The Wonka Mobile Was Maybe The Least Capable Of Any Something-Mobile

Are you familiar with Bill Wonka? Confectioner? Quite well known, runs a large operation that seems to be headquartered in Europe, and there were some incidents a few decades ago when a company promotion ended in at least four children being involved in some pretty severe industrial accidents? Sure, you know who I’m talking about. Well, it seems Wonka had a car kept at the factory, known as the Wonka Mobile, and based on its appearance in the 1971 documentary about the factory and its infamous promotional event, I think it may be the worst-performing of any car named with the somethingmobile construction.

You know the category of car I’m talking about: Batmobile, Wienermobile, Monkeemobile, Oldsmobile, Bookmobile, and so on. The Wonka Mobile (occasionally Wonkamobile, but I usually see it rendered as two words), compared to almost any of these other vehicles, is a shockingly poor-performing machine, saddled with not just pretty significant drivability issues, but its unusual fuel requirements and poorly-considered exhaust system design create a pretty untenable exhaust evacuation situation, especially when it comes to passenger comfort.

Want to see it in action, so you know what I’m talking about? Of course you do:

See what I mean about the fuel and exhaust situation? The Wonka Mobile is powered, it seems, by various forms of carbonated beverages, including, as they state:

“…Ginger ale, ginger pop, ginger beer, beer bubbles, bubble-ade, bubble cola, double cola, double bubble, burp-a-cola, and all the crazy carbonated stuff that tickles your nose.”

Whatever is happening in that large boiler-like structure that dominates the entire center section of the Wonka Mobile – it looks like a boiler, but I’m not convinced what’s happening in there involves any boiling, or even heat of any kind, because the exhaust is a thick, foamy sort of suds, suggesting that the carbonation is the active force here, and perhaps the bubbles of carbon dioxide are in that large vessel and pushing upon the vanes of some turbine or something?

It’s quite unclear, but the result of whatever reaction is going on involves all that foam, which is ejected via various pipes, most of which seem to be directed directly at the passenger seats, covering the passengers and driver in this thick bubbly waste. Not a great design.

The design of the Wonka Mobile is interesting in that it seems to take its fundamental look from pre-1880s steam-powered cars, like Sylvester Roper’s 1860s-era steam car:

…or perhaps the 1878 Amédée Bollée La Mancelle, perhaps the first car ever to be built in series production:

I’m not sure when Bill Wonka decided to build his Wonka Mobile, but I’d think it’d have to have been close to 100 years after cars like La Mancelle, making these design choices quite curious. But that’s Wonka for you!

There was a Bonhams auction back in 2017 that featured a lot with a lot of drawings from production designer Harper Goff, showing some fantastic sketches of the car that would be built for the movie. Goff is a beautiful sketch artist, and these drawings are full of charm and very evocative:

Most show a steam-like car design as seen in the movie; this one has an interesting diamond-form four-wheel layout, with the two driving wheels large and in the center, feeling a little like a paddlewheel steamer. The central boiler and large stacks and big lanterns and other details feel close to the final product.

That said, at least one sketch does seem to show an alternate design idea, something that looks like an early 1900s gasoline car:

The round radiator is a very distinctive look here, and the overall look of it really feels like a Georges Roy car, right down to the grille bezel. Interestingly, the car is labeled “Phizz Mobile” though the caption of the drawing reads “Wonka-Mobile.”

Also, see that strange, sort of square wheel at the rear? It seems that was there because there were plans to have the Wonka Mobile climb stairs:

Oh wow, wait, look at that drawing! This looks like a version of the gasoline-car type, and reveals something I missed about the first gas-type car drawing: Wonka himself is driving it from the rear, using those huge mirrors to see where he’s going! You can see the rear driver’s position in this drawing quite well as the car ascends the stairs.

Another drawing shows the Wonkamobile (one word in this caption) descending stairs, and here Wonka’s driving position is in front, the “boiler” is at the rear, and there seems to be some sort of round carbonation vessel in the front. There’s a nice attempt to rationalize the necessary engineering for a stair-capable car, with that telescoping/scissoring front wheel and that huge, toothed drive belt.

The final Wonka Mobile abandoned the staircase capability, and was a three-wheeled design, with the large carbonation “boiler” in the middle, seating up front and at rear, and a high driver’s position just behind the boiler, and featuring a free-standing monocle-like windscreen. Note the front exhaust stack facing right at the passenger seats.

There’s this nice size comparison photograph featuring the Wonka Mobile and what looks like a ’58 to ’62 Volkswagen Beetle. It’s a Euro-spec car (the movie was shot in Munich), but without seeing the rear I can’t quite nail down the exact year. Still, it does show well just how big the Wonka Mobile really was.

There seems to be a tow bar on the front wheel, making me wonder if the thing was capable of self-propulsion at all. The scene in the movie only features it driving a short, straight distance, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just towed. None of this gives me any special confidence in carbonated beverages as a viable fuel/propulsion option.

Oh, as an aside, I’d like to mention that one of the first jobs I got when I moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s was designing the DVD interface for the first DVD release of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was a fun job: I got a lot of poor-quality press photos from the movie and had to scan them to try and get some sort of visual material for the interface.

I ended up using a 3D program to make the logo and candy buttons and other visual elements, and I had some fun with the button highlight images. At the time, DVD menus were still pretty new, and I could only highlight a button with a single-color, fairly low-resolution bitmap. You could assign a color to these bitmaps, but that was about it. Still, I really like working with limitations, and I had fun making highlights that looked whimsical and fit the mood.

Thankfully, someone had a copy and went through and showed almost every screen I made! I don’t think I have a copy of this anywhere? Anyway, if you’d like to see what it was like, here you go:

Man, that was back in 1997! How’d I get so old?