Who invented the radio-control car? It should be a simple question to answer, and indeed, if you plug that question into all-knowing Google, it spits back an answer: Italian electronics company Electronic Giocattoli, with a 1/12th-scale Ferrari 250LM that it offered in 1966. Case closed, move on to the next article, right? Except that’s not the case at all, and the correct answer may have to do with an infamous incident of goofing off at one of America’s largest carmakers.
Why RC Planes Before RC Cars?
Curiously, radio-control aircraft predated radio-control cars in both full-scale and model formats. British drones described as Aerial Targets flew as early as 1917 while the earliest radio-controlled car, a Chandler sedan converted as a publicity stunt, drove the streets of New York City in 1925. (For what it’s worth, the first documented radio-controlled watercraft was demonstrated in 1898 at Madison Square Garden by Nikola Tesla.)
In the world of scale RC aircraft, twin brothers Walt and Bill Good are widely regarded as the pioneers of the hobby after their initial test flight in 1937 and subsequent development of their Big Guff a year later. The powered scale car hobby, however, tended toward tether cars and slot cars over the next few decades just as full-size remote-controlled cars tended to follow Norman Bel Geddes‘s example toward roadway-embedded guidance wires.
Two major factors – one organizational, one technical – created that gulf, according to David Palmeter. The Academy of Model Aeronautics, a strong international organization dedicated to the pursuit, has been around since 1936 while the largest organizations dedicated to RC cars, ROAR and IFMAR, date only to the late Sixties and late Seventies, respectively.
“Also, flying an airplane can be done with the early RC equipment with nothing to hit – except the ground,” Palmeter said. “Cars are generally run in limited space and needed quicker reacting equipment, which improved significantly with the availability of digital proportional RC in the Sixties.”
Palmeter’s experience bridges both the worlds of radio-control aircraft and radio-control ground vehicles. As a teen in the mid-Fifties, he had flown model airplanes with .049 and later .099-cubic-inch gas engines and, after numerous crashes, “I began to contemplate sticking closer to the ground with a gas powered car.” By the late Sixties, his sketches and dreams culminated in a 1/8-scale gas-powered radio-control car using a Monogram 1965 Corvette body, and he went on to get involved in ROAR and RC car racing soon after.
He stuck with the hobby, and about five years ago became increasingly curious about its roots, enough to start digging through old magazine articles and documenting his research on his website.
![Elettronica Giocattoli Ferrari 250LM]()
![Elettronica Giocattoli Ferrari 250LM]()
![Elettronica Giocattoli Ferrari 250LM]()
![Elettronica Giocattoli Ferrari 250LM]()
![Testors 1966 Ford Mustang]()
![Ace Radio Control Ford Mustang kit]()
Was That Ferrari First?
The Elettronica Giocattoli Ferrari 250LM immediately jumped out at Palmeter, even though, at the time, little was known about it other than the suggestion that it was released sometime in mid-1966. A simple plastic toy, it came with a basic box-shaped controller about the size of a transistor radio, and through its plastic windshield one could see the circuit board with its various components. A simple electric motor like the ones found in electric toothbrushes these days controlled the steering up front and presumably a similar one spun the tires in the rear.
Palmeter even found an article on the Ferrari in the June 1966 issue of Italian magazine Quattroruote that offered more details, including the car’s top speed of 3.6 kilometers per hour and its price of 28,000 lire (for comparisons sake, when it made its way to the States a year later, retail price was about $100), as well as a good amount of marveling at the idea of a radio control car. As Palmeter translated, the Ferrari was of “a rather unusual construction, not so much because it moves by itself, but because its movements are radio-controlled. No wires, no guides, therefore, but only an impertinent machine that goes for a walk far and wide, obeying only the impulses that come to it via radio.”
By his reckoning, the Ferrari must have been in development in 1965, which “is certainly a very early production radio controlled car,” though other production RC cars were coming on the market at the same time or right on its heels. Tether car maker Wen-Mac, shortly before its purchase by Testors in 1966, had developed a dual-motor proportional radio-control version of its battery-powered, plastic-bodied 1/11-scale 1966 Ford Mustang that, when introduced at the February 1966 Hobby Industry Trade Show in Chicago, cost $69.95. And within a year, as seen in the March 1967 issue of Car Model magazine, kits were available to turn many 1/18-scale cars into radio-control cars. As Tom Dion wrote in that article (using an Ace Radio Control Ford Mustang kit to illustrate):
Many advances have been made in radio control equipment in the past few years. The introduction and use of the transistor has reduced the cost, increased the reliability and brought the physical size of radio equipment down to where it will fit nicely in a 1/18th scale car about ten inches long. The recent introduction of the low cost, high capacity nickel-cadmium battery assures adequate power on board for those wheel spinning starts, cornering broadsides and flashing speeds on the straightaway.
