Martin BUCKLEY
‘The engineering folly of its cantilever roof was confirmed by the fact that it was never attempted again. By anyone’
The Chrysler Norseman, representing 15 months of work and a lire45m invoice from Ghia, lies at the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Nantucket. It went down on 26 July 1956 with the 29,000-ton SS Andrea Doria, on the final leg of its 4000-mile trip from Genoa to New York. Two days earlier the car’s co-creator, 47-yearold Virgil Exner, had suffered a massive heart attack. The Chrysler design boss, who named the car for his Scandinavian heritage, was so ill following open-heart surgery that news of the Norseman’s fate was kept from him at first.
This was just one of dozens of prototypes built for Chrysler by Ghia, mainly because ’50s Italian labour came cheap. There are a few surviving shots of this giant, gruesome coupe, but nobody at Chrysler saw it in the metal and no one seems sure of the colour: metallic green with grey leather is the favourite guess. On an Imperialsized 129in wheelbase yet powered by one of the smaller Hemis, the Norseman’s dramatically sweeping roofline may have inspired the Rambler Marlin but its cantilever construction – only supported by the C-pillars in the name of all-round vision – was unique. The engineering folly of this is confirmed by the fact that it was never attempted again. Its windscreen was said to be shatter-proof, which seems doubtful, and the supposedly aerodynamic underside was at odds with the ungainly ‘floating’ bumpers and wind-catching wheelarches. The 12ft-square rear ’screen retracted electrically into the roof, leaving rear passengers open to the elements.
The car clearly represented a lot of work even for the efficient Ghia workshops in Turin, so when the Norseman missed its scheduled sailing it was simply booked on to the next available ship, which happened to be the ill-fated Andrea Doria. Not a cargo vessel but a cruise liner, it was billed as one of the most luxurious afloat and believed to be ‘unsinkable’. On 17 July the Norseman was crated up and stowed on board for what would usually have been an uneventful crossing, stopping at Naples and Gibraltar.
On the evening of the 25th, the MS Stockholm struck the Andrea Doria: mistakes were made in interpreting the liners’ radar in thick fog, but by the time the errors were spotted it was too late. Within minutes the Italian ship was listing; 11 hours later she was 250ft below the waves.
According to Peter Grist’s excellent biography Visioneer, Exner took the news of the demise of the Norseman – ‘the world’s most automatic car’ – on his handsome chin. It had been due for the bin anyway: after doing the rounds of the shows, the $100k ideas car was earmarked for crash testing. Exner simply saw the watery loss as an opportunity to do something else: if the insurance company coughed up, why worry?
By ’56, years of chain-smoking, black coffee and late nights had broken the health of the Raymond Lowey protégé as he worked on the ‘Forward Look’ designs that would rejuvenate Chrysler’s fortunes in the second half of the ’50s. Exner was working on the ’61 Chryslers when he had his heart attack and, while recovering, didn’t have much influence on the poorly received ’62 cars, downsized on the orders of Chrysler bosses. Exner (1909-’73) didn’t make particularly old bones, but post-chrysler probably had more fun working with his son on projects such as his neo-classic effort on the last post-war Bugatti chassis, the revival of the Stutz Bearcat and my favourite guilty pleasure, the Duesenberg II.
Amid the maelstrom of concept cars that emerged from Detroit at the time, you wonder if anyone would recall the Norseman had it not met such a famous fate. The wreck of the Andrea Doria is a magnet for treasure-hunting divers, and has claimed the lives of a few including the experienced David Bright. He was the first and may yet be the last to see what remains of the car, reportedly a barely recognisable heap of rust.