Chrysler’s 1934 Airflow revolutionized car aerodynamics—our wind-tunnel tests prove it | Driving.ca

foreign [Music] 1934 Chrysler wrote introduced to the world a car unlike the Auto industry had ever seen before the 1934 airflow now Chrysler wasn't the first automaker to toy with aerodynamic principles but it was the first to apply them to a mass-produced automobile keep in mind that the Chrysler Corporation had been born just 10 years earlier it was only 25 years earlier that Henry Ford had introduced the Model T and that the very first powered flight happened just 30 years earlier and speaking of that powered flight the airflow was developed in a wind tunnel designed by Orville Wright now Wright's wind tunnel was only two foot by three foot and cost about five thousand dollars in today's money about ninety thousand dollars but we're here at the Ontario Tech University Ace wind tunnel which cost a little bit more to figure out whether or not the claims that those Engineers were making back in the 1930s had any validity or whether they were just blowing smoke the first test we're going to run here at the ace wind tunnel involve figuring out whether cars of the early 30s really were more aerodynamic going backwards than forwards according to Breer trials in his scale tunnel showed contemporary sedans exhibited roughly 30 percent less drag with their rear end pointed into the wind Chrysler even went so far as to reverse the running gear in an actual 1933 DeSoto custom so that retired racer Harry Hartz could drive it backwards from Detroit to New York as part of a sort of guerrilla marketing campaign ahead of the airflow's reveal we happened to have on hand a near identical stock 1932 DeSoto sedan which will test in the tunnel first facing forward to establish a few benchmarks and then flip around and test backwards in what may be perhaps the first full-scale verification of Brewer's results published online [Music] Patrick Smith and I'm a research development engineer here at Ace wind tunnel we are part of Ontario Tech University and today we're doing a research experiment for determining how a DeSoto matches aerodynamically to some of the claims that were made in the era today we're kind of doing a simplified test very cognizant of when early wind tunnels were created so a non-moving ground plane static weigh scale measurement is kind of what we would call this test it measures three degrees of freedom so it'll measure drag side force and downforce or lift depending on Direction and then between all of the wheel pads we can also do moments and forces we can tell if the car is pitching rolling or yelling and so that way we can determine how efficient the vehicle is whether it's removing energy through drag whether it's lifting through top speed or if it's actually stable within yaw which is important when you're going high speed DeSoto the first few years it was around stuck some rather conservative styling but 1932 would see the brand where a dashing race car inspired rounded Grill marketing claimed a blind man running his fingers over the desoto's front end named it the most beautiful car he'd ever seen But air currents weren't so complementary especially when they abruptly met the desoto's flat plate glass windshield exposed running boards fabric roof and freestanding headlights creatures comment almost every car of the early 30s foreign [Music] so we just finished the reverse test where we put the DeSoto in backwards very interesting findings and kind of aligns with what we had assumed so the vehicle actually did do better when it was going in reverse I could hypothesize that a couple things that would make that better would be that when the car is backwards the radius on the back of the vehicle is is much softer so the flow stays attached much better and then the taper of the vehicle being that it tapers in towards the front of the car leads for a smaller recirculating Zone at the back now front of the car which is quite interesting and then also there's another function where because of the hood and the front windshield you get a two-step approach almost like a pickup truck so by tapering in the rear and then having the two steps you get two small recirculating zones instead of one large one which was actually separating off of the roof so I think that could be the contributing factor as to why that would be better the story of the Chrysler airflow begins in 1927 when one of its principal Engineers Carl Brewer was a stationing on a beach in Michigan he noticed what he thought were a formation of low-flying birds but were instead a squadron of military aircraft background thinking to what exactly nature could teach us about how to better move through the air he eventually got in contact with Orville Wright Who convinced him to build a wind tunnel in Chrysler headquarters bed scale wind tunnel about two foot by three foot was used to test roughly 50 different models about 1 10 scale those tests showed that cars of the day were actually more Dynamic going backwards than forwards that didn't make sense to Breer who was convinced that the automobile industry should be taking full advantage of the aerodynamic principles that Orville Wright and others had learned since the turn of the century that's why he developed the Chrysler airflow today we're going to scale out Brewer's wind tunnel experiments and see if we can generate the same results foreign Ontario Tech in Ace I don't always talk about facility but rather as a solution so we've