1956 Chrysler Norseman

The Chrysler Norseman was a concept car built in 1956. It was a four-seat coupe. Although designed by Chrysler's stylists, actual construction was contracted out to the Italian coach-building firm of Ghia. Ghia had experience in the construction of low-volume vehicles and one-off prototypes, having built the successful Lincoln Futura concept the previous year. It took Ghia's craftsmen over a year to build the complex Norseman.

Chrysler wanted a fully drivable vehicle, not just a rolling mockup, so all normal systems for the powertrain, braking, suspension, were installed. More difficult to fabricate was its unusual cantilevered roof, which was secured to the body only at the rear C pillars. There were no side pillars, and at the front the roof rested only lightly on a fully frameless windshield. There was a power sunroof as well, an advanced feature, that was difficult to integrate into a slender roof structure with no structural support at the front. The door glass was ventless (having no small vent window at the front), a styling theme that would become popular some ten years later.

The car was to be a featured attraction of Chrysler's auto show exhibit for 1957 and was shipped by Ghia to New York City in July 1956. The car was shipped on the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria, which was involved in a collision off the coast of Massachusetts and sank, with the loss of fifty-one lives and all cargo.

As a result, the car was never shown to the public and was never seen by most of the stylists who worked on it. It is known to automotive historians, however, via photographs and specifications. Chrysler never used the cantilevered roof design in any subsequent vehicle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Norseman

For 53 years, the lost liner Andrea Doria has rested on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, some 40 miles south of the island of Nantucket. The wreckage, lying on its starboard side about 260 feet below the ocean's surface, is one of the world's most tempting, and most difficult, targets for divers, at least 14 of whom have lost their lives while exploring what remains of what was once the flagship of the Italian Line. Because the hulk lies at such a great depth and presents so many challenges, it's referred to among professional divers as "the Mount Everest of dives."

The first divers reached the wreckage the day after the Andrea Doria's tragic collision with the Swedish American liner Stockholm in thick fog off the New England coast, and returned with photographs that they sold to Life magazine. They were the first of many who went down in search of treasure: jewelry from the first-class cabins, the contents of the pursers' safes, place settings from the dining room. Only a few were aware of the presence of another treasure, one that by its sheer size was doomed to decay in the blackness of the ship's hold: a show car known as the Norseman.

In light of the deaths of 46 of the Andrea Doria's 1,134 passengers and five of her 572 crew members, most of whom were killed by the impact, contemporary news reports about the loss of the show car were commendably brief. "The Norseman, a revolutionary new Chrysler Corporation 'idea' car, was lost in the sinking of the Italian liner Andrea Doria," the Associated Press reported. "The experimental car was built for Chrysler in Turin, Italy, and was being shipped to the United States for its first public showing. A Chrysler spokesman said Friday the Norseman cost about $150,000, including a year's engineering work. It was insured." Short and to the point.

The story behind those brief facts is this: The Norseman, a big, fastback hardtop coupe, was one in a series of collaborations between the Chrysler Corporation and Turin's Carrozzeria Ghia. The corporation had come to rely on its Italian connections for the construction of idea cars since Pinin Farina's construction of a custom body on a 1950 Plymouth chassis, because executives liked the quality of the work and considered the cost, starting at just $10,000 per car, to be ridiculously low. Ghia was given the contract to build the XX-500 in 1950, and was soon set to work on a stream of idea cars, one after another--the K-310, the Falcon, the Plainsman and the Flight-Sweeps, I and II, among them. In 1956 came the commission for the Norseman, which Chrysler intended as one of its stars of the 1957 show circuit.

The inspiration for the Norseman lay not in Europe, but in Chrysler's own styling studios. William Brownlie, then assistant manager of the studio that produced the Norseman, recalled in a 1996 interview that he was the one to suggest building a car without A-pillars, which was far and away the car's most distinctive feature. The idea gained support. The designers--styling director Virgil Exner and chief stylist Cliff Voss among them--were concerned about the perceived practicality of the design, particularly the protection that the roof would afford passengers in a rollover. Quarter-inch steel rods located where the A-pillars would have been held the roof in tension; in a rollover, the theory went, they would snap, allowing the roof to spring upward. A Chrysler engineer worked with glassmaker PPG Industries on the development of a crush-resistant windshield. The corporation's publicists made the somewhat doubtful claim that the cantilevered roof could support eight times the car's weight.

Incorporated into the fastback design was a glass rear window that could be retracted up into the roof. A character line began at the crease of the hideaway headlamps, and continued straight down the side of the car, stopping just short of the tips of the rear fenders. Those fenders ended in oval-shaped openings, in which hefty chrome bumper blades floated; each of these held three small, round taillamps. At the front of the car was a broad, oval grille with large, cylindrical pods at the extremities; a bumper blade ran between these two, while fine, chromed vertical teeth filled the opening. Sculpting was kept to a minimum; aside from a pair of modest fins, broadly flared wheel openings and an echoing sweep in the fastback roofline, the look was long, low and clean.

