Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "King Rose Archives" channel.

Road hugging huh? Well no, those old GM cars had lots of body roll intentionally designed in. And if you hit a small bump while turning, the leaf spring rear end would jump sideways. New engine? Nope, its a slightly modified Stovebolt 6 from pre-war. Powerglide transmission? Well, it was only 2 speed and made cars seem sluggish. But I love the beautiful Dinah.
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The only Pontiac for that year available in Australia was the Parisienne, assembled locally form kits sent from Canada. They were indeed quiet. They were indeed smooth. But with that little six cyl motor in such a big car, it was a slug to drive.
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@tincoffin : Except for that really ugly front, which they toned down part way through the production run, the Airflow looks not much different to the contemporary Chevrolet Series FA to me. Both are considered art deco designs. And the Chevrolet had a much better more modern engine - a variant of the OHV "stovebolt". And Chevrolet reliability. YouTube has since suggested a restored Airflow video to me. From that I see the Airflow dash was more old fashioned than the Chev dash, and a bit of an ergonomic disaster. When Chrysler put the bustle boot on, the Airflow looked just the same as the Chev. To me, the Airflow also looks much like the contemporary Buick 4-door (except for the front of course) which also had a much better engine (an OHV straight 8). I agree Airflow the construction was more modern, but that was also part of its downfall - as I said, it took Chrysler a year or so to master how to weld it, and the early Airflows had body faults not seen in other brands.
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@thebrain7065 : You must be extremely lead footed, as this is a small SUV weighing 1.5 tonne. Official highway consumption is 10.5 l/100km ie 27 mpg to 10.1 l/100km depending on engine fitted. Or is yours faulty, misfiring or has faulty sensors?
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Weird ham acting!
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With drum brakes you don't need a servo. That's what set the time of introduction of disk brakes - the much higher force required was unacceptable until manufacturers figured out how to make a cheap and reliable vacuum booster.
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This Chrysler promotional film says the car returned 18 MPG (US) on a coast to coast test drive at mostly 50 MPH. The typical full size US car of the time gave about 13 to 14 MPG in average daily driving. Moderate speed highway driving always gives a better MPG than normal mixed driving. (my preset car, which has the GM world market V6 engine, normally consumes about 10.5 litres per 100 km, but on long highway trips at 110 km/hr (about 65 MPH) it does about 6 litres per 100 km.) So, there was nothing particularly good about the Airflow's economy. With that, the really ugly appearance, and the high unusual fault rate (It took Chrysler over a year's production to get the welding of the body right), no wonder it didn't sell. All that nonsense about wind tunnel testing was just marketing fluff, and most likely seen as such at the time. All major manufacturers, just before the war and after, wind tunnel tested or tuft tested on an open test road, principally to ensure the handling remained safe at all possible speeds and likely wind strength and directions, but also to accurately measure fuel consumption. (Tuft testing involved gluing tufts of wool or similar all over the body, and following the car with another car acting as camera car. In conjunction with gauges measuring the load on each wheel, that enabled the engineers to understand the aerodynamics.)
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@formerice : The ways that the Airflow was more advanced were not the ways that counted for anything with the buyers, though - that was part of the trouble. There is no reason why a well designed side-valve engine should be any less durable than an OHV. In fact, because there is better cooling for the exhaust valves, you could claim an advantage for the side-valve. However, there is a performance disadvantage .... The British engine design engineer Harry Ricardo showed in the 1920's that a side-valve engine can be as fuel efficient as an OHV, but ONLY AT ONE SPEED (RPM). This means in practice that a car will be slightly more economic with an OHV engine than it would be with an OHV engine of the same capacity and power output - cancelling out any advantage in aerodynamic body design in ordinary driving. When I mentioned Chevrolet relaibility - I meant the reliability of the whole car, not just the engine. Unusual non-engine faults were one of the reasons the Airflow didn't sell - it quickly got a bad reputation.
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@soilmanted : No, that curved grill was ugly. Having said that, some other (non-US) cars had similarly curved grills in the late 1930's, so others would presumably agree with you. Your statement "basically factual, with the addition of some embellishment and embroidery" is putting it very mildly. Except for some softening of curves, its just like any other "2-box with the small box at the front" design of the time, very far from the aerodynamic optimum of a teardrop shape with the blunt end at the front and the back pointy. It is easy to find statements about its aerodynamics traceable back to Chrysler's marketing department (such as this video), but can you find anything about it in professional engineering journals? I don't think so. And it's fairly typical (for the time) fuel consumption in highway conditions shows it is nothing special. Today's cars use east-west mounted engines - this permits a rounded or sloped very short length of the front "box" (nose), and the aerodynamic advantage of the short nose is a major reason why east-west came into use. But nobody has claimed all that much advantage. The first really big selling east-west vehicle was the 850 cc Mini Minor - but fuel consumption was not claimed to be much better than the NS Austin A30 that had the same engine in 800 cc form and slightly more weight.
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@thebrain7065 : If you watched this video you would have seen that what they were doing was approximately what today is called "highway cycle" wrt economy testing. Highway cycle always gives substantially better numbers than town/shopping cycle or mixed driving, especially with side valve engines. Almost all the full size American cars of that time achieved around 18 MPG on highway conditions. Of course enormous Packards, Dusenburgs and the like probably didn't. You can look up Mazda Tribute fuel consumption in lots of places - Mazda data, RAC, etc. Even on "shopping cycle" it should give 21-22 MPG depending on which engine it has, so either you are lead footed or there is something wrong with it. And you aren't comparing apples with apples anyway.
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@thebrain7065 : No sweat. You enjoy Independence Day for me. I'm in Australia - We celebrate January 26, Australia Day. City government traditionally spends a large bag of money on fireworks and there's lots of free entertainment and merriment. Well, usually. This year COVID put a stop to that. In fact we've just had another week of COVID "lockdown" - we were not allowed to leave home except for 4 things: Buy essential food, 1 hour of exercise, visit doctor or get a vaccine shot, or go to work if you work in a defined essential job.
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@anoint426hemi6 I didn't compare it with a modern car - I cited the experience in a modern car to show that highway driving returns a lower fuel consumption than mixed use driving, which is relevant because what they did in this film is basically highway driving. I.e., comparing a modern car's highway fuel consumption with town driving consumption. Perhaps that is too subtle for you. You show the classic sign of someone who know nothing - you attacked personally instead of using facts to prove me wrong. Compare the Airflow with it contemporaries and you'll see it's just like the others (eg the Chevrolet) except for the rounded nose - do you really think that can make much difference, which can only be most apparent at high speed freeway driving? Chrysler had the best engineers? Its not very likely, given Chrysler was always by far the smallest of the Big Three, and would have gone out of business except that the US Govt made GM help Chrysler financially and technically not that long after the Airflow era. There's no way Chrysler could have had the immense engineering resources of GM or Ford, nor the talent. However, the quality of the engineers is not particularly relevant here, because the Airflow body shape is just a styling thing supported by marketing fluff. The role of the engineers was to take the stylist's design into tooling to make the product.
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It looks like an ugly version of the Chevrolet.
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