got a kitchen but we also have some great chefs we're a Solutions provider here for aerodynamics thermal management acoustic for wind tunnel applications but we have probably the most sophisticated climatic aerodynamic wind tunnel in the world we started with a climatic wind tunnel we're going to have a snowstorm in July we have desert heat in January and we introduced a moving ground plane or a rolling road so in fact now when we put a vehicle down to measure the aerodynamic forces which are very very precise we actually move the road underneath With the Wind so in fact Canada as a first has provided a tunnel that provides some unique capabilities not found anywhere else in the world so primarily today I think we're really interested in Drag and making sure the vehicle actually have a nice bow length on the road okay so cars of the 30s were in fact more streamlined backwards than forwards but how could Chrysler's Engineers improve on them to make them more aerodynamic going you know the right way after shooting down the idea of a teardrop shaped rear-engined machine they came up with some airflow prototypes with a handful of major improvements a raked back v-shaped windshield closed fenders fitted close to the body a gently sloping back end and covered rear wheels and most prominently of all a rounded off nose and Grill that integrated the headlights into the fenders in their test Chrysler suggested that this form might be as much as 40 percent more slippery through the air than a conventional sedan what our Ace tunnel tests show the same so the car that just rolled in is the Chrysler airflow a fascinating vehicle you could tell that it was definitely designed with aerodynamics in mind there's a lot of interesting features about it that I think will definitely help its performance I think that the vehicle will definitely be a little bit more efficient due to some of the features that it has on it but definitely in a forwards to forwards test I would assume based on looking at the car that the airflow is definitely going to be better and on that note I think there's no better way to transition than to just do the test and let's find out foreign [Music] so we just did the smoke Wand Over the airflow and it was an excellent vehicle you could definitely see how the flow was much more attached to both the roof line the way that the windshield splits down the side of the car and definitely down the back hatch definitely a much more efficient and Sleek shape so it definitely matched up with the way that they developed it very interesting to see in person as well to see that kind of Technology at that era of vehicle surprising result I guess not really too surprising is that the vehicle was incredibly efficient it was more efficient than the DeSoto going forward by a little over 10 percent and actually was fairly comparable to a DeSoto going backwards so that was probably the most interesting thing of the day I was definitely comparing those two and seeing that if you took the body of a DeSoto and flipped it around you were you were pretty close to what that airflow was definitely some of the biggest things is fit and finish and the way that air flows over the front of a vehicle all airflow kind of starts at the front and how it's split into its different quadrants the way that the windshield controls the flow and over the hood it's definitely way more efficient with this vehicle and that's kind of the ethos of how you could see the vehicle was shaped from front to back back and then maintain that attachment into the back newer Vehicles do use interesting techniques for separating it on purpose I'd say that that's kind of where the evolution took place afterwards but always interesting to see how you know in 1934 car actually uses the technology that we still use today [Music] in numerous ways about 10 years ahead of its time which is not an entirely good thing because while it may have been much more aerodynamically efficient as we've just proven the airflow's Revolutionary styling polarized the buying public and many people just weren't ready for that much change all at once sales never did ramp up even after a facelift a few years later that made it more conventional looking but Walter P Chrysler always stood by the airflow even decades later telling one reporter I never understood why progress should crawl when it can be made to LEAP so what did we learn a 1930s car while handsome is pretty terrible aerodynamically and when pointed backwards into the wind it's actually more streamlined than it would be going forward and finally the Chrysler's out there styling for the airflow actually work it did while we did see an improvement over the 1932 DeSoto it was not as drastic as Chrysler's numbers suggested it would be but it was still a major change while the figures didn't quite match Chrysler's claims it still proved to be one of the most aerodynamic sedans that you could have bought at that time Chrysler's Big Ideas really did work thank you [Music] for driving.ca I'm Nicholas marneze special thanks to Sandy Sinclair for providing us with this Chrysler airflow for David Wilson for loaning us is DeSoto and to the Ontario Tech University's Ace climactic wind tunnel foreign [Music]

Channel: Driving.ca

Views: 8,005

Keywords: @driving, @drivingcarculture, ACE wind tunnel, Chrysler Airflow, DeSoto, Ontario Tech University, aerodynamics, history, wind tunnel, wind tunnel test

Id: KpkdgoUE-dY

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023