The advent of the modern electric car has given rise to a class of entrepreneurs angling to take on the world’s major automakers.

Despite the repeated failures of similar plans through the years — Kaiser, Tucker and DeLorean come quickly to mind — the dreamers behind companies like Tesla, Fisker, Aptera and other startups are not intimidated. Like their predecessors, they believe they can succeed by offering the cars of the future.

They might, however, look to the cautionary tale of the Davis Divan, another car of the future.

The Davis was one of the great oddball cars of American history, alongside such novelties as the Stout Scarab and the vest-pocket Crosley. It has been 60 years since the wave of the Divan’s brief celebrity crested and broke; the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles has been highlighting its example of the marque.

“Yesterday’s car of tomorrow,” as Leslie Kendall, the curator at the Petersen museum, termed it, the Divan was a rounded three-wheeler that in 1949 appeared on the cover of the popular Sunday newspaper supplement, Parade. With its streamlined body, hidden headlights and wraparound chrome trim, the Davis Divan looked like a bumper car from a carnival attraction (or a Hoover vacuum cleaner of the era, minus its handle). The Peter- sen museum’s Davis Divan, one of about a dozen that were built, is blue and has a removable top.

Glenn Gordon Davis, known as Gary, was an entrepreneur who, like his contemporaries Henry Kaiser and Preston Tucker, would attempt to pioneer a different approach to automobile design in establishing his new automobile company.

“It was a seller’s market and everyone who had ever wanted to get into the automobile business tried to,” said Kendall of that postwar era. “Davis didn’t get any further than Tucker did.”

Three-wheeler

But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Davis was an avid and tireless used-car salesman when inspiration struck. After the war, he acquired a curious, one-of-a kind three-wheeler that had been built for Joel Thorne, the millionaire heir to a Chase bank fortune and fervid auto racer.

The car was the work of Frank Kurtis, an accomplished engineer who also built the successful Kurtis-Kraft Indianapolis 500 racecars. The car Davis bought was called the Californian, and he conceived of mass-producing a version of it.

By 1946 he was taking deposits from starry-eyed future dealers, raising more than $1 million to build his dream car. But he turned out to be less of an engineer than a salesman.

His persuasive talents are on display in a poster hung behind the Divan at the Petersen museum: “Davis is years ahead! … Never has there been such a car … Never a car so low and fast and sleek and safe … Never a car so cat quick in traffic!”

“No, there has NEVER been such a car!”

Aircraft stylings

The Divan was powered by engines from independent manufacturers, Hercules and Continental. The surviving models usually have later, upgraded engines.

Davis boasted of how easy a three-wheel car was to park. Its canopy roof meant no blind spots, and it turned in a tight circle. (Davis on occasion claimed the car could make a U-turn at 55 miles an hour.) It would get up to 50 miles a gallon, Davis said.

Davis claimed to have borrowed from aviation technology and manufacturing methods to build a better car. “Its aluminum body blends with the flow of motion to decrease air resistance to a minimum,” the Davis’ brochure declared, “achieving true beauty of contour.”

He said the car had a low center of gravity and a great ride “thanks to aircraft style shock absorbers.” But the most aircraftlike thing about the Davis was its place of assembly, an airplane hangar in Van Nuys, Calif.

Determination

Davis’ dream hails back to a more romantic time, when instead of saving auto companies, men founded them — and marketers could count on people knowing that a divan was a romantic piece of furniture. One Divan advertisement proclaimed, “They said ‘impossible!’ — so, Davis did it!”

Fans of the Davis seem to be sustained by similar determination. One of them, Tom Wilson, of Ypsilanti, Mich., rescued an abandoned Davis in 1967 and restored it. Wondering how many more examples survived, Wilson founded the Davis Registry in 1993 and over the years tracked down survivors.

Wilson’s Davis is now in the collection of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tenn. Thanks to Wilson and other true believers, the oddball Davis has been reappreciated in recent years. A Davis figured in a “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip. Another Davis popped up last year on an episode of the Discovery Channel series “Chasing Classic Cars.”

While the promotional materials for the car promised catlike quickness in traffic, Kendall, the curator, mentioned a different trait in the fall 2008 issue of the Petersen museum’s quarterly publication. “Driving the Davis is a memorable experience not because of its performance and handling — which are appalling — but because of its ability to attract the attention of motorists,” he wrote.

Big ideas, little success

Davis was operating in a world of Hollywood fantasies. The literal divan of the Davis Divan was its couchlike single bench seat. Davis, whose photos show a dapper dresser, liked to pose a quartet of comely starlets in that seat, with the caption, “Four Stars of Tomorrow in the Car of Tomorrow.”

The car’s appearance in Parade spurred wide interest in the Davis, but the company was already in shambles. Dealers who had purchased franchises were clamoring for cars, and assembly workers owed back wages filed suit. The Los Angeles district attorney investigated and brought charges against Davis. According to the marque’s registry, Davis was convicted of fraud and eventually sentenced to two years in prison.

He never stopped thinking about cars like the Divan. Before he died in 1973, Davis was talking about a three-wheel “safety car” with a wraparound bumper. After his release from prison, he had moved into another end of the automotive business, the show business side that he had always excelled at: He helped develop the amusement park dodge ’em bumper cars, which naturally suggested diminutive Davis Divans.

“That is a metaphor for Los Angeles,” Kendall said.