This was one of my hottest dreams in the early Eighties: Extreme wedge shape and a raw attitude in design, tremendous power and performance and put in the world by a highly dedicated aviation enthusiast – but the Vector never really took off.
To me the real Vector is the car here, above and below: The first and therefore the original, the W2-model first appeared around 1978. Back then it was still a hollow shell without an engine; merely a mock up. However, I only discovered that several years later when the engine was in place and the project started to look very much like a real car. In fact, it was a real car in the sense that it did actually drive, a sort of taken for granted thing with most car but not necessarily so for extreme prototypes. Vector made a big deal out of rebuilding and repainting the few prototypes they had, so the whole enterprise seemed bigger than it was. There are still rumors around that for ten years they actually only had one prototype.
For me this did not really matter – not so much because I had no driving license, but purely because the basic shape of the Vector W2 fascinated me without equal. It was not quite so relentless as the Lamborghini Countach (which hung in the same teenage room, of course), and actually played on a few more keys. More curves, more details, visually more muscles. Overall I would not say that the Vector is nicer or better as it is also less resolved than what the Italians came up with – but the Vector seems perhaps more focused on being a sports car, where the Countach seems more like a design statement in itself.
In fact the car was just as focused as the founder of Vector, Gerald Wiegert, actually: When I first heard about Vector, Jerry Wiegert had already been in the running for ten years, and the company had shown their first draft at the Auto Expo in Los Angeles in 1972. That he had not advanced much further in that time, but nonetheless still carried on, vouches for his pursuit of his dream and for the magnitude of the goal, as Wiegert wanted to demonstrate that exciting car designs can come from America as well from Italy. See for yourself the text below the picture of the 1972 prototype below:
With that goal in mind it sure is paradoxical that the early Vector from the late seventies in many ways shares features with the 1968 Alfa Romeo Carabo, a very Italian design and a groundbreaking one to boot. Even the green colour of the car is vaguely reminiscent of the Carabo, isn’t it?
Reportedly it was Wiegert himself who drew the basic features of the Vector and no matter what, I still think the early cars are beautiful and spectacular. I was not the only one, it seems, as for years the Vector roamed around in magazines and at exhibitions, without Vector actually building a lot of cars, if any.
In fact, it’s hard to come by exact numbers but some believe the production (if you can call it that) numbers are four W2s and seventeen of its successor W8. The newer Vectors are to my mind something else, though: Basically the newer they are the more desperate they appear designwise too, and the last ones I can hardly bear to look at. But the early ones I still love – because one should never forget your first dream; should you?
And Wiegert clearly didn’t forget that first dream either: Vector went bankrupt in the early nineties, but Wiegert still has the right to the cars and owns much of the machinery (how much could that really be?) to build them. The company is today called Vector Motors, but has to the best of my knowledge not yet built any cars – which in a way is indeed very authentic Vector.
