The Adams Probe 16: The Futuristic Car With An Extreme Style
Throughout "A Clockwork Orange," the Oscar-nominated sci-fi film directed by famed Hollywood auteur Stanley Kubrick and starring Malcolm McDowell, Alex DeLarge and his cohorts reign terror wherever they can find it. In one memorable scene, the quartet has piled into a low-slung, open-roof sports car and is racing down a dark country highway. DeLarge claims the car "purred away real horrorshow," giving "a nice warm vibrate-y feeling all through your gutty works."
They slip under a semi-truck trailer and push a VW Bug, motorcycle, and van off the road in a game DeLarge calls "playing hogs of the road." In the semi-futuristic world of droogs that wear bowler hats and jock straps and drink spiked milk, that car was dubbed a "Durango 95," but in reality, it was an M505 Adams Brothers Probe 16, a real automobile that would fit right in with the most futuristic looking cars on the road today.
Make sure your clockwork is set for the future
Brothers Dennis and Peter Adams were working at Marcos, a British sports car manufacturer, when they decided to venture out and make futuristic cars investigating the "extremes of styling." What they came up with eventually landed in Kubric's "A Clockwork Orange."
The M-505 Probe 16 was just 34 inches tall and had no doors. Instead, it opted for a sliding glass roof that required passengers to hop into and slide down into almost fully reclined bucket-styled seats.
While the interior looked like a jet fighter cockpit, it had a more down-to-earth 1.8-liter OHV, 1,900cc JanSpeed-tuned 4-cylinder Austin B-series engine from British Motor Corporation (BMC) mounted transversely behind the driver. It was mated to a 4-speed manual gearbox with four-wheel independent suspension and disc brakes.
The Probe 16 was displayed at the London Motor Show in 1969, where it won "Best Styling Exercise." Three were made, but only two are known to still exist (chassis no. AB/2 and AB/3). For some time, it was believed that the prototype caught fire and burned (as mid-engine cars from that period were known to do), leaving chassis AB/3 and AB/4.
However, according to Bonhams (who sold AB/3 in a 2020 auction for $184,800), the prototype, sold to songwriter Jimmy Webb, still exists, while the AB/4 does not. Whatever the case, it's definitely a concept car that should have been made.