Chrysler Air Conditioning 1954 - Feels like a fridge. Looks like a fridge.

Recently, Jalopnik's informal daily reader survey, the "Question Of The Day" asked "What car colors need to make a comeback?" My response didn't make it into the top ten responses, but I am now surprised that turquoise didn't make it in either. I mean, paired with the white accents in this '54 Chrysler, it looks damn good. The effect is more impressive with all the shiny metal surfaces on the interior of the car.
See? Pretty. Could I live with it every day? Probably not, but just because I wouldn't buy a car this color doesn't mean I couldn't appreciate there being cars like this around. Car colors are stuck in a rut. Silver, champagne, black, white, with an occasional daring splash of dark blue or burgundy. There are exceptions to this chromatic vehicular dirge, but overall, the scenery on my daily commute is far too monotonous. I'm not helping, either. My car? Silver. Yawn. It was the one on the lot with the features I wanted, though.

Apart from the color of this Chrysler, the predominance of body-color surfaces inside the car is notable, as is the preponderance of hard metal surfaces, each of which are all too eager to bash your brains out. This was 1954, when building a safe car meant making a nice rigid box for you to bounce around in when you hit something good and solid. That steering column is a gorgeous piece of industrial design that will look just as pretty rammed through your chest. Fortunately, this will never happen, because the steering wheel will prevent it from sinking in too far, like the "basket" on the end of a ski pole. The woman in the ad will  have to settle for admiring the beauty of the steering column with her head stuck through the wheel. Let's not talk about her daughter.

How safe was this car? The ad doesn't tell us which of their cars was used for the picture, and I'm not enough of a vintage car buff to tell just by looking at the interior (although I think there may be some in the peanut gallery that can). In general, a modern car weighs roughly the same now as an equivalent model did way back in '54, thanks to heavy stuff like electronics and safety equipment. However, they're structured VERY differently. Your average Car of the Future is designed to crumple itself into a ball to dissipate a crash's energy, sacrificing itself to save your life. They didn't understand much about safety features in 1954.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) rates vehicular fatalities on a number of scales, but a key number to look at is the number of deaths per hundred million miles traveled in cars by the population. This is the "fatalities per VMT" (Vehicular Miles Traveled). This is clever, because it controls for the greater number of cars on the road these days, which would otherwise make it hard to compare numbers.

So, how many people died per hundred million miles driven in 1954? Six.
How many deaths per VMT in 2009? One and a half.

Also, current cars have more "soft touch" surfaces inside, like rubberized plastic, foam, and fabric. This makes the interior more quiet and less echoey. A conversation in the '54 Chrysler would have been like talking in an oil barrel. However, one thing all those shiny metal surfaces have going for them is that it's really easy to clean them. Viscera wipes right off.

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