1955 Desoto Fireflight

1955 Desoto Fireflight, click picture to enlarge.

I am glad that I was born at a time where I was old enough to live through and enjoy what was the golden age of automotive history in the 1950's and 1960's. As you can tell by these old car pictures the cars made before WWII were mostly drab and bleak looking with a garish boxxy appearance. After the war when the manufacturers started producing cars for the public they still had much of that same blahness to them. But in the 1950's they changed all of that and started designing style and flash and glamour in the cars. This 1955 Desoto is a good example of that.

But there was an unorseen problem in that. Many of the manufacturers outdid themselves to their own hurt. What I mean by that is that they introduced new and improved features in the cars that were just too far in advance of what the public was ready to accept and so they rejected all of "these new-fangled gadgets" in favor of what they were more familiar with. Some examples of this were the Desoto, Packard, Hudson and Studebaker cars that died by the wayside.

The 1955 Desoto was a thing of beauty and a real pleasure to drive. It sported a powerful 291 cid Hemi-head V-8 that would literally flat out fly with you if you pressed the petal to the metal. The Hemi-head V-8 was very popular in those years and many different cars had them.