eBay Find: 1950 DeSoto Custom – The 65-Year-Old Daily Driver

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Prices of classic cars are going completely insane. Just last week a man spent 14.20 million Euros (16.05 million USD) buying an extremely deteriorated Ferrari 250GT California. Fortunately for the classic-car enthusiast that does not buy his cars as a simple investment to be kept in a climate-controlled garage until they appreciate enough to give a 30 % profit to the owner, there are still plenty of interesting vehicles to be found. This, for example.

DeSoto started sliding towards its eventual doom during the fifties. But when this car was launched nothing could possibly go wrong with DeSoto. It was 1950, the war was starting to become a sepia-toned memory, and America was still raking in the benefits of pent-up demand and plenty of production capacity thanks to the war. The middle class was getting ever more affluent and upwardly mobile, the key word being ‘mobile’. It’d be a couple more years for this peace and prosperity to reach its zenith and for cars to become stylish chariots that reflected this prosperity; for now, they were considerably more sedate.

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Now I know that it’s very hard to call something with that “Inspired by Shavemaster” grille sedate, but let’s consider its 1960 sibling and you’ll see what I am on about. Our featured model is a 1950 Custom, the top-line model. One of 72,664 built that year, and this one even has the very desirable two-speed windshield wipers. Power is provided by a 112 hp, 250 cid six through a three-on-the-tree manual transmission. The odometer shows 81,456 miles, and a DeSoto shop manual is included in the $11,900 (OBO) price.

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There’s an enormous problem regarding the interior pictures, though–specifically, there are none. Oh, the (admittedly photogenic) dashboard is very well documented, but we can see only seat edges in the listing. On the one hand, they show the upholstery in pretty good nick; on the other, it could be that only those parts of the upholstery are in pretty good nick. It’s also missing a hubcap, but a replacement is just a Google search away (starting at $9.95 on eBay).

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So if you want to own a driveable piece of history that will not break the bank, and you can tolerate having to explain to everyone what a DeSoto is, the listing is here. What could possibly go wrong?