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When LeBaron Meant Class: Jay Leno Dives Into The History Of His 1930 Deusenberg


When LeBaron Meant Class: Jay Leno Dives Into The History Of His 1930 Deusenberg

When you hear “LeBaron”, how many of you picture a totaled-out droptop with John Candy and Steve Martin inside? No? Maybe Aunt Kathy’s old droptop that she never put the top down on? I’ve got my own image, the ’78 Chrysler that had through the end of my high school years into my early Army days, up until I had a massive failure of common sense and traded what had been a solid running, driving car in on a 1999 Chevrolet Blazer because it seemed like a “mature” idea. Whoops. My own personal history aside, the LeBaron name dates farther back that that tarted-up Diplomat, or even beyond the Imperial years where it was one of the main model names of the Imperial marque. LeBaron was a coachbuilder in the early days of the automobile, the company that would build you the body to go onto the chassis you had purchased. So if you were well-heeled in the late 1920s, before the stock market went full Three Mile Island on everybody, you would throw down the money for a Duesenberg rolling chassis, then pay a company like LeBaron to build the sheetmetal that would turn the basic bones into something jaw-dropping.

It’s difficult to not appreciate a Duesenberg. These were the gold standard for the first half of the century, powerful, luxurious, technologically advanced not only for the day, but if you look at current designs, you can see where the roots came from. Out of the three basic stages of cars (the Model A, Model X and the Model J series), the J chassis, which is what this car is, was the most numerous produced. 420ci straight-eight, 265 horsepower standard, up to 400 horsepower if you opted for the SSJ variation…folks, those are solid power figures today. Not radical, but in the later 20s and 1930s, they were radical. These trade in the millions of dollars today…and for damn good reasons.


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