1941 Preview

This week, as several hundred thousand automobile workers returned from long Labor Day weekends, motor bigwigs held many hurried last-minute confabs before drawing the curtain on the 1941 model year. Weekly production idled around 30,000 cars last month, is expected to rise towards 115,000 or more by Thanksgiving. Charts called for 1,200,000 cars in the final 1940 quarter, boosting this year's output to a three-year high of 4,200,000, up 13% from 1939's 3,733,000. For 1941, few motormakers expect to equal the 5,016,000 cars produced in 1937. But they bubbled with pre-auto-show enthusiasm.

>The industry's biggest enigma was, as usual, Henry Ford. In 48 years of motor-making, Ford has never sold a six-cylinder car. But newshawks in Detroit last week heard that 400 six-cylinder engines were in the huge River Rouge Plant, guessed the 1941 Ford line would include a six. (Other sixes, especially Chevrolet and Plymouth, have cut into Ford's market, reduced him from first place in 1930 to third in 1940.) Fordmen were mum, but Ward's Automotive Reports said: "Sample [six-cylinder] models are now being turned out."

>Nash, the No. 7 (in 1940 sales) producer, gave a preview of its big, bullet-shaped, roomy Ambassador 600. Of advance design (one-piece body and chassis), it will compete in the low-price range with Chevrolet, Ford and Plymouth, who make more than 50% of U. S. sales. Fat, fast-talking Nash Chief, George Walter Mason blandly predicted a 100% sales jump, backed his hopes with $7,000,000 in development and plant expansion.

>Ever since young Harlow Curtice took it over in 1933, Buick has increased its sales with such monotonous regularity that Detroit is almost tired of calling it "the Hot Car." The 1940 Buick, with its popular torpedo body, sold 283,000, an all-time record. For 1941, Hot Carmaker Curtice talks about 300,000 or more, has expanded his plant partly for Buicks, partly for possible conversion to military engines for defense.

Meanwhile, Plymouth, Studebaker, Oldsmobile, Hudson, Willys and others showed the trade their new models. But at peak of the ballyhoo, Ward's soberly announced: "The automobile industry will do well to uncover in the model year ahead a volume of business as good as that in the model year just concluded." Translation: "Things don't look so hot." Ward's reasons: lower anticipated public buying because of lower profits, higher taxes, reduced auto exports, conscription, higher car prices (an exception: Nash, which lowered prices on expectations of larger output), general uncertainty.

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