Amelia Earhart’s 1937 long-lost 812 Phaeton cord added to the National Register of Historic Vehicles

Amelia Earhart’s plane wasn’t her only vehicle to disappear—her 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton also went missing after going missing over the South Pacific on July 2, 1937. After a long hunt to put this beautiful car back together, Earhart’s Cord 812 becomes the 33rd car to be included National Historic Vehicle Registration this week.

Hagerty Earhart .’s automotive sensors announced as a way to honor International Women’s Day on March 8. Earhart is an outspoken proponent of putting women in the pilot’s seat, but she also spent some time in the driver’s seat. Unfortunately, she didn’t spend much time on her 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton — it was purchased less than a year before her fateful flight. Right after she disappeared, Earhart’s husband sold the Wire. The car passed through hands many times before it was mysteriously split into parts and spread across the country.

While this particular Cord has a tragic story, the car itself is horrifying and with good reason. From Silodrome:

The Cord 812 and its cousin the 810 were developed by a team of American dream designers, the project is led by Gordon Buehrig, in collaboration with young designers Alex Tremulis and Vincent E. Gardener.

Buehrig is responsible for a series of outstanding automotive designs including the Cord 810/812, the Stutz Black Hawk and the Continental Mark II. Tremulis was then hired by an ambitious man named Preston Tucker and would design the Tucker 48. The gardener would go on to design the Gardner Special and the 1956 Studebakers in Raymond Loewy’s design studio.

The most famous feature on the Cord 812 is probably the pop-up headlights hidden in the front fenders, they are raised and lowered by handwheels on the dashboard, and the lights themselves are Stinson’s landing lights – Mr. EL Cord is a key stakeholder at Stinson.

Perhaps it was the plane’s landing lights that drew Earhart to the Cord. Or maybe it’s creative design; The Cord comes with a 289 cubic-inch V8 engine mated to an electric-selective semi-automatic transmission. It was also the first mass-produced product front wheel driving in america, Silodrome report. Automotive collector Ray Foster spent years researching and collecting parts to reassemble the Wire. In 2004, the finished vehicle was restored to original specifications by LaVine Restorations, Inc after it was sold to JBS Collections.

For Earhart herself, the mystery of her disappearance in the South Pacific has captured the American imagination for decades. Most likely Earhart died like a castrated on a remote atoll than dying instantly in a plane crash. In 2018, studies identified with “99 percent certainty”” that the bones of a white man found on the remote Nikumaroro Atoll were Earhart, NPR report.

tMr. Wire will be displayed in the annual “Cars in the Capital” celebration organized by Hagerty. The old cars on display at the event included one of the few that survived Chrysler cars and Black Ghosta famous Dodge Challenger 426 drag racer in 1970s Detroit.