That Time A Gunmaker Tried To Become An Automotive Manufacturer

Sturm, Ruger & Co., or just Ruger, dates back to 1949, when they launched the Ruger Standard. That firearm still stands as the most popular .22 caliber pistol made in the United States and was modeled after a captured Nambu pistol by a returning WWII marine. Now, why on earth are we talking about Ruger on an automotive website? Well, just twenty years after they planted their flag in the firearm’s industry, Ruger decided to expand into a brand-new field of passenger vehicles.

To be clear, this wasn’t a rebadged Ford and wasn’t a Chevrolet Impala with a licensing deal and a gun-rack behind the driver’s seat. The 1970 Ruger Sports Tourer was built from the ground up by Ruger and it had fairly little in common with anything else on the road at the time. Intended to be sold exclusively under the Ruger name, it never reached mass production, but it did produce two physical, working prototypes. Here’s what you need to know about Ruger’s short-lived attempt to get into the car game.

A Look At The 1970 Ruger Sports Tourer

Given that only two prototypes were ever built, and we don’t have them available for testing, we don’t know how this car performs on the track, and we have limited access to the performance specs. We do know that it packed one of the greatest engines Ford ever built, the mighty 427 V8. The official power rating for the Sports Tourer is 425 horsepower, which would suggest specs comparable to the 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt that produced the same power. That means 480 lb-ft of torque, and a 0-60 probably somewhere in the five to six second range.

Muscle cars weren’t hard to find in the 1970s, but the Sports Tourer’s body design was remarkable for the time. The car was modeled in a retro style, inspired by William Ruger’s own 1929 Bentley 4.5-liter, but built primarily from reinforced fiberglass with bonded vinyl, and cast aluminum doors. The brainchild of both Will Ruger Sr. and Will Ruger Jr., the Sports Tourer looks like a pre-war luxury sedan had a baby with a late-sixties muscle car. It was unusual to see cars shaped like this in 1970, and even stranger to see one built from fiberglass.

Are We Talking About The Same Ruger?

There are plenty of “vanity project” cars out there, one-offs, and customs built for millionaires, but very few millionaires have ever had a Rolodex to rival that of the Ruger family, at least when it comes to engineering and design. Packard’s Erwin Weiss was called on to build the chassis and suspension, and legendary coachbuilder Tom Hibbard of Lebaron, Hibbard & Darrin, worked on the cabin. By the time the project was complete, the Rugers had spent nearly a cool million on research and development, and the car was all but ready for mass production.

It was developed specifically to bring the Rugers’ vision of the ideal sports car to life, and its unique past-meets-present look and feel, pairing 1920s-style suspension with a forged I-beam front axle (after Ruger Sr. nixed a more modern independent front suspension setup), wit a muscle car V8, and building classic Bentley-style body panels out of fiberglass, speaks to a multi-generational passion for cool, fast, well-built vehicles.

Supply chain issues would ultimately kill the project off before it could go to market, and the prototypes remained a one-of-two. The Rugers likely dodged a bullet (no pun intended), as the oil crisis was right around the corner and increased competition from European and Asian rivals would have made a gas-guzzling, retro-styled V8 by a company with no stake in the automotive industry a very tough sell. The car was all but ready for the dealership when it was finally scrapped, with the factory brochure reading that the Ruger Car was intended to “transcend the vagaries of fashion: it is a permanent possession, like a good shotgun.” It’s a shame it never reached production, because the marketing writes itself.

While the car never hit the market, you could nevertheless say that it delivered on its promises, as Bill Jr. was known to drive his own model around his family’s estates, having put 14,000 miles on the odometer by the time of his passing in 2018. The car went up for auction in 2019 and sold for $44,000 through RM Sotheby’s as part of the William B. Ruger Jr. Collection. We know what you’re thinking, “forty-four thousand? I could swing that!.” We’d advise not holding your breath waiting for it to pop up again as whoever owns it now definitely knows exactly what they’ve got.

The Long, Weird History Of Automakers Making Weapons

To the best of our knowledge, Ruger is the only firearm company to ever get involved in automaking, if you’re specifically looking for companies that are primarily devoted to weapons. But they’re not the only automaker to ever get involved in the firearms trade. In fact, if you go back to World War II, it’s harder to find an automaker that didn’t make weapons. The most obvious example may be General Motors, having produced M1919A4 machine guns and M1 Carbines at a dedicated gun plant for the war effort. GM Defense still works with the American military to this day.

Ford has one of the longest resumes when it comes to working for the military, having produced armor plating and engines for armored vehicles like the 32-ton M-4 and the M-10, the Armored Universal Carriers for World War II, and the automaker’s Willow Run plant was constructed specifically to mass produce the B-24 Liberator aircraft. More recently, Ford has had a hand in building missiles like the LGM-118 Peacekeeper and the legendary AIM-9 Sidewinder, first launched in 1958 and expected to stay in service until 2055.

Overseas, Mitsubishi works on guided weapons systems, and Subaru’s aerospace division does a lot of contract work for Japan’s Defense Agency, helping to build target drones. And we haven’t even touched on Jeep’s military history. World War II was an event that fast-tracked industrial production around the world, launching small manufacturers into the stratosphere, and elevating big manufacturers to the status of small countries.

The manufacturing might and engineering know-how an automaker can bring to the table can be invaluable assets to the defense sector, so we could be here all day listing examples of Ford-built missiles and Yamaha-made attack choppers. But, you won’t find many examples of hunting rifles and handguns being built by Chevrolet or Toyota. When it comes to consumer products, by and large, the automakers stick to their autos, and the gunmakers stick to their guns… Again, no pun intended.