Bobby Darin's Dream Car Was an Outrageous Vision of the Future

ROAD  & TRACK

By Blake Z. Rong

The DiDia 150 was the most expensive custom car in the world in 1960.

 

 

 

 

Laugh you must, but last week's entry in Our Modest Car Collection is but a mere mewling fawn in comparison to the DiDia 150—the custom-bodied, tail-finned, bubble-topped, diamond-painted, aluminum-bodied, aluminum-chassised, big-block-powered metallic red dreamboat that was purchased by Bobby Darin, who was born eighty years ago today.

 

The DiDia began as the vision of its namesake, a clothing designer named Andrew Di Dia, who worked as machinist and bus driver in Detroit. No surprise, then, that he had a keen interest in automobiles: before he penned his namesake car in 1953, he reportedly drove around in a Buick with nascent tailfins. His neighbor, Edward V. Francoise, just happened to be a stylist at Chrysler. Di Dia enlisted him for some sketches of just what he was thinking. 

Nearly the entire car was custom-built by Detroit shop Clarkaiser Customs. Only a handful of parts—a Ford Thunderbird steering column, the big-block drivetrain from a Cadillac—were from production parts. Ron Clark oversaw the build; his "perfectionist nature and wonderful manual skills helped produce a body that was as crisp as a pin," describes Coachbuilt, "hand-hammered out of half-hard .064 aluminum over wooden bucks. Each fin assembly, for example, took Bob 15 weeks to shape. All the aluminum body skin was gas welded and then metal finished without any fillers. Bob recalled that before they started on the Di Dia the only aluminum-forming experience the team had was fabricated a racing hydroplane hull for a local boatyard."
 

Darin was just 21 years old when he met Di Dia, at a Detroit concert in 1957. The singer offered a few design suggestions of his own—then vowed that when he hit it big, he'd buy the car. 

 

Flickr Cosmo Lutz

The car featured period-rare adornments like air conditioning, rain-sensing windshield wipers tucked away from the windows, retracting headlights behind thin metal slats, swiveling indicators, floating front and rear bumpers gleaming with layers of chrome. The electronic half-doors swung up with the push a button. The steering wheel was squarish-shaped. The tailfins were taller than the roofline.

 The paint was infused with the dust of industrial diamonds, ground and mixed with the metallic ruby red; thirty coats were applied and sanded by hand atop a base coat of gold. Proving his skill, Clark designed and fabricated a front independent suspension and also adapted the rear swing-arm from a Ford. Each passenger seat received independent air conditioning, a cigarette lighter and ashtray, and a radio speaker that presumably played "Splish Splash" on repeat at least 48 times.
 

Four people built the DiDia 150 for seven years—the car originally was supposed to be completed in two. They were paid $93,647 total to build it, or precisely $757,115 today. (Noted the Gettysburg Times in 1961, it was a figure befitting "a very precise man, and it shows in the car he designed.")

 DiDia brought it to Los Angeles to debut it at George Barris's third annual Bakersfield Motor and Boat Show, but arrived two months early, so he showed it at any car show he could until the big event. 


 

Darin loved it. The year after it was built, in 1961, Darin drove it with his wife Sandra Dee to the Academy Awards. "I followed behind him in a limousine," said DiDia. "The car had two fans and a switch that you had to turn on. Bobby didn't realize, so it heated up. All the magazines said the car caught fire but it didn't."
 

Darin had finally made it big. He paid $150,000 for the car, a price high enough to set a Guinness World Record, and this price was all that period newspapers could talk about. In today's money, that'd be equivalent to $1.2 million—a hefty price for hedonistic supercars that rarely bats another eye, not when a 1500-horsepower Bugatti Chiron costs over twice that. 
 

Di Dia joined Darin on tour as part of his entourage. Now a full star, he had his publicists label it as "Bobby Darin's Dream Car." "'I wonder what the trade-in value is," he quipped. 
 

He drove it to another Academy Award before donating it to the St. Louis Museum of Transportation in 1970. Three years later, he died from a childhood heart condition that finally caught up with him. 

 

 

Andrew Di Dia, age 93, reunited with his dream car at the 2010 Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance.

The car is still at the Museum of Transportation, where it resides alongside planes, trains, and automobiles: a Union Pacific freight train, an HT Potts tugboat, and an operational Chrysler Turbine Car. Good company.

 Along the way to modern day the car saw a full restoration, its Cadillac engine giving way to Ford 427 firepower. If you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, you should check it out. It was the car of the future.

It couldn't have come from anywhere else except a nostalgic, warm, fuzzy, America. Its then-astonishing price may be old hat compared to a certain billionaire's presidential campaign, but it is still a great car befitting a great, where taste and style never knew any boundaries.

 The future is now! Hovercars to the moon by 1980! 

Images via Wikipedia, Tumblr, Flickr