It wasn’t just the Crosley; after the war, there was a raft of micro-car and small-car ideas being floated. It was a bit like the recent/current EV start-up era, where lots of entrepreneurs thought that Americans were going to snap up all sorts of cheap little cars, like this Town Shopper, which undoubtedly had a industrial air cooled single out back. Yes, these women were going to be thrilled to be seen parking it in front of the department store.
It even made the cover of Popular Mechanics:
By this point (1948) I’d imagine that the post-war shortage of cars was on its way to an end, and people could buy a whole lot of used car for $595, sans freight.
I’m not sure having an event in San Francisco for these would be the greatest idea since I can’t imagine them having a very easy time struggling to get up those steep hills with a passenger aboard (no matter how lightweight).
Purpose-built golf carts, gas and electric, probably gobbled up much of the market share those microcars were aiming for over the next few decades.
Inflation adjusted about $7k. Can’t imagine a scenario where this would make sense.
Guess no one else could either.
+1. I just came here to post the same math you did.
Adjusted for inflation from June ’48, the magazine price is $2.83. CHEAP!
Oh wait, that’s from another (later) magazine.
I realize safety wasn’t high on the priority list back then, and I’m sure these weren’t intended for use too far from home base, but I’m just imagine one of these tin cans tangling with something like a ’44 Buick whose driver wasn’t paying close attention. Those ladies would be squished like bugs.
My little Florida town is now a “Golf Cart Community”, so we’re now free to roam around a defined downtown area on our carts. They’re only allowed on low-speed streets, but there are a few crossings of higher traffic thoroughfares. I white knuckle those intersections when I have to cross over an uphill grade on a low-speed battery-powered golf cart where the traffic is thick with F150s, jacked up Wranglers and various Bro-Dozers. Maybe I’m just losing my nerve as I age.
One of these tangling up with a ’44 Buick would have been quite an unusual situation, given Buick’s production volume for model year 1944.
Touche’
I would think that tangling with a Buick of any vintage would be quite unpleasant for a Town Shopper’s occupants.
In doing a bit of research on the Town Shopper, it appears that it was promoted by a man named Harrison M. Kleinschmidt, a Montana native who through much of his life was in regular trouble with things like theft and arson convictions. How he got connected with an attempt to sell a microcar is unclear, but it was short lived… this car was promoted for a few months in 1948 in a few western states – the proprietor was accepting deposits to set up dealerships – and then nothing was ever heard about it again. I suspect the examples that were shown at hotels like the one in the ad above weren’t working examples (just a guess). Sometimes it was promoted as the “Harvey Town Shopper” — I think after the Harvey Hotel in Helena, Montana where Mr. Kleinschmidt lived at the time.
Oddly, Mr. Kleinschmidt did have a moment of notoriety a few years later on. He entered into a mining business with some other relatives. Their mine was rather remote, and he volunteered to supply weather information to the National Weather Service from his location. On one morning in January 1954, he took a temperature reading of -69°F, which was the lowest temperature ever recorded in the US, and that record stood for quite some time.
Mr. Kleinschmidt died in California in 1972.
I’m willing to bet it was a Uranium mine. I’m also pretty sure Kleinschmidt’s flash of inspiration for the Town Shopper came when he looked at the heap of War surplus wash tubs and Tecumseh motors that he was about to set on fire and decided to steal them instead.
No doubt he said, “I’ll ride this post war euphoria into an opportunity to talk big and travel in style on someone else’s dime to stay in fancy hotels like the St Francis for as long as possible. If I play my cards right they won’t catch on until 1949 at the earliest. By then I’ll be rich or in jail. Again”
It wasn’t January 26, 1954 (my birthdate) was it by chance? I’d like to think something at least a little noteworthy happened on the day I was born.
Close… it was January 20. Here’s a writeup of how that was recorded:
https://www.umt.edu/this-is-montana/columns/stories/montana-70below.php
Showed the picture to my wife. She said it would be a cold day in you-know-where for me to go shopping in that thing!
