The Cord 812: Fifty Years Ahead, and Nobody Quite Ready for It
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Quick Takeaways
- The 1937 Cord 812 introduced front-wheel drive, concealed headlamps, and a supercharged engine at a time when most American cars were still catching up to the 1920s.
- Its styling — penned by Gordon Buehrig — was so advanced that the same basic design was patented and later appeared in scaled form as a toy car.
- The Cord Corporation collapsed in 1937, less than a year after the 812 debuted, leaving a legacy far larger than its production numbers.
- Today it's considered one of the most important American car designs of the twentieth century.
The Coffin Nose
Gordon Buehrig was 26 years old when he began designing what would become the Cord 810. He had already worked at Cadillac and Duesenberg, and he had developed a clear point of view about what American cars could look like if the people making decisions got out of the way.
The result was unlike anything on American roads in 1936. The hood was long and tapered to a pronounced point at the front — what journalists immediately nicknamed the "coffin nose." The headlamps were concealed behind the front fenders and could be cranked open by handles inside the cockpit. The body had no running boards, a radical omission at the time. The windshield curved. The interior featured a dashboard that looked more like aircraft instrumentation than anything a driver had previously encountered.
Mechanically, the car was equally unconventional. The 812 used a Lycoming V8 mounted transversely and driving the front wheels through a pre-selector electromagnetic transmission — a system that allowed the driver to select gears with a small lever, then engage them by pressing the clutch. The supercharged version, identifiable by its external exhaust pipes emerging from the hood sides, produced around 195 horsepower, which was substantial for 1937.
A Company That Couldn't Survive Its Own Ambition
The Cord Corporation, which also owned Auburn and Duesenberg, was in financial difficulty before the 810 and 812 even reached customers. Production was plagued by quality control problems — the pre-selector transmission in particular was prone to issues in early cars — and the company was burning through money faster than the cars could generate it.
By August 1937, Cord Corporation had folded. Total production of the 810 and 812 combined was around 2,900 cars. The tooling was sold, the factory shuttered, and one of the most remarkable automotive design exercises in American history ended after less than two years.
Buehrig's design outlasted the company. He patented it, and when an Iowa toy manufacturer produced a scale model Cord in the late 1930s, it sold in enormous numbers. The design that couldn't keep a car company afloat became one of the best-selling toy cars of its era.
Why It Still Matters
The Cord 812 appears regularly at the top concours events in the world, and it competes well there because it looks like it belongs at no particular moment in history. The Art Deco details are present but restrained. The overall shape is too clean to feel dated. It looks, depending on the angle, like it could have been designed in the 1930s or the 1960s or somewhere in between.
That visual ambiguity is part of what makes it such a compelling subject for photography. The Cord doesn't lean on chrome and bulk the way many American prewar cars do. It makes its case through proportion and line, which hold up regardless of what decade is doing the looking.
Bottom Line
The Cord 812 was too advanced for the company that built it and too beautiful to be forgotten by the industry that outlasted it. Fifty years before aerodynamics became a design priority, Gordon Buehrig was already there.
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