SUPERCHARGED 1933 DUESENBERG | AMERICA'S MOST LUXURIOUS CAR

when people think of a million dollar car they can't help but consider the duesenberg among them in its day it was the most powerful car on the road in fact it was said that a duesenberg owner was passed only when they wished to be passed the car was such a better performer than anything else on the road introduced late in 1928 you've got a car with a 420 cubic inch engine that delivers 265 horsepower when its next closest american competitor the chrysler imperial delivered only 130. so we're talking more than double the horsepower rating of its closest domestic competitor and what you got was was not just horsepower it's the way you got your horsepower the duesenberg brothers fred and august um were were very much into racing um they raced to indianapolis they were very successful they they knew what they were talking about when they came down to engineering so an el cord approached them about building the ideal car for the ultra high end of the market this is what they came up with it's essentially a grand prix car but scaled up to heroic proportions and fitted with some of the most beautiful coachwork ever built this car as it happens was fitted with a body by murphy of pasadena now every duesenberg every model j duesenberg built was delivered from the factory as a chassis only then you had to send it to a coach builder or have it sent to a coach builder for the body to be built in other words what you bought from duesenberg were the frame rails the wheels and axles the engine the steering wheel that came up if you strapped an orange crate to it and sat down you could theoretically drive it the factory price of a chassis in 1929 was 7 500 went up quickly to 8 500 within a couple of years and the cheapest body you could buy ran about forty five hundred to five thousand dollars so we're talking about thirteen thousand dollars out the door when people made uh on average during the year a few hundred dollars over a 12-month period of time in other words you're looking at a car that was just incredibly expensive and that's one of the things that distinguishes a million dollar car the other things that help distinguish a million dollar car are its high quality uh it's high style it's high performance and it's very very low production in the grand scheme of things uh only about 500 or so duesenbergs were ever built over a span of a few years they were introduced in late 1928 as a 1929 model and the last one was delivered as a new car in we believe 1937. by that time the the height of the engine uh and the uh the engineering did not lend itself um so well to road going cars and and duesenberg collapsed um with the cord corporation and in about 19 uh the late 1930s auburn cord and duesenberg they all went away at about the same time um but but this car is one of the supercharged versions um to get even more power from the double overhead cam four valve per cylinder mostly aluminum engine they added a supercharger and centrifugal supercharger that was driven from a stock from the side of the engine it was a an impeller that was driven mechanically and forced the fuel in the air mixture into the cylinders for greater performance a greater explosion of a more a powerful explosion in the in the uh the cylinders and that elevated the horsepower rating from 265 to 320. later on they revised the manifolding added another carburetor and they ended up with 400 horsepower another attribute about the duesenberg that makes it worth so much money the model j duesenberg is the fact that you if you wanted you could drive it around today it has modern performance uh and everything between your hands and this and the road is in either ball or roller bearings so this car is incredibly well engineered it's comparatively easy to drive for a car that weighs more than two tons uh at its lightest some of these cars ended up weighing more than three tons in fact one car built from the for a fellow by the name of father devine out of new york was so heavy that it would snap the spokes of the rear wheels that's how much it weighed this car it has a very large steering wheel before the era of power steering so that you could get the leverage that you needed when you were going around the corner but the one thing that it did have also was power brakes uh the brakes the faster you went the more power that you had at your disposal uh to stop the car which is very important uh when you were driving a car that could go 120 miles an hour it was not something to to leave to chance now when you ordered your duesenberg convertible coupe for murphy you had a lot of decisions to make one of them was whether you wanted your door hinged at the front or the back one of them whether you wanted your top to stack behind the passenger compartment or conceal beneath a metal panel as this one does you can also choose the length of wheelbase if you wanted a little bit more wheelbase even though it was a two-seat car to make it more comfortable you could do that you could specify a trunk or a rumble seat this car happens to have a rumble seat and you access it from the sidewalk side of the vehicle it's a left-hand drive which is uh american configuration you pull up to the sidewalk you get your very nimble passenger to climb on the running board take a step here another step here and climb into the rumble sea and since this car has a rumble seat and the driver the owner may have wished to travel they installed a trunk rack for a trunk and that's where we get the name today for a trunk it's exactly um what what it was intended to be something removable with handles on it that your valet or or the your chauffeur could take off and unpack in your hotel room or or your destination of choice

Channel: Petersen Automotive Museum

Views: 57,459

Keywords: Duesenberg, duesenberg brothers, classic cars, luxury cars, vintage cars, american cars, car collection, jay lenos garage, duesenberg brothers racing, duesenberg cars history, duesenberg car jay leno, jay leno duesenberg, super cars, exotic cars, car reviews, petersen museum, petersen museum vault, petersen automotive museum, petersen vault tour, classic cars restoration, most expensive, most expensive car in the world, supercharging a car, supercharger, superchared

Id: lx0RG3HqA2U

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020