Green Machines: Collection Classics: Streamlined Baby
April 1, 2007
In the summer of 1927, Carl Breer—then the head of engineering and research for
Chrysler—was driving with his family to Lake Huron, when he noticed what he
initially mistook for a distant flock of migratory waterfowl. But the flying
birds “turned out to be a squadron of army planes heading for Selfridge Air Base
over Lake St. Claire,” says Barry Dressel, manager of the Walter P. Chrysler
Museum in Auburn Hills, Mich. In the automotive equivalent of Newton’s apple,
Breer’s thoughts quickly turned to aerodynamics. The engineer stuck his hand out
the window of his moving car and “the effect made Breer wonder how much power
was wasted pushing against all that air resistance,” says Dressel.
So, like
any good scientist, Breer set out to devise a controlled experiment. It just so
happened that one of his engineers was acquainted with Orville Wright (the same
aviation pioneer who had been flying with Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge when the
military officer’s airplane crashed on September 17, 1908, making him the first
casualty of powered flight and the eponymous namesake of the air field that
eventually contributed to Breer’s inspiration). Enlisting Wright’s expertise,
Breer’s team devised Chrysler’s first wind tunnel to test the effects of aerodynamics on the various flat-fronted automobiles of the era. In his book The
Birth of Chrysler Corporation and its Engineering Legacy, Breer noted that these
wind tunnel tests had shown a 30 percent increase running most vehicles
backwards. “Our laboratory was on the fourth floor of engineering,” Breer wrote.
“I looked out of the window at all the cars below and remarked, ‘Just think how
dumb we have been. All these cars have been running in the wrong
direction!’”
The Airflow project began as an effort to get better performance
through reduced air resistance. However, according to Dressel, “Chrysler
certainly wasn’t the only company that had explored doing that; European car
manufacturers had been examining those issues since the early 1920s.” So, while
Breer may not have been the first to ponder the aerodynamics of the
automobile—Paul Jaray’s Tatra Type V570 prototype being one notable example of a
predecessor to the Chrysler and DeSoto Airflow—he was certainly among the first
to apply his findings to a series-production automobile.
Conventional wisdom
holds the Airflow as one of automotive history’s most serious miscalculations.
Many blame a radical design that the marketplace considered too avant-garde. Not
only was the Airflow uniquely smoothed-out at the front—engineers eliminated the
vertical radiator and upright windshield—but it also sported a teardrop rear
shape to quell the turbulent air that developed behind. The sloping rear end
necessitated moving rear passengers forward, due to compromised headroom. “Rear
passengers had been sitting over the rear axles since the days of horse-drawn
carriages,” Dressel says. To make room for front occupants, engineers then moved
part of the Airflow’s engine ahead its front axle.
Indeed the Airflow
fundamentally changed car design. The teardrop form enabled Chrysler to create a
fully enclosed rear trunk, whereas previous cars used external, folding racks to
which trunks were strapped. It also permitted three-across seating in the front,
whereas previous tapered bodies narrowed in the front cowl.
Dressler warns
against assuming its appearance was solely at fault. “You hear that the car was
not successful because people were turned off by its looks, which is only
partially true,” he says. “It may not have been as handsome a car as the Lincoln
Zephyr that followed, but neither was it plainly ugly, like many so-called
aerodynamic designs of the late ’30s.” The auto industry quickly realized that
this was the way to build an automobile; within a few years virtually every manufacturer would adopt some aspect of the Airflow’s design.
Toyota built its first car—the Toyoda [sic] AA—as a near replica of the DeSoto
Airflow. “But it wasn’t just Toyota,” says Dressel. “It was Peugeot, it was
Volvo, it was Mercedes, it was Fiat; everybody, in one way or another, copied
the Airflow design.”
Also problematic was the Airflow’s weight, the likely
result of mistakes in adapting space-frame architecture borrowed from aircraft
design. “The consultant they hired to make stress calculations probably
overestimated how the body should be built, so they ended up with a heavy car,”
Dressel explains. “It was an all-steel body, and it was on the way to being a
unibody construction, so that you didn’t need this massive chassis underneath
because the body as a unit added structural strength to the whole.”
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