AUTOS: The Forty-Niners

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For two nights this week, trains of snorting vans lumbered up to Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and disgorged rich cargoes from Detroit. Inside the hotel, swarms of workmen sweated under floodlights to turn the Grand Ballroom into the fanciest automobile showroom on earth. On a wide stage, they set up an endless chain conveyor and a revolving platform for the new models; across the room, they reared a 25-ft. pylon above a cluster of jewel-bright auto engines.

For its first big postwar coming-out party, the debut of the 1949 Chevrolet and Pontiac, General Motors Corp. had spent a million dollars. The world's biggest automaker had bundled threescore U.S. automotive editors (and plenty of potables) aboard its Astra Domed, diesel-drawn "Train of Tomorrow," for a free ride from Detroit to New York. It would pick up the tab for a three-day whirl of luncheons, receptions and banquets for 5,000 people. All over the U.S., G.M. dealers were also cutting capers; Omaha Chevrolet dealers sent a flagpole sitter aloft for nine days (at $100 a day) to whomp up interest in the unveiling of new models.

Beast of Burden. This chromium-plated razzle-dazzle was not only G.M.'s recognition of the approaching buyers' market for all cars; it was also a salute to the role which the automobile plays in U.S. life. To the average American, a car is much more than a chromium-jawed beast of burden. It is the next thing to being a member of the family, regarded as affectionately as the Bedouin regards his camel, or the Mongolian tribesman his shaggy pony. It is both a necessity and luxury, a help in making a livelihood and a means of escape. When he buys a new car, the average American approaches the job with considerable gravity and excitement, and often only after a rousing argument at the dinner table.*

Four for Four. This week, with every gilded chassis and every cutaway transmission in place, G.M.'s President Charles Erwin Wilson and his four executive vice presidents would stand atop a marble staircase at the Waldorf to greet their guests and show their wares, on which they had spent a round $150 million for retooling. All of G.M.'s cars showed a drastic change either inside or out. They were so low and rakish that a small man could look over the top. They had wider seats (average front seat width: 62 inches), little change in wheelbases (but in some models shorter overall length), and were up an average of 3.5% in price.

The biggest eye-poppers were four $30,000 Cadillacs, the costliest production cars ever built in the U.S. (and described by hard-breathing pressagents as "sleek and sybaritic specimens of automotive splendor").

One was a black town car built for Mrs. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., wife of G.M.'s board chairman. It has interior fittings of silver, a chauffeur's umbrella, a pearl-grey clipped sheepskin carpet, a short-wave telephone, a gold compact, and a lifetime fountain pen. Nearby was a gunmetal "hardtop" convertible designed for President Wilson and christened the Coup de Ville. Upholstered in pleated gunmetal leather, it has a telephone, pull-out desk and engraved vanity case. ("Not that I use powder," quipped Wilson.)