Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: What did Harry Hartz do in a DeSoto that had never been done before – or likely has been done ever since?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you are correct.
DeSoto is of course one of the multitude of automotive brands that came into this world with high hopes of pertinacity, but which invariably ended up on the name plate scrape heap like so many others. The Chrysler sub-brand started out as though it could do no wrong, selling 81,065 cars its debut year, an admirable achievement that would stand until the 1960 debut of the Ford Falcon.
Chrysler created DeSoto to be their mid-tier brand, a strategy that was initially complicated by the Corporation’s purchase of the similarly positioned Dodge a year prior. Chrysler tried moving DeSoto up-market in the mid-’30s, giving the brand an Airflow model just like Walter P’s namesake had, only based on the shorter DeSoto chassis. Both models of Airflow proved to be a sales disaster. DeSoto was particularly negatively impacted because they didn’t have additional volume models to make up for the Airflow’s lack of popularity.
The company is also remembered for offering the first mass-produced American automobile with hidden headlights, the 1942 model gaining the feature right before all auto production was shut down for the war. That was the only year they were offered, DeSoto dropping the feature when production restarted in ’46. It was long before then however – before even the Airflow disaster – that a DeSoto participated in a promotional stunt that had never before been undertaken.
From Desaga, A Brief History of DeSoto:

In 1933, DeSoto recruited another race car driver for a more astounding publicity stunt. This time, Harry Hartz drove a DeSoto backwards across the country. Hartz peered his way across the continent through a rear window turned windshield.

That stunt, which involved the DeSoto’s body being installed backwards on the chassis, led the way to the Airflow debacle which almost killed DeSoto in the ’30s. By the ’50s Chrysler’s lineup had become overly crowded and the brand once again became threatened. Chrysler had moved itself down-market upon the introduction of the Imperial brand squeezing DeSoto from above, while both Plymouth and Dodge undercut it from below. Add to that the 1958 Recession taking a bite out of the middle of the car market, as well as new cheaper cars just hitting dealerships, and DeSoto’s end was written on the wall. Chrysler eventually killed off the brand after the 1960 model year, 32 years after giving it birth.
Image: Curbside Classic