to spend US$5,000 – about US$86,000 today – to build a larger tunnel in Michigan, completed in September 1928.Īrticle content An illustration of an early scale-model wind tunnel of the type used by Chrysler in the 1930s Photo by Chrysler Corporation Breer liked the results, and convinced Walter P. That autumn, Breer tapped Ohio-based engineer Bill Earnshaw to run some preliminary aerodynamics tests Earnshaw, in turn, sought help from powered-flight pioneer and friend Orville Wright to set up a rudimentary scale wind tunnel, about two feet wide and three feet tall, with a belt-driven fan powered by a 35-hp electric motor. The aircraft got Breer thinking about how the aerodynamics principles being applied in aviation could be used in the automotive industry. Breer was vacationing with his wife at Gratiot Beach in Michigan in 1927 when he took notice of a squadron of Army Air Corps planes passing overhead en route to Selfridge Field, at first mistaking them for a flock of birds.

trusted unreservedly to drive innovation within the automaker. Breer and colleagues Owen Skelton and Fred Zeder made up Chrysler’s “Three Musketeers,” a trio of engineers that Walter P. Chrysler had built out of the remains of the Maxwell Motor Company in 1925. The Airflow’s origins can be traced to Carl Breer of the Chrysler Corporation, which Walter P.

Article contentīut like the T, the Airflow, too, upended the auto industry, introducing new chassis construction methods, benchmarks for comfort, and, most apparently, styling unlike anything else on the road.Īrticle content “The 1934 Chrysler Airflow was a radical step beyond contemporary automobile design” (Stellantis caption) Photo by Stellantis

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Cars in the ’20s wore coachwork still loosely inspired by horse-drawn carriages, with running boards, fabric roofs, and freestanding headlamps. When the Airflow began development in 1927, the styling of most all automobiles was, arguably, not too far removed from that introduced by Henry Ford’s “Tin Lizzie” T, itself still in production and largely unchanged from its debut in 1908. Sure, that attention is well-deserved, but it often overshadows the impact of cars like the 1934 Chrysler Airflow. When it comes to influential pre-war cars, Ford’s Model T always hogs the spotlight. Here’s what we learned.Īrticle content 1934 Chrysler Airflow and 1932 DeSoto outside of the Ontario Tech University ACE wind tunnel Photo by Elle Alder Walter P., the Wright Brothers, and the Three Musketeers But how would their figures compare to ones measured at a modern state-of-the-art facility, like the ACE Climatic Wind Tunnel at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa? Driving.ca decided to find out firsthand, testing the revolutionary 1934 Chrysler Airflow, as well as a conventional 1932 DeSoto sedan, using some of the most advanced equipment available today. The Airflow’s story has been told a hundred times, and Chrysler engineers’ data from the period repeated endlessly. Those tests led Chrysler to develop a radical new model, the Airflow, designed around fluid-dynamics principles, and marketed via scientifically derived claims that contemporary cars’ styling was so backwards, many were more streamlined driving in reverse than forward. In the late ’20s, the fledgling automaker conscripted famed aviator Orville Wright to build a small-scale wind tunnel to test cars’ aerodynamics. Chrysler and the engineers at Chrysler Corporation understood that perhaps sooner than anyone in the American auto industry.

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