Crazy little Crosley Hot Shot was the first postwar sports car, a star of the first micro car line in America.
Crazy little Crosleys were America's first micro cars of the modern era. Powel Crosley was a successful industrialist who manufactured millions of radios and refrigerators and owned the Cinncinati Reds baseball team. When buyers complained that they couldn't pick up any stations on his low budget radios, Powel Crosely started his own high-powered broadcasting network. But Crosley wasn't satisfied, he wanted to produce basic, economical vehicles that anyone could afford.
The first Crosley car was introduced in 1939. It weighed less than a thousand pounds and cost just $250 when a Ford cost $850. Still the little bantam struggled to find a place in the market and ceased production during WWII, resuming just after.
WIth just under 25,000 little Crosleys sold, the car-starved postwar market gave the slab-sided cartoon beast its best sales year in 1948 but soon the Big Three manufacturers got new designs on the road. Though Crosleys got 50 miles per gallon, gas was cheap and no one cared. Americans flocked to buy Detroit's big, flashy new models and Crosley was doomed. He sent his workforce off for the 4th of July holiday in 1952 and closed the plant forever.
CROSLEY FIRSTS
- Micro compact
- Four wheel disc brakes
- Postwar sports car
- Slab sided body (no separate fenders)
- All steel station wagon
CELEBRITY OWNERS
- Humphrey Bogart
- Gloria Swanson
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Paulette Goddard
- General Omar Bradley
SInce 2007, the Smart Car has taken Crosley's place in the autoscape, the first micro car to make serious inroads into the U.S. market since Powel Crosley's little car that could.
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Comments
The Crosley is just one of the cars I think of whenver people say that US makers never made "Cars people wanted". Obviously, people wanted bigger cars than the Crosley, or the Corvair, or the '62 Olds F-85 aluminum-engined turbo car or.... Anyway, the little brazed-engine car was light, if not especially robust, inexpensive and innovative. The Japanese did not invent small, innovative cars.
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