Chrysler sent a thorough set of surface drawings, but not the final 3/8-scale clay model, to Ghia, where craftsmen began constructing the full-scale car. The Norseman was to ride on a specially constructed chassis that, as Brownlie recalled, consisted of frame rails, a floorpan, a full underpan and diagonal cross-welded sections. The wheelbase stretched a generous 129 inches. Aluminum, instead of the usual steel, was used for the body panels, hammered over a full-scale wooden buck of the design.

Typical of Ghia's efforts for Chrysler, the car was to be fully functional. The powertrain was standard-issue, including a 331-cubic-inch overhead-valve V-8 rated at 235 horsepower, which drove the rear wheels through a two-speed, push-button PowerFlite automatic transmission. The interior had a futuristic theme, with pods suspended from the upper crash pad for gauges and controls. Four bucket seats were provided, upholstered in green and gray metallic leather. According to Ghia's notes, some sort of luminescent paint was used on the backs of the front seats in a kind of interior lighting experiment.

There's some disagreement about what colors were chosen for the Norseman's paintwork. According to Chrysler's records, the car was painted in a two-tone metallic green with red accents in the wheel openings; Brownlie recalled that Exner had specified that the car be painted silver, with a red leather interior and a black accent on the roof. Italian journalists who saw the car before it was crated up for its transatlantic journey reported that it wore two shades of blue. Figuring that there would be plenty of time for studio work once the Norseman arrived in the U.S., Ghia took precious few photographs of the car before it was loaded onto the Andrea Doria.

Of course, the liner never reached New York harbor. On the night of July 25, 1956, blanketed in a fog so thick that it prevented seeing from one side of the ship to the other, the liner steamed at reduced speed toward its destination, sounding its fog whistle every 100 seconds as crew members strained at the radar screens. The Stockholm, too, was proceeding cautiously, having left New York for Göteborg, Sweden, with 534 passengers and 215 crew members aboard.

Each ship knew of the other's presence, yet they collided, the Stockholm's bow making a deep gash in the Andrea Doria's starboard side, and ripping apart her watertight compartments. Though no cause was formally determined, evidence has since come to light that that the Stockholm's radar operators had tragically misread the display, believing it was on the 15-mile setting when, in fact, it was on the 5-mile scale.

The Andrea Doria remained afloat for 11 hours, long enough for other ships in the area to respond to its SOS. All of her surviving passengers were evacuated. Mesmerizing photographs of the ship's final hours won a Pulitzer Prize for photographer Harry Trask and the newspaper he worked for, the Boston Traveler.

Exner had suffered a heart attack, and was recuperating in a hospital bed on the day of the liner's sinking. It was not until several days later that his family gently broke the news about the loss of the Norseman. There was no effort to recreate it. Some of its styling cues would later be used on other Chrysler idea cars, but not the cantilevered roof.

The Stockholm was repaired and, amazingly, is still afloat, visiting Mediterranean ports of call as the Athena. It is the ship's eighth name since the collision. And what of the Norseman itself?

In the mid-1990s, David Bright, a leading underwater researcher and explorer, wrote on his website about finding the remains of the car. "While looking for a lost diver, I had an opportunity to see the Norseman for myself in the cargo hold," he wrote. "Normally, all passenger cars were placed in the garage section of the Andrea Doria that is slightly aft of the collision point where the Stockholm impaled the Doria underneath the bow wing bridge. These cars would have been placed onto the Doria by use of a crane and meticulously parked in the garage and arranged strategically for stability. However, the Norseman was no passenger vehicle and was specially packed and treated with extra care. The Norseman was put into a wooden crate and placed in the number 2 cargo area.

"The crate had disintegrated and the car was in very, very poor condition. The ocean's salt water invaded the Norseman's metal and most of the car is rust, corrosion and a heap of indistinguishable junk. The tires are still there and have assisted to [sic] its identification.

"I have been back to the cargo area several times (it is pretty scary in the cargo hold because the ship is lying on its starboard side) and visited the Norseman on a couple other occasions.... I have not been back to this cargo site since 1994 and with all the decay that the wreck has had over the past 10 years, it is doubtful if I will (or anyone else) ever get a chance to see the remains of the Norseman again."

His prediction was sadly true. David Bright died in July 2006 after a dive to the Andrea Doria in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the sinking. He suffered decompression sickness and went into cardiac arrest, and was pronounced dead a short time later at Cape Cod Hospital. He was 49.

This article originally appeared in the August, 2009 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.

Marty Martino is currently making a replica of the 1956 Chrysler Norseman Concept Car.



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