Today: Headlines from April 6, 1925

Looking Back a Century

Every sunrise in 2025 brings headlines about self-driving cars and electric charging streets, but hop in our time machine and dial the calendar back exactly 100 years and the big automotive story was still about getting America on the road—not taking its hands off the wheel.

A New Giant Roars to Life in Detroit – Chrysler Is Born

April 6, 1925 | Detroit, Michigan
Walter P. Chrysler had spent the early 1920s rescuing the ailing Maxwell Motor Company, tinkering with its engineering and, some say, with its very soul. On this Monday in 1925 he finally threw off the old badge altogether, filing papers that transformed Maxwell into The Chrysler Corporation. Detroit’s morning papers hailed it as the arrival of “a third great pillar” beside Ford and General Motors.

Chrysler’s debut model—the sleek, six-cylinder Chrysler 70—boasted hydraulic four-wheel brakes, a high-compression engine, and a top speed of 70 mph that left Model T owners blinking in the dust. Factory whistles on Jefferson Avenue blew long and loud; 10,000 workers realized their paychecks now carried a brand-new name.

Why It Mattered Then

• Forced competitors to abandon mechanical brakes and low-compression engines.
• Pushed auto financing forward; Chrysler teamed with banks to offer installment plans, opening car ownership to the swelling middle class.
• Accelerated Detroit’s population boom—by 1930 the city had ballooned to 1.5 million, much of it on the promise of Chrysler pay stubs.

Echoes in 2025

Fast-forward a century and Chrysler, now folded into global mega-conglomerate Stellantis, is promising an all-electric lineup by 2028. The once-radical hydraulic brake has become regenerative, the gasoline roar replaced by a lithium-ion hum. Yet the core impulse—to reinvent how ordinary people move—still traces directly back to Walter Chrysler’s signature on that 1925 charter.

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Closing Thoughts

The front pages of 1925 remind us that technological revolutions rarely arrive with fanfare about artificial intelligence or lunar commute hubs. Sometimes they begin with a single sheet of incorporation paper and a factory full of grease-smudged dreamers. A hundred years later, as we glide down smart highways, it’s worth tipping our (virtual) fedoras to the day Chrysler joined the race.