Was Stan Meyer's water car seized?

Nobody seized Stan Meyer's water car, and it wasn't stolen a week after he died. It went through probate, his widow, his old friend's basement, and an estate sale. Plus the clever part the owners pulled off it.

The archive's own copy, 29 September 2026 20 MB

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What was shown

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

WTVN Channel 6, Columbus, Ohio · c. 1985
Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
Don Gabel, interviewed 24 September 2008, on the parts removed so a thief could not run it — stanslegacy.com
Meyer estate photographs, 25 January 2008 and 12 June 2009 — stanslegacy.com

shorts stanmeyer watercar dunebuggy factcheck engineering history

What was said

7 ↓

Machine-read, so expect the odd wrong word.

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Machine translation by Google, opened in a new tab. The archive stands behind the English.

NeuralStan (AI narrator) · They say the government seized Stan Meyer's water car, or that it was stolen a week after he died. Nobody seized anything.
NeuralStan (AI narrator) · Police taped off his house while they investigated. With no will, his things sat in court for years, then went to his widow, Marilyn. She gave the car, and the rest of it, to his old friend Charlie Holbrook.
NeuralStan (AI narrator) · In two thousand nine, Charlie's son sold it at an estate sale. The archive knows where it is today. Stan's family says it has never been started since.
NeuralStan (AI narrator) · Before that, someone had pulled its key parts so no thief could ever run it. One of them was his distributor.
Stan Meyer (original recording) · We had to go ahead and develop the laser, what we call the laser distributor, as you see right here, which is put between the conventional rotor cap and that of the rotor assembly.
NeuralStan (AI narrator) · It was a light sensor. It read the engine's rotation, so his computer could fire each water injector at exactly the right moment. Modern engines time their fuel the same way.
NeuralStan (AI narrator) · Not seized. Not stolen. Sold. Check the paper before you share the legend.

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Mentioned in this episode

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