I think this is one of those ideas that makes a lot more sense back when most people could not conceive of a husband and wife each having a separate car. Most families had “the car” and probably wished for something like this – inexpensive and small for those little short errands that folks often do- it would have made a kind of sense, at least in theory.
But even then, something with Model T comfort (but without Model T durability, commonality and price) would not have been an easy sell.
It took awhile for incomes to catch up, and then the 2 car family became a thing, and everyone said “oh, of course!”
Not only that but the sort of massive zoning-separated suburban development that obliges residents’ every single trip to be done by car was only starting to be built in 1948. Most people still lived in cities, pre-Depression “streetcar suburbs” and small-to-midsize towns that still had compact, walkable downtown business districts and could get quite a bit accomplished on foot and by public transit.
“Suburban Living” was being pushed hard as the wave of the future but it would take at least a decade after the war to become the lived reality of a critical mass of people who found the 2-car household a necessity.
That “something” arrived about a decade later and was called “Volkswagen”
Popular Mechanics subscription list must have been full of all sorts of tight-fisted-with-a-buck types who dedicated their lives to coming up with all sorts of low-cost solutions to just about anything. If it could (theoretically) get the job done for half the price of the mainstream solution, I swear the magazine had room for it in their pages.
Yeah, Popular Mechanics was chock-full of what is now known as ‘click-bait’, sort of like a National Enquirer for tinkerers.
Oh, having subscribed to both as a kid, I’d say Mechanix Illustrated was way worse on this front than was Popular Mechanics. As luck would have it, I only read them for car reviews and tests. I recognized my innate klutziness in tinkering and such (as well as my aversion to getting my hands dirty), and steered clear of their projects.
In it’s early years Mechanix Illustrated was always first in line for a house ad in Captain Marvel (Shazam, not the Marvel Captain Marvel…long story) comics since both were Fawcett publications and it was felt that superhero comics were a phase readers (mostly boys) grew out of while a kid who read their technical magazine would be a reader for life.
As it turned out, MI basically died when Tom McCahill did and Fawcett folded not long after
Too small to use for shopping where do you put your stuff, if you wanted to spend on a small shopping car there were plenty of used options around for that money with doors and roofs and 4 cylinders to get you around.
I don’t know when they came into existance as a class, but it sure seems like today’s Neighborhood Electrice Vehicle (NEV) or Low-Speed Vehicle (LSV) handily covers the market that the Town Shopper might have been targeting back in the day.
In 1962 or 3 I spent a year at a different school with a longer bus ride. We would pass the new subdivision of River Hills where about once a week we would cross paths with a solid looking middle aged guy sitting in a King Midget waiting to pull out on state highway 13 and head for downtown St Paul. Some people just make it work.
Availability mattered more than price in those years. Crosley was only a bit cheaper than a base Chevy, but Crosley’s plant was classified as appliances, so it had more access to materials.
Crosley was (marginally) a practical car for city use, while this thing was not practical for any purpose.
Crosley could also get significantly more cars out of a given amount of steel than Chevy did.
Looks like a cute deathtrap ! .
Some woman blabbing on her cell phone banged into the back of my 2001 Ranger on the i5 freeway this afternoon , I don’t see any damage but had I been in this I’d be walking at beast, more likely dead .
-Nate
I tried to confirm if there could possibly be any war surplus (Cadillac tank engine, Rolls-Royce Merlin, etc.) material used in this vehicle.
I came up empty handed.
This piece from 1947 speaks on a couple of occasions of “…substantial automobiles”, presumably a backhanded reference to things like this from startups like this, as well as Crosleys and the few small imports starting to come in (mainly at that point from “export-or-die” Britain).
https://youtu.be/yTWYBoGkgJM
40mpg was aimed at Americans who came out of war gas rationing combined with the relatively poor efficiency of the typical flat head six and eight of the day. In a few years, OHV four cylinder European imports could get that.
I’d take a Davis Divan over this. I know, that’s a low bar.