Why The Roach Coach May Be The Most Bizarre Car Ever Built

If, at first sight, the Roach Coach looks vaguely familiar, you were probably a kid in the 1970s enthralled with the Donruss trading card company's line of "Fantastic Odd Rods" stickers. For a few years in the early '70s, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a cartoon monster stuffed inside a wild muscle car. Well, the Roach Coach looks like it drove straight off one of those stickers into real life, and the story behind its creation is as bizarre as the show car itself.

The story begins with Roach, Inc., a company in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, they were the leaders in heat transfer (aka iron-on) graphics and t-shirts. Ironically, they still exist today. Roach commissioned the Egyptian Body Shop in nearby Dayton, Ohio, to create a custom hot rod that could go out on the car show circuit and county fairs to bring attention to its custom T-shirt company. The Roach Coach was designed by Ed Newton and built by Don "The Egyptian" Boeke, Dan Woods, and Jim Jacobs.

Timing on exactly how things played out is odd because, according to an article in the September 1978 issue of "Impressions" ("The Magazine for the Imprinted Sportswear Industry"), the building of the Roach Coach took a total of six years, which means it had to start sometime in 1972. That perfectly coincides with the "Fantastic Odd Rods" craze, so maybe (just maybe) those stickers were an inspiration after all.

Be that as it may, the metallic Red Pearl and Candy colored hot rod wasn't unveiled until a big "open house" event in 1978 that showed off Roach's new 100,000-square-foot corporate headquarters. Either Roach had incredible foresight to begin the build six years early, or someone's got their history wrong.

Either way, the Roach Coach featured dual bubbled canopies that looked like bulging eyes, a fiberglass molded body resembling a bug (roach), with a litany of chrome exhaust pipes sticking out the back, and big, 17-inch racing slicks. According to designer Ed Newton, it took six years to build because "We literally had to sculpt the body from scratch out of a huge Styrofoam block before the molds could be made and the shell cast." The suspension and tube frame was handmade as well. Those bulging eyes are also reminiscent of the spies from MAD Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon strip.

Keeping with the showpiece vibe, the Roach had an engine from an Indy race car. It reportedly had a Granatelli Racing Short Block Ford DOCH fuel-injected V8 mated to a Hewland five-speed, with a rear axle taken from a crashed dragster (per Gatsby Online). The titanium gas tank that sat in front of the engine was said to be a "high-pressure fuel vessel" taken from an Atlas Agena rocket (per Impressions Magazine, via Design You Trust).

While on the car show circuit, the onboard computer (complete with TV monitors) told the tale of how the Roach Coach came to be. This odd rod may reportedly be sitting in a dusty warehouse (like the one from "Raiders of the Lost Ark") somewhere in Dayton, Ohio.