Jonathan Barnavelt's automobile [The House with a Clock in its Walls, 94]. It’s 1935 model, described as "a big black car with running boards and a windshield that could be cranked open." Jonathan, Mrs. Zimmermann, and Lewis are riding around in this car just prior to their run-in with Mrs. Izard.
When Jonathan drives everyone to the talent show, his car is identified as a Muggins Simoom [The Specter from the Magician's Museum, 52].
Bellairs created the fictitious car by combining two words and basing its description on various cars of that time period: muggins is British slang for a fool or someone easily outwitted (there is also a game of cribbage called Muggins); a simoon is a type of radial engine. Strickland says when the car appeared in The Specter from the Magician's Museum that someone evidently decided that the car was named Simoom (after the Arabic word for 'poison wind') and "made a change that I failed to catch. I think I got the editors to spell it the way John did in the more recent books."
Either way, the ridiculous contraption does not exist, though many individuals after the turn of the century built their own custom automobiles and thusly named the one or two production models whatever they chose. For example, Chuck Conrad with the Classic Car Club of America says there was a model called the Mugge which was supposed to go in production in 1910 in Tampa, Florida. Amy Friend says that the description of the Muggins could accurately describe a number of cars from the mid-thirties: “there is a 1934 Airflow that is large, black, has running boards, and the windshield cranks out to let in fresh air.”
If Jonathan Barnavelt built his own car he would have been on the far opposite end of the spectrum of Bellairs himself, however, as he once claimed that he didn't know anyone who had less of an interest in cars than he did - interestingly noted since no car has ever had a radial engine.
