This Hemi-Powered Pool Table Hot Rod Would Never Be Built Today

There’s no two ways about it: We live in the golden age of horsepower. You can get crazy performance for cheap, whether you’re buying new or building the truck engine in your project car. That said, you don’t see as many visionaries building hot rods and kustoms like this wacky pool table wheels with a Hemi underneath the slate.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that beautiful exercises in artistic expression are completely gone in this generation. Spend any amount of time on The H.A.M.B. and you’ll see it. But I would be certifiably shocked to see something so zany as Steve Tansy’s 1970 “Pool Hustler” come alive in 2025.

Tansy had a hand in bringing some of the most famous movie cars to life, like the Ecto-1 in Ghostbusters and even early Batmobiles. Some of his other, more eccentric work includes a Coca-Cola vending machine-bodied creation that rides atop a square tube chassis with a 1965 Corvette rear-end. The Pool Hustler was totally on brand, then, and I love it.

This car is currently for sale by Historics Auctioneers in the United Kingdom at £25,000, which is roughly $33,000 USD. The 426-cubic-inch V8 apparently doesn’t run, but fixing that is a lot easier than perfectly recreating the oh-so-’70s bodywork. Oh, and the pool table itself? It’s believed to be 100 years old by now.

In true hot rod fashion, zoomie headers point up on each side of the centerpiece. The pool ball wheels and Goodyear slicks are so wide that they poke out super far, and looking at it from the rear, it’s certifiably tough. Few technical details are mentioned in the listing, but that rear-end and exposed suspension really do it for me.

Arguably my favorite angle is looking at the beautifully rounded front fenders from the side:

You can argue that something like this would never be built today because it’s a bit cheesy. You’d probably be right, too. But as someone who makes a living writing about cars on the internet, I’d love to see more like this to break up the monotony of LS-powered something-rathers that run a nine-second quarter-mile. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place.

Maybe I need to start looking for artists instead.

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