Cars of the 1960*$ 45 



lars, a little less than the same size prewar car. Others believe 

 that a car can be made to sell for four hundred dollars. 



"After a few years," remarks David Dietz, Scripps-Howard 

 science editor, "post-war cars will be so far ahead of 1942 

 models that the differences separating the two will be greater 

 than those separating the 1942 car from the old Model T 

 Ford." 



Dr. Charles M. A. Stine, vice-president of E. I. du Pont de 

 Nemours and Company, points out that "since automobile 

 production stopped the shiny new models that are gathering 

 dust in dealers' storerooms have aged, technically, at least 20 

 years. We are now in the 1960*8 of motor cars, as measured 

 by the old pace of development." 



Between 1912 and 1942 the automobile industry did give 

 the consumer a car of greater dependability and better appear- 

 ance at a lower cost. In dollars per horsepower, cars cost only 

 about one-third what they did in 1925. And it cost the owner 

 a little more than half as much to run his car in 1942 as it did 

 fifteen years ago! 



But in recent years the more the prewar car seemed to 

 change the more it remained the same. The main reason for 

 this was the huge investment in expensive dies and tools which 

 the companies did not want to scrap. A new model was 

 brought out each year, but this model did not differ more 

 than 10 per cent from the previous year's model. 



Automobile stylists designed a car with accent on beauty. 

 They went in for fancy fenders and radiator grilles. They 

 streamlined the windshield by slanting it, but they also stream- 

 lined the rear window so that in winter snow piled on it and 

 the driver couldn't see out. Even in clear weather the rear 

 window gave the driver little more vision than that afforded 

 by the tank driver's slit in an M-4 tank. Meanwhile the auto- 

 motive engineers were forced to wrench the machinery 

 around to fit the stylists' ideas of what a car should look like. 



