New Cars

John North Willys, "one of the handsomest executives," the "Little Napoleon" of the automotive industry,* set his pince-nez back on his small, sharp nose. The bustle roused by several hundred enthusiastic Willys-Overland dealers convening at Toledo was slightly disheveling to this trim 53-year-oldster/- who "builds automobiles, lives automobiles and talks automobiles." There was, however, no weariness in that long-lipped smile, which can caress a lackadaisical dealer into a "gogetter."

The dealers were going to sell the new Willys-Overland "Whippet," a low-slung coursing car designed to make 55 miles an hour and 30 miles on a gallon of gasoline; a roustabout car that "turns on a dime," stops with a swish of its four-wheel brakes. Out in the yards 885 of these machines waited to be driven away to dealer showrooms in the farthest reaches of the country. Mr. Willys was content. He was the first manufacturer to offer a U. S. equivalent to the diminutive European touring-traffic-and-economy cars like the Bean in England, the Citroen and Baby Peugeot in France.

This week Willys-Overland dealers will exhibit the new models while the factory speeds up to a quota of 30,000 cars in the next 90 days.

The little machines will be in three models--a two-door coach and two-seat coupe (both $735 f.o.b. factory) ; a touring car ($645). They have a four-cylinder, small-bore, poppet-valve engine of 15 horsepower on a 4% in. stroke. Their wheelbase is that of the Ford and Chevrolet, 100 in. The overall height is 5 ft., 8 in. with a low centre of gravity due to an 8% in. axle-clearance and the standard 56 in. tread. Tiny balloon tires, smaller even than Ford balloons, have been furnished by Fisk.

* Epithets of the Watt Street Journal.

/-At 14 he bought a laundry at Canandaigua, N. Y., his birthplace, sold it a year later at a profit. Then he sold bicycles. Still later he became one of the first automobile salesmen in the country, so successful that he could buy over the old, failing Overland Co.