1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow, engine number 360007. Photo courtesy of Arizona Concours d’Elegance.
Introduced at the New York Auto Show in January of 1933, the Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow was promoted with literature reading, “It gives you in 1933 the car of 1940.” Indeed, the car looked like nothing else on the market at the time, and sold for a price 25-percent higher than a Cadillac Fleetwood V-16 when America was in the grip of the Great Depression. With just five examples ever constructed (and three known to survive), the Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow was hardly a commercial success, yet elements of its design did predict the future of automotive styling; next January, one of these will appear at the second-annual Arizona Concours d’Elegance.
Purchased by Studebaker in 1928, Pierce-Arrow needed a halo car to draw affluent buyers into showrooms, regardless of the state of the economy. Designer Phil Wright was given the unenviable task of creating a car that couldn’t be ignored, and the result was the Silver Arrow. Using wind tunnel modeling to help create the car’s shape, the Silver Arrow featured a host of forward-thinking designs. Headlamps were integrated into the sculpted front fenders, which sat flush with the body instead of protruding into the wind. Running boards were eliminated, and to improve airflow, door handles were tucked into sculpted pockets and sidemounts were hidden in compartments located aft of the front wheels. Rear fenders were skirted and tapered for improved aerodynamics, but the Silver Arrow’s most distinctive feature was its fastback rear, with an integrated trunk, that utilized an all-steel roof and emphasized the car’s futuristic look.
The same Silver Arrow during its time in the Imperial Palace collection. Photo by Daniel Strohl.
Power came from a front-mounted, 462-cu.in., 175 horsepower L-head engine, which (in conjunction with the car’s wind-cheating shape), delivered a claimed top speed of 115 MPH. Though plans initially called for the Silver Arrows to be rear-engined, this idea was ultimately scrapped in the name of expediency; instead of using an all-new chassis, the five Silver Arrows built were constructed upon a modified version of the 139-inch wheelbase 1236 chassis. Remarkably, the first Silver Arrow progressed from drawing to finished product in just three months.
It was never clear if the five Silver Arrows built were intended as concept cars (which would have scooped the Buick Y-Job, often considered the first concept car, by five years) or as elite, hand-built production cars, but the truth probably lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Assembly line workers were hand-picked to build the Silver Arrow, which succeeded in once again drawing attention to the Pierce-Arrow brand. To capitalize on this, the company produced a mass-market namesake in 1934 and 1935, but these Silver Arrows were conventional in appearance and powered by an inline eight-cylinder engine.
Photo by Daniel Strohl.
The car to be shown in Arizona carries engine number 360007, and is currently owned by the Academy of Art University Automobile Museum, located in San Francisco, California. For nearly 20 years it was part of the Harrah’s collection in Reno, Nevada, and under the stewardship of William Harrah the Silver Arrow received a full restoration in 1966 and a repaint in the 1980s. In the years since, it’s spent time in the Imperial Palace collection and the Blackhawk collection, and was sold by Barrett-Jackson in 2012 for a price of $2.2 million. The sale represented the first time since 1973 that a Silver Arrow changed hands at auction, and even private sales of the three remaining cars are a particularly rare occurrence.
The second-annual Arizona Concours d’Elegance will take place on January 11, 2015, on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore Resort in Phoenix. For additional information, visit ArizonaConcours.com.
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