Welcome to Down On The Street, where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. We saw our last 1940s Alameda vehicle four months ago, so it's time for another.
We're going prewar with this Chrysler, which I found parked just around the corner from the '60 Bel Air sedan and the '73 Corvette. It looks to be in very good shape for a street-parked 70-year-old car.
The '40 Windsor came with a 108-horsepower Chrysler Flathead Six, which would be a laughable number nowadays… until you consider that this car's shipping weight was only 3,210 pounds. Back in 1940, car buyers had to put up with road noise, and they were forced to sweat when the weather got hot. You had no holders for your ridiculously undersized soda bottles, and the kids in back were forced to look out the window for entertainment- you know, at cows and stuff. If you wrecked- which was pretty easy to do, considering the sketchy brakes and low-tech tires of the era- you ate dashboard! But all those inconveniences made for a very lightweight vehicle for its size, and thus we have a big suicide-door sedan that weighs 315 pounds less than a 2010 Chrysler Sebring (and is approximately 315,000,000 times better looking).