1958 De Soto Firesweep. Photography by the author.
Note: I write up driving impressions of virtually every car I photograph, within a couple of days of the drive, so everything is fresh in my memory. Occasionally, because of the constraints of the story’s format, the prepared text doesn’t run. Now, thanks to the joys of the blogosphere, it can. This week, we reached back in our archives to January 2008, when we ran a 1958 De Soto Firesweep in Hemmings Classic Car.
Look out the windshield, and see the hood rising in the middle, tapering nicely. It points the way ahead. Ingress/egress is easier here than in some other cars of the era we’ve tried – traditionally we smash our knees on something while winding our girth behind the wheel, but there was no such case here. (At least, not initially.) The bench seat, part-vinyl with cloth seating areas, is admirably grippy – supposedly this is base trim, but it’s pretty sharp for something that’s supposed to be on the economic end of the scale. The pedestal mirror, as ever, manages to show little behind you and take up rather a lot of room where you’d rather be seeing traffic.
The speedometer employs a drum rather than a ribbon. The angle of the red slash leaves a question, however: is it the top or the bottom of the angle that we read to sort our speed? The difference between 75 and 80, on a California freeway, might be the difference between safe passage to your destination and a set of wigwags in your mirror as the local revenue-generators pay for their day out of the office.
In any case, the face of the dash seems surprisingly flat, lacking the 3D depth of Mopar instrument panels just a couple of years later: Wiper and cigarette-lighter knobs jut out, but the face itself, from the clear speedo cover to the metal trim, feels very two-dimensional. The clock, off toward the center of the dash, is too far away to do the driver any good, but the pods containing oil, amps, fuel and temp gauges, proper gauges mercifully, jut out like Playboy fantasies. In pictures they’re not so massive, and they’re a bit low, but considering the sheer cliff face of the rest of the dash, they seem very in-your-face.
Twist the key in the dash, and as the engine alights, the sound of the starter disengaging grinds loudly enough that it obliterates all other noises emanating from under the hood. Once it trails away, what’s left is a grinding whirr – or maybe it’s more of a whirring grind. That’ll be the idle, then – vaguely agricultural but not to the point where it feels like it wants to shake itself apart.
We drove with the AllState free-standing air conditioning unit on the driveshaft hump. It was sufficiently wide, straddling the transmission hump, that we had a hard time getting our right leg over to the gas pedal, thus negating the charm of its mere presence.
Press the shift button – there, next to your left hand as you grab the wheel at the proper 9-and-3 position – and it takes a second for it to clunk into gear. Acceleration is gentle and smooth on the uptake, if noisy: The DeSoto 350 is a roary little thing, which properly channeled could be mistaken for spunk but in a two-plus-ton full-size sedan is an ever-present reminder that you were too cheap to tick the next box for a less-stressed powerplant.
The manual steering, which we suspected coming in would be leaden and lifeless, in fact offered surprising response, had only about 10 degrees of slack in the wheel, and doesn’t require Franco Columbu-sized (or even Big E Langston-sized) arms to wrangle it into position at low speeds. (It’s not a fan of re-centering itself post-turn, however, and offers no assistance righting itself once the curve is behind you.) Happily, the wide whitewall radials on the wire wheels offer plenty of bite in turns, meaning that you can lean over quite a bit in turns (and you do, even at 30 MPH it feels like one degree of lean for every mile-per-hour with which you attack the turn) but still not lose grip.
We would be remiss if we didn’t say something about the brakes: The day of the photo shoot, the front drums weren’t feeling particularly well. In truth, even a halfway-down press of the manual drums was enough to send a shudder through the entire car, shaking the entire instrument panel and steering column, making us wish we’d planned better and simply coasted down instead. Clearly this isn’t representative of the line, and is restricted to the example we drove.
Even so, Forward Look De Sotos are few and far between these days, and those that see road duty, not squirreled away in museums are more unusual still. More the pity.
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