The Ford Nucleon was ridiculously *small*

One of the more imaginative and incredibly unlikely concept cars was the Ford Nucleon, a 1950’s idea for a nuclear powered car. Apparently this was pretty much a complete art and sales project, without much actual engineering; it was based on the notion that not only could nuclear reactors be scaled down small enough to fit in a car, they could be made not only wreck-tolerant, but that lightweight and virtually magical radiation shielding would be invented that would allow said reactor to hum away at full power mere feet from paying customers without roasting them or giving them explosive ass cancer. It was, let’s face it, wholly ridiculous… and entirely awesome.

Photos of models of the Nucleon have been available since the 1950’s, but diagrams have been lacking. An article posted online a few days ago included a few specifications for the proposed vehicle, finally nailing down some of the dimensions. And for reasons that seemed good to me (and which are probably obvious), I slapped together a quick side view. I think my side view is *reasonably* accurate based on numerous photos of the scale model Ford built and the dimensions given. What I’m not certain about is whether *Ford* truly understood their vehicle.

Here’s the side view using the 200-inch (16.7 ft) length specified by Ford, accompanied by two normal-sized humans:

The driver doesn’t even come *close* to fitting. So I scaled the Nucleon up until it seemed to look right, with the end result being that the car is now about 26 feet long:

That’s by no means a small vehicle… but then, it’s nuclear. Scaling it up by a factor of about 1.55 makes the cab big enough to fit actual full-size humans. But scaling it up that much makes the 77.4″ width (6.45 ft) into 120 inches, or ten feet. Good luck squeezing *that* onto the road; the Hummer H1, known as an uncomfortably wide vehicle, is a mere 87 inches wide.

Does anyone have any information to contradict and correct the Ford specifications? Or is it just another case of the art department kinda ignoring reality?