If you’re not in America, it’s Thursday. If you are in America, then it’s also Thursday, but it’s a Thursday full of ritualized gluttony, family, naches, joy, irritation, revisionist history, and, ideally, gratitude. We call it Thanksgiving, and if you haven’t heard of it, welcome to Earth! Try the noodles, all kinds.
Traditionally, we eat turkey on Thanksgiving, a symbolic way of trying to show the powerful turkey avian population that we fear them no more; while this is clearly a lie, it’s important to keep it up, for our own dignity. We here at the Autopian have a tradition as well, and that’s to feature a car from Turkey on Thanksgiving.
My go-to is almost always an Anadol, a pretty fascinating carmaker with an interesting lineup of Reliant-derived cars and some genuinely bonkers things, like the Anadol Böcek, seen on the right here: 
This year, though, I want to feature a fascinating Turkish-built vehicle, one that came from a joint venture between an American company and a Turkish company. The American company was Chrysler, the Turkish company was Chrysler Sanayii A.Ş., founded in 1962 in Istanbul. Also known as Askam, this joint venture became Turkey’s first and largest truck maker, and they produced trucks under the Chrysler brands Dodge, DeSoto, and Fargo.
The DeSoto name had fallen out of use in America in 1961, and while Fargo was used for Chrysler-built trucks in various markets, it really thrived in Turkey. The cab of these trucks was a special one designed for developing markets, and as you can see was one designed to minimize the need for complex stampings and curved glass. I think they’re pretty cool looking.
The basic body design could be had in van, SUV, pickup, and stakebed styles, and if you look at the larger trucks made, it appears that the same basic cab has been plopped onto a larger chassis/lower body:
I’m pretty sure the middle part is the same as the pickup, with the headlights relocated from the grille to the wider fenders?
As you can see on this spec sheet, these trucks used the famous Leaning Tower of Power, the Slant-6, making a modest but useful 106 horsepower. Mechanically, these aren’t really all that different from most ’60s-era American trucks, and I think their boxy design is quite appealing. I also like the little round amber turn indicators at the rear, standing in for where an American truck may have had reverse lamps.
Chrysler sold their shares in Askam in 1978, but the company continued to build trucks under their license and using Fargo and DeSoto and Dodge names for quite a while, with the company lasting until 2015!
Fascinating, right?
Before I let you go off to enjoy the holiday, I need to remind you that when it comes to gratitude and thankfulness, all of us here at the Autopian have so much of that for you, our readers and members and commenters and members of our growing, thriving, friendly car-loving community.
Somehow, in this age of divisiveness and general online jerkery, you have managed to build a community that’s welcoming and fascinating and witty and warm and engaging, and it’s something I am genuinely thankful for. So thank you all, so very much for being part of the Autopian and helping us keep doing what we do, and being a place for people who love cars of any kind, in any way.
Thank you. And enjoy eating so much you feel bloaty and slow for days later!
Happy Thanksgiving all! As a long time lurker and new member I just made my first post to SadLittleboxter about a bird named Mr. Sulu that resides on a farm east of Fargo, where I once lived.
And it disappeared after I hit send. So this is kind of a test to see if it happens again ..
You’re here! Welcome.
Love the Fargo. Hope they remembered the Tru-Coat.
Happy Turkey Day and thank you for the sticker and shirts!
A truck like that needs to be stuffed with goodies and left to cook.
This is the first year-end holiday both my wife and I have had by ourselves in our own home literally since we were kids. No joke.
We are soooo thankful not having to go anywhere on Thanksgiving, often overnight or more. There’s no place like home. And now I’m thankful for this auto community.
I was out shovelling my driveway this morning and two huge wild turkeys flew up from the neighbor’s front yard. They only flew about 60 feet and landed at the base of some trees across the street.
I’ve never seen wild turkeys in town on my street before. Odd to see them on Thanksgiving morning.
I have a flock of 19-20 living behind my house. They are a pain in the ass. I think there’s a flock that size in every patch of woods over 2 acres around here. They cross streets less well than deer or squirrels.
Coyotes know where they’re headed and the whole group either crosses or waits. None of them get confused. Squirrels and deer… we’ve all seen it. It’s the same technique with greatly different vehicle repair bills. Turkeys will fan out their tailfeathers and strut in circles to assert their dominance (?) on passing traffic.
More then once I’ve seen turkeys try to fight their reflections in chrome truck bumpers for longer than I cared to stay and watch.
Turkeys are far more delicious than they are smart.
‘Turkeys are far more delicious than they are smart’. Well said, raise a drumstick!
We live near Asheville. One of my most vivid memories of Helene rolling through is looking out my front door and seeing two turkeys in my lawn, the storm raging at its worst, and they’re just pecking at the ground like nothing was up. They’re breathtakingly stupid.
