while you're ahead, Rob.

Jeez, man, does your lawyer know you're here?

They basically launched an IPO, and that was

the startup money.

At the time we got funded, we had promised

the shareholders that we'd have

the first production car done in a year.

So all the team had to do was dust off the original plans

and see which components needed to be--

- There were no plans. - Ugh, come on, guys.

- We're on a deadline here. - That's-- that's pitiful.

They had to disassemble the prototype

and lay the pieces down on paper and trace them

and then make a drawing out of it.

And by the time we were done with that process,

it's like everything's different from the W2.

We should just change the model name.

So that's when we came up with that...

W8.

Eight was the cylinder count of the car.

Which still sounds like the name of a tax form,

but whatever.

The important thing is, Mark Bailey could finally

get started on what he had been hired to do.

That is, if Jerry Wiegert would let him.

Jerry and I got it at odds from time to time

because we just had differing priorities.

He had all kinds of marketing campaigns.

Heads turn and eyes are drawn to this distinctive car.

A restoration of a GMC motorhome they wanted to use

to take to shows.

So he would borrow my production personnel and work

on his motorhome for the day without talking to me about it.

Which sounds like a pretty dysfunctional way to work.

Especially now that there were shareholders asking...

- You gonna build some cars? - Mark was trying.

- Hm. - That's a very complicated,

complex vehicle to manufacture.

Expensive, too, which is why sometimes

a few corners had to be cut.

The gearbox for the Vector was mated up to what was basically

the front-wheel-drive transmission out of

the GMC motorhomes.

And since Jerry's motorhome was off limits...

We went rummaging through junkyards looking for

transmission castings to use in the first couple cars.

It's not like we were ever gonna let anybody know

where they came from. - Sure, why not?

And it's highly doubtful that this decision will come back

to haunt them at the worst possible time.

Speaking of time...

We were scrambling to finish the first cars.

The LA Auto Show was the big unveiling.

And after almost 20 years, the Vector was finally

on the market. Price tag in today's money?

Over $1 million.

It was literally what Jerry envisioned.

Aerospace technology for the street.

It had a screen on the left side of the steering wheel,

and it had a little set of buttons to change the view.

You could look at the chassis and see if anything was open.

You'd see your speedometer on another screen.

And as you speed up and accelerate,

that whole bar graph moves.

All aircraft circuit breakers.

Every one of these push buttons in the dash are right out of

the cockpit of a military fighter aircraft.

Loud.

And don't forget the, um, the...

Semi-monocoque aluminum honeycomb chassis.

So a bunch of these things that, to us at Vector,

seemed like logical things to do, Jerry was pioneering.

But he was still far behind on one thing.

And so the first Vector production car,

serial number 001, was finally delivered to its Saudi prince.

I believe it was about a 10-year cycle from the time

he made his investment.

And soon enough, even more of those aforementioned...

- Wealthy individuals - ...started lining up

to kick the tires. But billionaires weren't

the only ones lining up for joyrides.

Of course, then all the car magazines wanted to come

and do a story.

Automotive journalist Csaba Csere

would be getting behind the wheel to test

the Vector's performance claims. At least, that was the plan.

Suddenly, the transmission is packed up.

The engine was still running fine, but no matter

what gear you selected, the car is coasting.

At that point, pulled over on the shoulder,

and there was a Vector guy with me, a guy named Kostka.

- Oh, this guy? - Really?

I haven't had that problem before.

The front-wheel drive transmission out of

the GMC motorhomes.

Motorhomes. Motorhomes.

Luckily, there were two cars available that day.

We called them Pre-Production 1 and 2.

They kind of got nicknamed PP1 and PP2.

Good thing, because David was in deep poo poo.

And so we proceeded with the second car.

But as soon as we started some of the acceleration runs,

the car started overheating. - What?

There was steam wafting out of the various grilles behind me.

I'm thinking this car is just, you know, half-baked.

Nope. It's fully toasted.

2 With two broken cars, Csaba Csere's road test

of the Vector W8 for "Car and Driver" magazine

had hit the skids.

We couldn't get a test done.

