Can a sewing machine amount to anything in the auto industry? If he were alive, Ferruccio Lamborghini would tell you anything is possible with the right amount of passion. In 1935, the White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio, changed the national park touring business with their 1936 Model 706 Tour bus. In January, a similar unit, previously used by the Yellowstone National Park, went under the hammer for a whopping $1.3 million.
Jay Leno, in his latest episode of Jay Leno's Garage, featured a similar 1936 Model 706 Yellowstone tour truck restored by Winslow Bent, founder of Legacy Classic Trucks.
The White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio, started as a sewing machine company. In 1898, Thomas H. White bought a Locomobile steam car but found it unreliable. His son, Rollin H. White, decided to improve on it.
He patented his new design and asked his father to allow him to use a corner of the sewing machine company to build an automobile. As fate would have it, the rest was history. In 1900, the first group of 50 cars was completed.
“The cool thing is these are still in use today. Glacier National Park has got thirty-three of these on the road, and Yellowstone has eight of them. I think they are off the road currently, but they own eight. Zion National park has one of these things,” Bent revealed.
Leno loves how reliable and hardy the 1936 Model 706 tour bus engine is. He admits that a car with a similar type of engine that he has (Plymouth Business Coupe), with a flathead, can sit for a year and a half with bad gas and still fire up.
According to Bent, his 80-year-old 1936 White Model 706 Yellowstone tour bus has 600,000 miles ferrying about 4,000 lbs (1,814 kg) of people over the years and still works great. It runs a straight six 318 cubic-inch engine making roughly 120 hp (122 ps) and 200 lb-ft (271 Nm) of torque. The transmission is an unsynchronized manual four-speed.
Leno later takes this tour bus for a spin. We recommend watching the video below to catch the conversations and witness how silent an 80-year-old engine runs today.
Humphrey is a car enthusiast whose love and passion for automobiles extended into collecting, writing, driving, and working on cars. He got his passion for cars from his Dad, who spent thousands of hours working on his old junky 1970 E20 Toyota Corolla. Years later, he would end up doing the same with a series of lemons he’s owned throughout his adult life. Full profile
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