#ChryslerAirflow #windtunnel #aerodynamics

Barn door. Brick wall. Whatever metaphor you use, cars at the turn of the twentieth century were simply not that streamlined. With narrow, upright grilles; flat plate-glass windshields; and bodywork that ballooned out at the back, automobiles of the 1910s, ’20s, and early ’30s were, aerodynamically speaking, a real drag. The “horseless carriages” of those decades were, however, making more and more power every year, propelling them to speeds where, unlike their draft-animal-drawn forebears, their slipperiness-through-the-air had an impact.

Walter P. Chrysler and the engineers at Chrysler Corporation understood that perhaps sooner than anyone in the American auto industry. In the late ’20s, the fledgling automaker conscripted famed aviator Orville Wright to build a small-scale wind tunnel to test cars’ aerodynamics. 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.

The Airflow’s story has been told a hundred times, and Chrysler engineers’ data from the period repeated endlessly. 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. Here’s what we learned.

Read the full article on Driving.ca: https://driving.ca/feature/1934-chrys...

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