The Airstream Caravans were a fixture of the 1950’s, including to quite exotic locales like Africa. I came across some pictures of the 1957 Caravan to Mexico, and thought I’d share them, as the kind of vehicles pulling big trailers has changed so much over time. Does one ever see a sedan pulling anything other than a very modest little trailer anymore? How about six cylinder sedans with some 125 hp or so? There’s several here.
Great pictures! There’s a really rare 51-52 Chrysler Imperial sedan in the 4th picture between the Ford and the Chevy. And the 56-57 Rambler in the 2nd shot. It looks like Oldsmobile was a favorite, and I’ll bet the Rocket V8/HydraMatic combo was pretty good with a trailer.
Wow. A different world on a different planet!
I’d think many of these would work alright for towing: decent low-end torque and (relatively) long wheelbases. The roads themselves would have limited the speeds, so lack of horsepower might be less of an issue. I do wonder how the transmissions would have coped.
Pictures like this make me wonder just how much of bill of goods we’ve been sold on towing capabilities anymore. Granted, everything here is front engine, rear wheel drive, but most of them are probably automatics, and the newest car I could easily pick out is a 1956 Rambler which is probably a six with a Borg-Warner(?) automatic.
Which brings to question, do we really need a 4×4 large pickup with a Hemi to tow a trailer? Maybe front wheel drive transmissions can’t take the brute force put on them from the old Turbo-Hydramatics, Ultramatics and whatever Chrysler was using pre-1957, but are they really that much weaker?
Or is it just another excuse for the old American “buying cars by the pound”?
Which brings to question, do we really need a 4×4 large pickup with a Hemi to tow a trailer?
No, but it sure makes it a lot easier. And safer. Can you imagine driving a ’53 Chevy six or Rambler six with an Airstream in today’s traffic? Which now rolls along at 70-80 mph on the freeway, with very small gaps between cars? Help yourself!
Average speeds were very much slower then, and traffic density was generally much lower. I bet these folks rarely exceeded 45-50 mph.
The crew cab pickup of today is just a drastically better big sedan of the 1950s that happens to have an open trunk. Unless you get a rigid cover for it. Have we not been saying that here for almost forever?
The other thing is that more than ever people want to take everything with them, and they have a lot more stuff. So they need the bed for the motorcycles, ATVS ect.
Additionally trailers have gotten larger and heavier. They now have things like Quartz counter tops, big screen TVs, power awnings, powered slide out(s), microwaves ect.
Olds specialized in towing, in the same way that DeSoto specialized in taxis. You could order a wide variety of heavy-duty parts for towing.
Olds specialized in towing
Once again you’re making a sweeping statement without any basis. There’s nothing that supports that; all the manufacturers offered options for towing, including HD rear suspensions, cooling, higher capacity tires, etc.
If you look at all the pictures, of this caravan and others, you’ll see that Olds are not that disproportionately represented. Sure, they were a good choice, but there’s plenty of other makes well represented too.
And good luck finding any DeSoto cabs by this time. That was in the ’40s when they had a somewhat bigger share than average in cabs. By the ’50s, most cab companies were using entry level brands, as they were cheaper, or Checkers.
Imagine what a bonkers road trip that must have been for the 1950s. I wonder how long it took to get all those vehicles going in the morning then parking them all at night. If you click on the link, the map shows they were going about 200 miles a day.
Oh! The caravans and hordes went south back then?
This was a common site until very recently family sedans towing caravans/trailers in New Zealand and I’m guessing Australia until big small 4 door diesel pickups have become the new family car which eerily has followed the US.
I personally think double cab utes are stupid and pointless because the tray is so small
You may be able to transport a jetski so can a 90 EA Falcon wagon, which a friend used to do.
In New Zealand in the 70’s the only reason you brought a 6 cylinder sedan was to tow, theres all the Australian usual suspects but Triumph 2500 were extremely popular, as well as Rover 3500 not to mention Toyota Crown 2600 and Datsun 260c
Not towing but inside with the seats down in the EA wagon.
Not eerie, Shaun, but sadly, cultural imperialism. Oz exists in many ways as one of the world’s many 51st US States, as does our island neighbour NZ (who’s btw still mentioned in the begining of the Oz Constitution “if it decides to join”!). Culturally, it’s an odd connection, both embraced (the double-cabs, say) but also regarded somewhat warily.
I too think the current rash of dual-cabs is stupid for the reasons you mention, and I will give Americans this: if you’re going to do all your motoring in a half-truck, at least make the truck part useful like they have!
Actually, the 4wd/dual-cab towing the van was hugely influenced by legislation here. It changed such that the tow vehicle couldn’t be less than something like 1/2 as heavy as the van, and as folk wanted to take more and more of their suburbia with them, the bigger vans meant cars just weren’t heavy enough anymore.
I never realised that the US had such a caravan culture. We thought Airstreams existed purely to be converted into trendy diners.
In the UK caravan culture was huge, but the govt changed the law such that you had to pass a test to tow anything big, so only old folk left doing it now. It’s led to a huge boom in camper vans. You pay mega-bucks for an old skool VW now.
It used to be huge, peaked and had been in decline for many years, however while the tide had already started to turn the Pandemic has given the industry a significant boost.
There is an Airstream dealer, near my local Costco and once things started to reopen their inventory has been steadily falling. I’m sure some of that is due to production interruptions but a lot of it is due to people who want to travel and social distance.
So yeah you can count the RV industry as one of the industries that is doing better thanks to the Pandemic.
Need a hoot?
Lucy and Desi, in the movie “The Long, Long Trailer”.
Looks to me like a full-fledged single-wide mobile home, pulled by a typical ’50s passenger car.