The most important relationships were with Chrysler, there was the old Packard outfit, and there was a Wall Street group of Hayden-Stone. Hayden-Stone had bought owned Curtis-Wright Aeronautical, and they also owned the Studebaker automobile at that time, the old Pearce-Arrow. And the Hayden-Stone group wanted to take on the Dymaxion car and make it the Curtis-Wright Dymaxion, they said the airplane world was stealing from the automobile world, and they thought they might as well have the automobile world stealing a little bit from the airplane world, so they were going to use the advanced know-how of the aeronautical world to produce the Curtis-Wright Dymaxion, and they were then going to make it the lead car for the Studebaker family, and would produce it, produce the Curtis-Wright Dymaxion in the old Pearce-Arrow factory in Buffalo, New York a beautiful factory.

In the earliest days, Pearce-Arrow, Packard, Ford, Cadillac, they produced all the parts of the car in their own factory. And gradually, W.W.I found a letting out of subcontracts to produce parts in a very big way. So that gradually automobile companies went into more and more of assembly of the parts, and the actual factories of today when at the time of the great Crash, and the United States did socialize the big corporations, they then nominated certain businesses I said to you U.S. Steel there were some prime contractors who they were going to keep alive, always to be able to carry on their warfare. To get their weaponry to protect the country. So these prime contractors were going to always be kept alive. Now the United States, then, at the New Deal Time, though it made Ford Motor Company a prime contractor and General Motors a prime contractor, the criteria of being a prime contractor in the automobile business was that the automobile company had to make it's own cylinder blocks, had to make it's own crank shaft, and it's own cam shaft. That's all it had to do to be a prime contractor, and they all still do that in order to remain a prime contractor, but approximately all the other parts are produced elsewhere by parts manufacturers on enormous bidding, enormous competitive bidding to the automobile companies, working in thousandths of a cent differentials of their pricing.

So the this Pearce-Arrow factory being suddenly available, because it had been one of the companies that made everything under their own roof didn't work anymore and those kind of companies began to go out. Walter Chrysler also was very deeply interested in the car. The Hayden-Stone deal to produce the Dymaxion Car, Curtis-Wright Dymaxion Car fell through when the New Deal came in, because Curtis-Wright in producing this airplane, felt that it also had to have airports to fly them out of, that nobody would think of buying an airplane without an airport, therefore they had to produce some airports. So the Curtis-Wright company really produced and owned all of the well-known little airports that were around they were pretty small airports, for the kinds of planes they had, but they were the airport owners.

And it was under an agreement that the New Deal was going to buy their airports, and they were going to take the money that came from the New Deal for the airports, and they were going to put it into this Curtis-Wright Dymaxion car in Buffalo. Well, something happened between the Wall Street firm and the New Dealers, that didn't work, so they cancelled this, so they never went thru with that deal.

But Walter Chrysler became deeply interested in the car. He even thought about producing it. And he came out the year after I produced my first Dymaxion, he came out with his Air Flow, and he wanted to look at my Dymaxion, and incidentally, there was a New York automobile show that year. The automobile show was of very great importance in those years, and the New York automobile show of 1934, still the Old Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue the Chrysler Company then getting into enormous preparation to confront the public with Air Flow the word air flow coming suddenly in streamlining. They took the main position at the show remember this was still the very depth of the Depression, '34, you were just two years out of the New Deal Presidency, which starts in even though he was elected in '32 '33, so one year out of the depth of the Depression, and so not many people had much money to take on space. So Chrysler Company had taken this very prominent space. But the automobile show couldn't sell much space to others, so they had given me, free, and asked me to bring in my Dymaxion Car as a feature for the show. But I wasn't paying anything. So Chrysler Company said they would not pay for their very prominent front position of the show unless they threw my car out.

