Liz Carmichael And The Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation Scandal
Elizabeth CarmichaelElizabeth Carmichael with a prototype of The Dale, a fuel-efficient car that was supposed to be revolutionary.
In theory, Geraldine Elizabeth “Liz” Carmichael had a great idea. Her three-wheeled, two-seater car — which would soon be known as The Dale — got 70 miles to the gallon at a time when gasoline was rationed. But in reality, Carmichael had pulled off one of the biggest scams in the automotive industry to date — because The Dale was never manufactured.
Born in 1927, Carmichael was a trans woman who often introduced her wife — Vivian Barrett Michael, who was also the mother of her five children — as her secretary. Given that this was all happening in the 1970s, the news stories about Carmichael and her controversy at the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation would use very different verbiage than what would be considered acceptable by today’s editorial standards.
Carmichael came up with the idea for The Dale in 1973. She claimed that because the car only had three wheels, the vehicle weighed far less than a typical car, giving it more fuel efficiency. It was also reportedly made of “aerospace plastic,” which could withstand the impact of a brick wall, and was impossible to tip over. Carmichael was soon flush with investors, and she even filmed an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
And that’s when things took a turn for the worse.
YouTubeElizabeth Carmichael after her 1989 arrest.
Just one year after Carmichael announced The Dale’s existence, the California legislature began investigating her company, according to The Hollywood Reporter. What they found was that Carmichael had made over $3 million in advanced sales for cars that didn’t exist yet. What’s more, she was also selling dealer franchises without any cars going into production.
Lead investigator Bill Hall also discovered that The Dale was going to be made with subpar materials. Additionally, the hangars where she was allegedly manufacturing all of these cars were deserted, with no evidence of any sort of production happening. That’s when the authorities deduced that everything about the car, the company, and Carmichael herself was all just a fraudulent scheme. But before they could move in to arrest Carmichael, she’d run off with her five children and was never seen again.
That is, of course, until Unsolved Mysteries helped solve the case.
On April 5, 1989, Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment on Carmichael. Just two weeks later, a viewer tip led the authorities to a flower shop near Austin, Texas, where Carmichael had been working under the alias of Kathryn Elizabeth Johnson. She was soon extradited to California, where she was convicted of a myriad of charges and spent 18 months in prison.
According to Hemmings Motor News, Carmichael would later die of cancer in 2004, but the prototype of The Dale lives on to this day in the Peterson Automobile Museum in Los Angeles.
