The car that stood on two wheels

The great idea

The car stylist Alex Tremulis and the gyroscope expert Thomas Summers had a tidy argument. Two wheels instead of four meant a smaller, lighter car with a smaller engine, a slim body that cut through the air, and half as many tyres dragging along the road. Its makers even argued that if everyone drove a gyro car, traffic lanes could be cut by half.

The clever part was a heavy flywheel just behind the front wheel. Turn a spinning flywheel and it pushes at right angles to the turn, so a tilt sensor kept nudging it to hold the car upright, like a tightrope walker with a pole.

Summers put the philosophy simply in 1975: “Four wheels are ridiculous, three wheels are foolish, but two wheels are proper.”

What actually happened

It was first shown at the 1967 New York International Auto Show. That September it made the cover of Science and Mechanics, billed as “impossible to skid or flip”, and it was promoted as reaching 125 mph on a Mini Cooper S engine.

Real life was less tidy. Witnesses remembered it being unstable above 70 mph, and period film, often quietly speeded up, never showed it going much faster than walking pace. Gyro Transport Systems went under around 1970, and the Gyro-X never went into production.

Where it went wrong

The promises ran ahead of the prototype. Octane’s verdict in 2026 was that it could do none of the things it was promoted as doing, and when the car was shown to the motoring press, its gyroscopic control system had been taken out.

The hard part was never finished. “We had stabilisation problems in high-speed cornering that were never resolved,” Robert Poteet, who worked for the Summers Gyrocar Company, recalled in 2018. And the heavy flywheel, spinning at 3,000 rpm, stored so much energy that it was a hazard in itself if anything went wrong.

Money was finite, too. Summers raised $750,000 for the venture, and Ford had already balked at the cost of developing a working gyroscope for its own two-wheeled show car, the Gyron.

What changed

It had a long and peculiar retirement. Summers added a third wheel so it could be licensed in California, and by 1994 it was a Volkswagen-powered three-wheeler with no gyroscope at all.

The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville bought it in 2011 and spent six years, and about $500,000, putting it back as close as possible to 1967, with a new gyroscope from an Italian maker of yacht stabilisers. In 2017 it won its class at Pebble Beach.

It is still learning. In 2017 it didn’t work well above 25 mph; by 2026 the team was on version 129 of the control software, and its restorer, Michael Hüby, had reached 55 mph on a private track. Hüby argues it shouldn’t be seen as a failure: regenerative braking, stability control and aerodynamics were all part of the Gyro-X idea, and all are in modern cars.

The department’s view: finish the clever bit before anyone prints “impossible to skid or flip” on a magazine cover.