At Movieworld on the Gold Coast, in the sunny Australian state of Queensland, you can’t miss this sight. In the main square, where the daily parades command the attention of young and old alike, is this vintage DeSoto taxi.
Its sweeping lines and bold design hark back to a long-forgotten era in automotive design. The bonnet itself is high and imperious, almost like the upturned keel of a racing yacht.
As I reached for my camera, I faced a slight dilemma. It was early on an April afternoon and the light was harsh. I needed to find an angle that would capture the car’s majesty, while emphasising the sheer length of that amazing bonnet.
It’s one thing training your lens on a mass-produced Ford Falcon or a Holden Commodore; it’s quite another when you are confronted with a car with this sort of engineering pedigree.
There’s a great yarn from the DeSoto archives that I must narrate here, simply because it says so much about maverick thinkers and the willingness, in the heyday of the automobile industry, to encourage people to think outside the square.
If ideas are the lifeblood of any company, then the story of this publicity stunt by US carmaker DeSoto will always stand out. In 1933, racing driver Harry Hartz drove a DeSoto across the United States … in reverse!
While I could not locate medical records to support my theory that Hartz must have had a terrible crick in his neck at the end of his project, the DeSoto people were not just content to stop and congratulate themselves over the publicity.
Engineers studied the data from Hartz’s amazing drive and soon confirmed that the car’s fuel efficiency was greater when driven backwards. This led to a complete re-evaluation of car design, in the quest for greater speed, better styling … and of course, a greater share of the market.
Which just proves the commercial value of, um, reverse psychology.
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