Plymouth Special DeLuxe. For those who wear a hat in the car
The Plymouth Special DeLuxe was in no way remarkable. It was not included in the list of the world best cars and did not break speed records. Its highest achievement was second places in NASCAR in 1950 and 1951. However, it has outlived many iconic cars as it is very reliable and comfortable. This is true, as you can find a lot of reviews about our good old Plymouth on various American web-sites. People still buy and sell these models, share their experience, information on where to get spare parts, and so on. Overall, the Plymouth Special DeLuxe is an energetic and active elderly gentleman.
Cars of the 1950s are believed to be long and wide, featuring shark fins at the rear. But in fact, most of the cars of that time were simple and durable, with no fins and no unnecessary parts at all. The consumer paradigm was still far from oniomania, and products were created not for shopaholics, but for serious people who survived the war. They appreciated durability, practicality, and reliability. Cars were produced in order to travel on the roads for a long time, and not in order to take selfies in their background. The Plymouth Special DeLuxe is one of those cars. It is a modest, durable, and indestructible road friend.
Oniomania is an irresistible desire to buy something unnecessarily, for the pleasure of the process itself. It can also be referred as shopaholism or unhealthy shopping.
The Plymouth Special DeLuxe has some features that now seem, on the one hand, touching, and on the other, very useful. For example, its body is designed ‘in the old fashioned way’, namely, taking into account the rule of the 1910s, so that a driver could easily get into a car with a hat on and keep it on while driving without the risk of wrinkling it. For this reason, those who don’t know this detail may find the interiors of old cars strangely tall. This is because the primordial American-European tradition of wearing a hat (for men) and a bonnet (for women) is a thing of the past. But tall people and those who love driving on bad roads with potholes can now fully appreciate a raised roof.
The Special DeLuxe has a very good build quality, which is why it has survived to this day. This is also no coincidence. During the war, American car manufacturers worked according to the ‘everything for the front, everything for victory’ principle and produced front-line cars. It didn’t take very long after the war to return to civilian production, and Detroit stamped enough of them to meet demand. But it took longer to get back to producing quality models. By the early 1950s, once the initial demand was met, build quality had improved and the Plymouth Special was one of the first quality models with legendary body strength.
Moreover, the Americans liked the Plymouth Special DeLuxe, as it was distinguished by its comparative fuel-efficiency and an immortal engine, as it seems. Despite the fact that it takes 18 seconds for the Plymouth to accelerate to 100 km/h, its engine still works stably under the hood even though it was installed 70 years ago.
The Plymouth Special DeLuxe is a modest, durable, and indestructible road friend.
The Plymouth has a one-piece front seat, that is, a full-size front bench seat. They don’t do such things now, and one can only feel sad about it and hope that someday the designers will understand all the charm of a big soft driver’s bench seat. The Plymouth Special DeLuxe’s bench seat is high, so you need to sit on it, like on a chair, and not like on the old armchair of a TV football fan. But on the other hand, when you get out of the car, you don’t need to lift your legs above your head, you don’t need to look closely at your own and other people’s knees, boots or louboutins, while trying to maintain a sense of imaginary superiority over farmers who sit in their tall tractors.
Cars of the 1950s were heavy and inert when cornering, but the Plymouth Special DeLuxe is the exception to the rule. It fits reasonably easily into corners when driving the highway, while the old steering wheel in a certain situation is preferable to modern ones, since you do not need to rotate your steering wheel too much. The Special DeLuxe is able to park even in narrow places of modern cities, although owners claim that you need to have remarkable hand strength for this.
An interesting feature of this Plymouth is that the front suspension is equipped with coil springs with different compression ratios for different states. The springs on the right side are stiffer if the car is intended for the Eastern states, and softer if for the Western states, since the engineers took into account the specifics of the highways in different regions of their vast homeland.