The Police Commissioner of New York was very well-impressed by my car. He was General Ryan, had been the head of the New York Division during World War I, and General Ryan liked my car very much, so he asked he invited me to park my car in front of the Grand Central Station the Palace, along Lexington Avenue. So it really did steal the show, and Walter Chrysler asked me to bring it down to his place in Long Island, he wanted to look it over, and he said, "You have produced the car I wanted to. By the time my engineers, my sales department, my bankers everybody in this enormous corporation got through things, it wasn't anything that I really liked at all. It wasn't what I thought I was going to get." It had been modified so many times. And he said "You produced the exact car I wanted to produce. And he said, "In our big corporation we have 'checks and balances', so that a a nut inventor cannot be a good persuader and get the corporation to really sink itself in deeply into something that is not going to work. But," he said, "you have really had the right mechanic experience," Walter Chrysler himself was a mechanic and he very quickly found that I, too, was a mechanic, and he said "you have had the right experience and the perceptivity to really produce the car that needed to be produced, and you have the capability to produce it." So, he used to ask me to take out his various members of his Board of Directors to really see what a good car it should have been and to see what he had been talking about.

Now, Walter Chrysler said, "Let us make a comparison since you have produced just what I did want to produce, and you've done it as a little individual, and I produced mine as an enormous corporation with all the checks and balances we have" he said, "let's look into what it cost you to produce your prototypes," I built three of them. And he looked into what it cost to produce his prototypes. And we found that in the corporation, it took three times as much time and four times as much money to produce our prototypes but I came out with a faultless one as far as he was concerned, and he came out with a compromise. So he was really deeply impressed with what the little individual can do.

When I talk to you about trying to find out what individuals can do that corporations and great states can't do. It's the whole matter of that bureaucracy and the checks and balances of very great importance.

At any rate, this gave me great intimacy with the automobile world. Now, why the automobile companies did not get into producing my car. And I'll assure you, Hudson all of them looked it over. Walter Chrysler finally turned up why they did not. It is really very simple. At that time, for every new car sold, five old cars had to be sold. That was the rate of getting rid of getting a man who had a rather poor car, you had to take in his car, and you had to sell it of course. And so they found that the following:

In the automobile mass production of cars, the automobile producer can't own all the cars he's producing. You get up to something like at Chrysler Company, or the Dodge factory there are 5,000 cars in one assembly plant of the many assembly plants just one plant turning out 5,000 a day. And they were, say, something over a thousands dollars, so you've got a thousand times five thousand, and so that's $50 million, it's a very yes, it's about $50 million the company can't own it's own product. There is not enough capital to possibly do it.

So what happened is that the automobile "inventors" got going and Henry Ford and others, the others had it too, where people wanted their cars, there was a great profit for a distributor of a car, and it was very worth while being a dealer. So the dealers there is something called "distributor" which is a state area, and there is a local "dealer" within it so the distributor has secondary dealers. A distributorship of the automobiles had been a very profitable matter. So much so that Henry Ford and others were able to write in their contract, that if you happen to have my distributorship, you have to guarantee to take so many cars a year. So the and you're going to have to then, in the contract, agree that you're going to have to let me know weekly what the cars exactly what kind of car you want. Your quota for this week, we'll say is going to be 300. How many of what are those going to be? Opening or touring cars? Run abouts? What are they, what color and so forth? So the automobile distributor has to give a schedule so many station wagons and such and such, and such and such a date is agreed on. He must then, the distributor must be at the end of the production line his representatives must be there with banking papers to pay for the car as it comes off. And it goes through a testing and he drives it away. Puts it on his truck today, or whatever way he's going to ship.

This is the only way, then, that the automobile mass production could occur. Then the this meant that the local dealer rather the distributor, got his contract, because he was a well-known business man, and a business man apparently, when he undertook to do something, could bring it off so that he risked the money and would make a profit, and everybody came out alright. So the distributor himself, could not possibly put up the money to buy all these cars, so he went to the local bank. And the local bank knew him as a businessman who didn't bite off more than he could chew, so he would finance him. So it meant then that the local banks, and the local banks didn't own the money, it was the people's deposits. So what happened then was that the people's deposits were, you and I didn't know that our deposits, but are funding Detroit to produce cars. And our funds, our deposits are literally buying those cars and they are held temporarily in the paper work by the bank, and they go on to dump it as soon as they can on some customer.