And Jerry says, "You know, stay another day.

We'll get the car fixed."

But I was on a flight the next morning.

Sorry, Jer.

So I go back to my hotel.

And Dave went back to the shop to check on PP1,

or was it 2?

I get a call at 2:30 AM,

No such thing as a good phone call at 2:30 AM.

It's Jerry, and he says, "We got a car together."

Yay.

And this time, the car is running reasonably well.

I got a 0 to 60 of 3.8 seconds.

I got a quarter mile of 12 flat at 118 miles an hour.

Which was nowhere near the W8's reported top speed.

However...

The transmission was acting up.

Again.

And it wouldn't shift into third gear.

We potentially have a really bad write-up coming here.

This is not good.

But it wasn't all bad either.

Based on that test, the Vector, performance wise,

was in league with the two fastest cars in the world,

the Porsche 959 and the Ferrari F40.

And when the write up hit newsstands...

"A world wonder or a great pretender?"

But at this point, the Vector W8 needed

some definitively positive optics.

And soon enough, Jerry Wiegert found them.

Tennis pro Andre Agassi bought a Vector.

It was not quite finished. He wanted it right now.

Apparently, Jerry asked the tennis pro not to drive it.

He took it for a spin, and apparently the carpet

in the backend set a fire.

We didn't sell another car after that,

so we were running out of money at the same time,

and I left the company.

And with the tenure of his captain's cut shorts,

eh, short, Jerry was left all alone atop a crumbling empire.

But Jerry's joyride wasn't over yet.

An Indonesian firm called Megatech came along.

Megatech, Megatech.

An investment group so mega loaded...

They bought Lamborghini.

And they basically told Jerry, "If you make

"your production numbers, we will continue to invest.

If not, we're going to take the company."

But this was the moment he had been training for

his whole life.

And with the fresh infusion

of Megatech's investment capital...

Jerry did not make the production numbers,

and they tried to take over the company.

Megascrewed. Megascrewed. Megascrewed.

And as the Vector board prepared to vote

on Jerry's ouster, he hatched a plan.

Jerry essentially barricaded himself into

the Wilmington facility.

Then he just hired a security service.

They called it the Waco of the West.

Not the best look when the press compares you to

the wacko from Waco.

The standoff dragged on for six months

until a judge ruled in Megatech's favor.

Corporate law says the board has control.

Jerry was finally removed by sheriffs.

And just like that, the joyride was over.

Megatech took over the company.

We could sell this car for less

if we run the Lamborghini engine and drivetrain.

Now it was not the all-American supercar anymore,

and so they had trouble selling cars.

And then a bunch of money turned up missing,

and the whole thing collapsed.

And guess who was there to pick up the pieces?

Jerry was excited to get Vector back in court.

And then Jerry launched another attempt.

But his WX8 would never make it past prototype.

Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

In January 2021, at the age of 76,

Jerry took his final flight

into the vast blue highway in the sky.

Three days before he died, he was talking about going to

the Middle East to finish WX8.

A consummate salesman to the very end.

People might look at Jerry and think, 20 years developing

the Vector was ridiculous, but it's also spectacular.

We should applaud his audacity.

I think a lot of people would have given up.

We're trying to do what any car company has

like 500 people doing, and we're like two people

doing that amount of work.

Jerry and his small band of upstarts

took on the European giants

in the most American way possible.

Doing it cooler, doing it better, doing it faster.

But wait, did they go faster?

We actually never broke 200 in them.

We got 198, 199.

Well, at least it topped 200 in one way.

I watched the temperature gauge went up to 250.

And if the ride was bumpy,

it was only because the Vector was blazing a new trail.

It's a fighter jet plane on wheels.

It's just flat-out badass.

But you know, I can't help but wonder,

maybe it was just a little bit ahead of its time.

This does not feel like a '90s car at all.

This thing could have been built today.

It really does feel like that.

In other words, it might have been just

a little bit too much too soon.

And there could be anything more American than that.

It did make a mark on history.

It's a little smaller than we would have liked,

but it's there.

This is the Vector.

The very first true American supercar.

I'll kill you!