Forgotten Classic: Chrysler Airflow Imperial CV-8 Coupe

If you grew up in America in the 50s and 60s, the Chrysler Airflow was still a car people remembered.  Sometimes you'd see one, dusty and neglected in some forlorn used car lot in automobile row, and your dad or your uncle would just shake his head and say, "Too bad, when it came out it was too far ahead of its time."  You'd wonder, though, how any machine that performed its assigned function well could be ahead of its time...                                  

The AIrflow was a project that had its roots in a Chrysler program in the early 1930s to adapt modern ideas to a production car.  The ideas included moving the engine forward so all passengers could sit between the axles, widening the cabin for more seating room, and structuring the body as a semi-monocoque assembly with welded external body panels contributing to the strength of the steel truss-like elements underneath.  

And streamlining; the radiused curves of the Airflow that eventually emerged from chief engineer Carl Breer's workshops reflected wind tunnel testing done in consultation with Orville Wright (yep, that Orville). By the early 1930s, aerodynamic thinking, some of it sound, was beginning to appear in prototype cars, including front and rear-engined efforts from Budd Body Company, and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion.*. In Central Europe, Hans Ledwinka was preparing to release the first of his rear-engine Tatra streamliners* in 1934, the Airflow year.

The body design by Oliver Clark began with the waterfall grille that fronted all Airflows (DeSoto, Chrysler and Imperial) that year, and was echoed in the radiused prow which enveloped the lights, the helmet-like fenders, and the V-shaped windshield (a one-piece curve on the Imperial limo) which angled back into the arc of the fastback roof profile.  

That first year, only the Chrysler Imperial models like this rare coupe had an external trunk lid; other Airflows allowed trunk access via a folding rear seat...  

The seats were raised above the floor on tubular chrome supports that seemed straight out of a Bauhaus living room, and the look was completed by the sober, purposeful, well-trimmed splendor of the cockpit.  Note that the two windshield panels can be cranked open at the bottom.




In addition to the semi-unitized body construction short-hood, long-cabin, wide-seat proportions, all Airflows, the straight six-cylinder DeSotos and Chrysler inline eights, featured hydraulic brakes, with vacuum assists on the big Imperial CW limousines, at a time when Ford (and Europeans like Bugatti) stubbornly stayed with mechanical brakes. One odd anachronism was the retention of solid axles even at the front, when a sophisticated double wishbone independent front suspension was already on the senior Plymouth line.  This was because engineer Breer was aiming at smooth ride, not sharp handling, and by lowering the spring rates he got the advertised "floating ride." The new body structure was strong enough that Chrysler advertised with an authentic newsreel of an Airflow being pitched off a tall cliff and then driving away under its own power.  It was expensive and time-consuming to assemble, though, and delays in tooling meant that Chrysler wasn't able to meet the initial demand...

There were other troubles, too.  Engine mount failures on as many as two thousand of the early cars hurt the Airflow's reputation, even though Chrysler fixed the mounts.  Chrysler had kept its more conventional-looking CA line of cars in production, calling it Airstream (they may have meant Mainstream) in 1935, and this helped keep them afloat when Airflow sales slowed during what was already a selling environment flattened by the Great Depression.  DeSoto, however, had only Airflows to sell in 1934. Perhaps the real trouble was not that the Airflow was "too far advanced" for its time, but that it was introduced at a time when people were more concerned about keeping or finding jobs, and feeding their families, than spending money on shiny new cars, even ones with pretty good reputations.  

*Footnote:  Tatra automobiles are featured in "Cars and Ethics" in our Archives for November 27, 2015, and also for Dec. 31, 2016 in "Roadside Attraction: Rolling Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art", and in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile" for Jul7 30,  2017.  The Fuller Dymaxion saga is reviewed in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 1", from May 7, 2017.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by Paul Anderson, who kindly shared a bounty of shots from a recent trip to the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida.