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Origins
The Diplomat, introduced after the war in 1946, was a DeSoto that Americans could not buy: a Plymouth wearing DeSoto's grille and trim, built for export markets where Chrysler's brand hierarchy worked differently. Through the late 1940s and 1950s it served as the corporation's world car — sold across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, often as a taxi, where its Plymouth simplicity was a virtue and the plusher badge justified a better price. It outlived its parent: when DeSoto died in the United States in 1961, Diplomats continued briefly from export stocks, the last cars to carry the name. As a car it was thoroughly ordinary, which was the point. As a piece of brand logic — the same metal, a different story, another market — it was decades ahead of common practice.
1954 DeSoto Diplomat pic1 · AlfvanBeem · CC0
