Transport: Little Fellow

Long-legged, youthful-looking Powel Crosley Jr. towered above a tiny automobile at the Indianapolis motor speedway one day last week while his grandson broke a bottle of gasoline on its nose and 200 Crosley Corp. dealers applauded the christening. Then Mr. Crosley tucked his six-foot-four frame comfortably behind the steering wheel and posed for photographers.

What the Crosley dealers saw as he sat there was a sleek, rakish, convertible sedan with tiny wheels, wide doors, a neatly streamlined hood and front end. Designed to sell cheaply, like Crosley radios and refrigerators, to run economically (like Mr. Crosley's Cincinnati Reds), the new four-passenger car has a two-seater companion, a convertible coupè which can also be used as a quarter-ton delivery car.

End product of lifelong tinkering by Powel Crosley with lightweight automobiles, the new car has an 80-inch wheelbase, 40-inch tread, a two-cylinder, air-cooled engine which gives it a high speed of 50 miles an hour, and runs 50 to 60 miles on a gallon of gasoline. Two quarts of oil fill its crankcase, four gallons of gas its fuel tank. At $325 for the coupe, $25 more for the sedan, it will undersell by $62 the only other U. S. midget on the automotive market, the American Bantam.

At a new factory at Richmond, Ind. and an older plant in Cincinnati, on May 15 Crosley Corp. expects to start production with 200 cars a day, sell them through the 25,000-odd Crosley agencies, where they can be rolled in at most front doors, displayed on sales floors among radios and refrigerators. Markets which Crosley dealers will go for hardest: the man who cannot afford a new higher-priced car; the family with one standard car which could use a second for shopping, commuting, taking the children to school. But, as Willys has found, the market for cars that can be built to sell new below $600 is strictly limited, is always subject to invasion by cheaper models of the watchful Big Three.