1949-54 Chrysler Imperial: Breaking Out of the Box

摘要

It seems like blue distance of the Middle Ages now, but 1949 was a brave new world for the U.S. auto industry. Overseas competition was nonexistent: Nobody could slip a wedge into the rock-hard post-World War II dollar market. Detroit's Big Three-General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford (they ranked in that order by sales)-finally parted company with prewar styling and were sailing into the commercial azure on the wings of eagles, Chrysler eagles being represented by what a wag called "three-box styling": one box on top of two others. "We'll be fine," hummed company president Kaufman Thuma Keller, "Old K. T.," successor to founder Walter Percy Chrysler, who had died young in 1940. The "true" '49s, introduced that March after a brief run of leftover '48s, would be evolutionary, not revolutionary-cars that fit people.