DESOTO

  In the summer of 1928, much like General Motors had done with it’s divisions a few years earlier, Chrysler Corporation created DeSoto to be another company brand and another price point in an attempt to pick up a little more of the growing auto buying market.  That meant Plymouth would be the less expensive brand, DeSoto their mid-priced model and Chrysler as the top of the line.  Also, here again was another of the autos being named after an explorer.  This time we guess it was to make you want to get into your car and explorer the U.S. even though there was no Interstate highway system yet in place to do so. This explorer was the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto who discovered the Mississippi River and if you lived in California, for example, it would take you quite a while to get to the Mississippi River. Did you ever wonder why it took some guy from Spain to discover a river in our own back yard?  Truth be told it probably should have been named for some Native Indian tribe or Pre-Indians who hunted and fished in it for decades before Hernando got here.
DeSoto’s first year of production was a record one that stood for over 30 years in the industry with over 81,000 models being produced.  Sales were successful and in 1934 the Airflow was introduced.  This was the first auto using aerodynamic principles in the design and, tested in a wind tunnel. Chrysler expected this model to be a hit but sales fell 50% below the previous year’s numbers even though it was a tremendous hit in Europe. In fact it was so big overseas that almost every European manufacturer copied all or as much of the sleek design as they could without being sued for copyright infringement.