![Charles Eckles prototype RC car]()
![Ken Balz RC Big T]()
![Bill Johnson experimental RC car]()
Early Experiments
However, as Dion insinuated – and as Palmeter documented – other non-commercialized attempts had been made at building radio-control cars prior to 1966. According to a Joe 1967 issue of Model Car Science magazine, Charles Eckles had been working on his own Cox-engined radio-controlled cars using PCS Digital Systems control units and Ford Mustang bodies as early as 1965.
A year prior, Ken Balz wrote about his efforts to conceal the equipment necessary to convert a Monogram Big T to radio control in the October 1965 issue of Rod & Custom Models. “It had long been a dream of slot racers to ‘drop the slot’ and race more like the ‘real’ racers… Ken was one of the first,” Palmeter wrote.
In what may have been the first attempt to chronicle the history of RC cars, Pit Stop Magazine identified at least two other pioneers in its first issue in September 1970: Norb Meyers, who built his first in either 1965 or 1966 and who later went on to found Ra/Car Developments, and Bill Johnson, who built his first experimental RC car as late as 1963 or 1964.
Clearly, an effort was afoot to develop the radio-control car by the mid-Sixties by DIYers and hobby companies alike. But some well-known designers at Ford Motor Company apparently beat them all to the punch.
![u200bGeorge Walker with the Ford LaTosca]()
![u200bAt work on the Ford LaTosca]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
Goofing Off at Work
In January 1954, Alex Tremulis took over Ford’s Advanced Studio – a perfect placement for a designer whose interests included advanced aerodynamics and streamlining, gyro-stabilized cars, and aircraft-inspired shapes and design elements. Not long after, he and his assistant, Romeyn Hammond, whipped together the earliest radio-control car that we’ve been able to document.
As
we told the story a few years back and as Jim and Cheryl Farrell originally related it for their book Ford Design Department Concepts and Showcars, 1932-1961, Tremulis and Hammond designed the LaTosca as a 3/8-scale model with the purpose of showing “students in the Advanced Studio how hard it was, even for professional designers, to design a car.”
They then decided to take the model a step further by building a basic chassis for the 3/8-scale model on which they installed about $1,000 worth of parts: a full-size car battery, some Lincoln convertible top motors to function as drive motors, a power window regulator to function as a transmission, a power seat unit to function as a steering mechanism, power window relays, and some unnamed model airplane radio controls.
The two placed a 3/8-scale mannequin named Oscar in the driver’s seat and discovered the little car could run as fast as 5 miles per hour. Hijinks ensued, as the Farrells related:
Tremulis would send the Tosca out on the street on occasion while controlling it from inside the building. Designers and clay modelers could watch it through binoculars as it traveled down Oakwood Blvd., in and out of traffic, stopping at traffic signals and finally turning into the driveway of the Ford plant. In time, Tremulis discovered that the radio controls worked up to 1-1/4 miles away. Security guard at the Styling Center recall stopping traffic on Oakwood Blvd., as the LaTosca crossed the street under its own power. On one occasion, while Tremulis was “driving” the car down Oakwood Blvd., it created a traffic jam and was holding up a line of traffic that included Ford’s chief engineer Earle S. MacPherson. MacPherson didn’t have an excess of patience anyway, and when he learned it was Tremulis who was driving his toy on public streets and creating traffic jams from inside the Design Department building, he made sure Tremulis and (Design Department Manager Charlie) Waterhouse knew what he thought of it. Many designers believe that Tremulis’s later problems at Ford started with the LaTosca.
Still, the scale model ostensibly had an actual purpose. As the Farrells noted, Ford vice-president of design George Walker, who was also pictured driving the car, “thought the idea of motorizing three-eighths sized models was an excellent way to see designs in motion.”
Also, despite the hijinks, Waterhouse allowed Tremulis and Hammond to motorize another 3/8-scale design model, the 1955 Mexico, an ultra-streamlined car that had already recorded a 0.22 coefficient of drag in wind tunnel testing. Tremulis even placed an Oscar that looked like himself in the driver’s seat and one that looked like Waterhouse in the passenger’s seat.
The Advanced Studio was dissolved in the spring of 1956 and it appears Tremulis and Hammond didn’t get the chance to motorize any other models at Ford.
![Tremulis's Mexico on the coffee table with a rendering of the 999 by Tremulis]()
![u200bFord Mexico 3/8-scale concept]()
Ultimate Dead Ends
The Farrells reported that the LaTosca’s chassis could have been used under other 3/8-scale models, and it was indeed spotted by Ford designers in storage for many years afterward without the LaTosca body, which was presumably destroyed.
The Mexico, on the other hand, remained in the lobby of Ford’s Styling building at the now-demolished Product Development Center for many years afterward. Whether it ultimately survived is anybody’s guess.
Of course, given that nobody outside of Ford or the handful of Dearborn drivers who saw a mysterious 3/8-scale car zipping around town in the mid-Fifties knew of the LaTosca and Mexico, it’s doubtful either car had any influence on Meyers, Johnson, Balz, and the other RC car pioneers mentioned above. It’s also doubtful Tremulis, Hammond, Waterhouse, Walker, and the others involved in the LaTosca and Mexico had any idea how popular the radio control car hobby would become just a decade later.
