Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie

Most Americans think Detroit was always the center of the American car industry, but in the early years there was plenty of competition from car producers in other states (Mercer in New Jersey, Pierce Arrow in upstate New York, Nash in Wisconsin), with Indiana taking a strong second place to Michigan.  A big concentration of independent manufacturing was in Indianapolis, with its history of carriage and bicycle builders.  Prior to about 1909, Indiana was in real contention for the industry hub.  It's probably not mere coincidence that Indiana's clout in the industry waned after that year, because Henry Ford put the Model T in production in October of 1908.  While the Ford juggernaut settled into a pretty successful run up in Detroit (15 million of the cranky but durable T's eventually drove off the assembly lines), Indiana's car makers seemed to shift towards an emphasis on craftsmanship and engineering.  The labor-intensive craft approach died earlier in America than in Europe, and the custom coach builders who had turned out bodies for the likes of Duesenberg, Marmon and Stutz were mostly gone by World War II, along with many of the independent car producers.  But to understand the impact of the independent Indiana car makers, you might want to take a quick look at the Honda, Nissan or Ford sitting in your driveway.  Do you enjoy the responsiveness of that light-alloy V6?  Well, the real credit for that concept goes to Howard Marmon of Indianapolis, who experimented with V4, V6 and V8 engines in the early 1900s and put a successful air-cooled V4 into production in the century's first decade.  Marmon used then-exotic light alloys to minimize weight, and adopted water-cooling (possibly for its noise-reduction aspect) long before he produced his epic, budget-busting V16, in 1931.  Italy's Vincenzo Lancia gets credit for mass-producing the V4, but Marmon's V4 happened first.  Now let's get back to your daily driver.  Maybe it has, instead of a V6, an inline four cylinder with dual overhead cams and four valves per cylinder, perfect for optimizing performance and fuel efficiency while keeping emissions down.  The official history of modern production cars credits the Lotus engine in the Jensen-Healey with this innovation in 1972 (Toyota and Saab would follow with their own interpretations in the early 80s), but it was really the Duesenberg brothers at Auburn Cord Duesenberg who first brought this idea off the race track and onto American highways.  Starting in 1929, the twin cam 4-valve per cylinder design they'd pioneered on racing cars became available on the massive 8-cylinder Duesenberg J.  Fred Duesenberg sketched out a similar cylinder head for Stutz Motors over in Indianapolis, and it powered the Super Bearcat and DV-32 to fame, but sadly not fortune.  All the independent manufacturers were swimming upstream during the Great Depression, and because companies like Marmon, Stutz and A-C-D were places where engineering held more sway than bean-counting, their answers to tough times often involved doubling down on engineering.  Just before his company went bankrupt, Howard Marmon invested his personal fortune in a final attempt to establish a new template for the modern car.  His HCM prototype featured four-wheel independent suspension, a torque tube driveshaft and a light alloy V12 engine.  In a way, Marmon was trying to do for large American cars what Lancia was doing for smaller European ones (it didn't work much better for Lancia, which went bankrupt about 20 years later). Three years later, Cord succeeded in making three thousand of its most futurist effort before the effort bankrupted them. Everyone takes the all-weather traction of front-wheel drive for granted, so it's easy to forget how many early efforts failed or bankrupted their sponsors.  In America, E.L Cord tried it as early as 1929, and France's Andre Citroen improved on the L-29's traction with his unit-body Citroen Traction (for traction avant, or front drive) in 1934.  By the time the revolutionary Cord 810 showed up for the 1936 model year, front-wheel drive was combined with a modern V8 and a pared-down, streamlined form with trademark hidden headlights and horizontal radiator slats replacing the old "radiator grille".  As one admirer claimed, it looked "like it was born and raised on the road" but it was heartbreakingly expensive to build.  While the effort to explore the frontiers of engineering and production possibilities had its financial drawbacks everywhere (France's Citroen had to be taken over by Michelin after putting the Traction into production), it left us with advances we take for granted today.  Indiana's independent car makers often led Detroit (if not Europe) in bringing advanced features into production.  Besides the front-wheel drive, overhead cams, and multivalve engines we've already mentioned, examples of innovations from independents include supercharging (Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Studebaker) and disc brakes in mass production along with integrated rollover protection.  The Last Man Standing of Indiana's indie car makers, Studebaker gave us these last two items* before closing the old South Bend carriage works at the end of 1963, along with some features we might like to see return (example: a sliding station wagon roof for tall loads).  Along with their weight saving and performance efforts, they'd also made it easier for drivers to see out of the car (note the glassy cantilevered roof of the '47 Starlight Coupe).  If you've ever been frustrated by the near-horizontal mail slot backlights of modern cars, you might enjoy backing this puppy down your drive.  But maybe the "vision thing" was itself an Indiana tradition.  If you look at the 1911 Marmon Wasp that ran the first Indy 500 over a hundred years ago you'll note the prominent rear-view mirror, often cited as the first, and perhaps evidence of old Howard's confidence that driver Ray Harroun would wind up with a bunch of cars trailing along behind him.  In fact, he won the race.  Who knows?  If Marmon had charged other car makers even a dime every time they replicated this feature, maybe his company would still be building cars today.

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*In 1949, another independent, Crosley Motors, first standardized modern caliper disc brakes on all their cars.  These were aircraft-type Goodyear-Hawleys; corrosion proved to be a problem and Crosley reverted to drums a year later.  Chrysler standardized disc brakes on the Crown Imperial in the same year, but these were not the modern caliper type, and didn't stay in the product line.  And while Studebaker successfully brought the caliper type into mass-production first in America, Citroen and Triumph offered them in 1956.

Photos and credits:
1.)  1911 Marmon Wasp (Hemmings Motor News)
2.)  1932-34 Stutz DV-32 Monte Carlo (Google + User Content)
3.)  1932 Marmon V12 prototype (RM-Sotheby's Auctions)
4.)  1937 Cord 812 Beverly (Barrett-Jackson Auction Company)
5.)  1947 Studebaker Commander Starlight Coupe (Studebaker Corporation)
6.)  1963 Studebaker Avanti (Studebaker Corporation)