Flagship Model Corners The Market On Chrome

By Tony Barthel

© 2021, curbside.tv

First, Chrysler lengthened the wheelbase of all but its largest cars by four inches, while the overall lengths of the cars hardly changed. Some describe the look of these cars as stubby, but the overhang reduction gave the cars a simpler and bolder look than their predecessors.

Passenger dimensions swelled, especially in height, a change that everybody continues to attribute to Chrysler president K.T. Keller’s undying allegiance to the fashion of hat wearing. Keller’s ideology certainly made for a roomy interior, on par with many luxury cars and limousines. An all-new padded dashboard with revised instrument cluster was a styling wonder that is eye-popping to this day.

Chrysler seemed to want to corner the market on chrome, with the grille having more than many other cars on the road. Much more. It still placed the turn signals far outboard and high enough to accommodate as many auxiliary lamps and bumper guards as you could get from the J.C. Whitney catalog. But thicker grille bars and stylized curves substantially separated this grille from those used in years past.

While the chrome announced the Chrysler’s coming, the taillights stole the show. Atop each removable rear fender stood a red plastic lens on a long chrome base, viewable from three directions. They appeared quite like the tailfin lamps that debuted on the 1948 Cadillac, and perhaps because of the close similarity, Chrysler kept them around only for one year, reverting to a basic rectangular tail lamp in 1950.

As if the tall three-way tail lamps didn’t offer enough visibility, Chrysler mounted additional stop lamps in the center of the trunk lid, about 40 years before the federal government mandated high center-mount third brake lamps. This car had Chrysler’s “Spitfire” straight eight engine and the “Fluid Drive” which still required shifting as a manual transmission but allowed the driver to come to a stop without putting in the clutch pedal and take off from any gear.

First off, the Fluid Drive and the Prestomatic represented two completely different units that together emulated some of the functions of the competition’s fully automatic transmissions. Fluid Drive basically replaced the flywheel of a standard transmission setup with two vaned, fluid-filled drums, eliminating the metalto- metal contact of a conventional clutch.

It also provided a smooth transition between the rotation of the crankshaft and the rotation of the transmission, which allowed a driver to forego the clutch pedal when accelerating from or decelerating to a dead stop. However, the existence of a clutch pedal on the floorboard put the “semi-” in “semi-automatic:” the driver still needed to use the clutch, sandwiched between the Fluid Drive unit and the transmission, to start the car, to shift into reverse and to shift between Low and High gears.

As in previous years, in 1949 Chrysler divided its lineup into four series: the sixcylinder Royal and Windsor and the eightcylinder Saratoga and New Yorker. Even with complaints about styling, the company being late to market and the lack of a fully automatic transmission the Chrysler division still built 124,076 cars in its silver anniversary year of 1949.

This contributed to a total 1,330,938 cars from all Chrysler divisions, then a company record and enough to keep Chrysler in second place behind General Motors (and ahead of Ford) in the sales race.