I also like gobbling at them from my car. They gobble back. It’s very funny.
I used to live near one of our wildlife management areas that had a very healthy population of wild turkeys in the cottonwood galleries along the river. They were truly hated by the resident staff and game wardens because the turkeys had developed the habit of flying down and pulling the rubber blades off of the windshield wipers of the work trucks. Why? They were turkeys, “far more delicious than they are smart” I suppose.
“Turkeys are far more delicious than they are smart.”
I think you could say the same thing about deer.
Venison is pretty good, if it’s cooked right. And deer are quite stupid as well.
That’s what a truck should look like!
It buy that rather than any of the ugly tumor shaped trucks on the road around me now.
And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.
There’s more to life than a little money, ya know. Don’tcha know that?
The first thing that came to mind was “put it in H”… and to come full circle, I would have been wrong about the country:
https://www.jalopnik.com/lets-really-figure-out-what-that-put-it-in-h-car-from-1825057867/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_mEctH8e4w
Thank you Autopian for being here! Thank you commenters for making this place special and such a friendly place. You all help me stay sane in a world that so often isn’t!
I would drive the sh*t out of that truck, even it was built right now.
I think you meant to say you’d drive the stuffing out of that turkey.
Happy turkey day, fellow Autops!
The boxy shape is rather Jeep like, I could see this pickup with a 7 bar grille. Of course Jeep was still Kaiser and AMC owned at the time and had its own oddballs.
My first thought also was that with the flat windshield and trapezoidal fenders, it is very Jeep-like. AMC probably could have started a lawsuit, if they could afford the lawyers.
Happy thanksgiving, everyone.
That truck is a lot like the Nomad, a locally-built bakkie (pickup) from 1970s South Africa, when anti-apartheid sanctions forced the country to build a lot of its own stuff.
Ask your doctor if Anadol is right for you!
From the makers of Stellantis!
Consult your doctor if you experience a sudden loss of power.
If engorgement lasts for more than 4 hours seek medical attention.
Side effects may include tedium and random loss of control. If you are allergic to any of its components, do not drive.
“Traditionally, we eat turkey on Thanksgiving, a symbolic way of trying to show the powerful turkey avian population that we fear them no more; while this is clearly a lie, it’s important to keep it up, for our own dignity.”
I’m grateful for your lucid looniness !
I never feared turkeys until I watched
“My life as a turkey”
One of the males that he had raised from a chick went for his jugular!
https://share.google/nevtvYfP1d6WsgZyr
Ford builds a massive number of vans in Turkiye.
In 2011, my father got himself a new Explorer. While it was being prepped, I was talking with the salesman…an oldschool good salesman, he was very knowledgeable and just plain liked cars. As we discussed the various Ford models in the showroom, when we came to the Transit Connect, he said “let me tell you a story…” and then preceded to tell me the entire tale of Ford’s dodge with importatation of the model.
Looks tasty! Happy Thanksgiving, Torch!
I have a friend who had a pet bird that he trained to say “Constantinople”. And he has a farm in Minnesota just east of Fargo. Happy Türkiye Day!
I too once met a bird that said “Consantinople” . To my chagrin, the bird could, and did, reel off all the stations that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits served and at the end of this long list the bird ended with an almost exasperated squawk of “Calais” which was annoying. I had joined a train at Basel/ Basle after a rather long end of season Apres ski party ( ski instrutors and chalet girls only party), found a train which had sort of the right numbers, chucked the skis and stuff into the baggage thing and went to sleep. Even I in the state that I was in realised that, as the train slowed and I opened the blinds that Calais is not known for it’s minarets. The bird belonged to a porter at Istanbul Station, he put me up for two days whilst my mess was fixed.
Probably a less odd story than a bird in Minnesota saying “Constantinople”
The bird was a European starling named Mr. Sulu. He also could say “beer, beer, beer”. As far as I know he did not say “Calais” which I would agree is sadly lacking in minarets.
Oh, you reminded of my story “How I ended at the Slovak Far West”. Sans the chalet girls, alas.
Do tell!
I was finishing my LLM in Budapest, and a close friend from Argentina came to visit. We went to Bratislava, Vienna and Prague, where we split: he went to Germany for his cousin’s wedding, and I had to come back to BP.
So I got my ticket for the (very) late night train, went to the platform with the BP sign and hopped in a wagon. I have to add that many a pint were gulped during those days, especially the last one.
I woke up at dawn with the sight of Bratislava on the wrong side of the train. Instead of having BR on my left (north), I saw it on my right (south). I hoped that we could be using a different route, but after a while it became clear that we were not going south, at least literally.
Mind you, leaving the Prague-Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest route meant that tourists were almost non-existent, thus no English speaking train guards. Or passengers, for that matter.
So, after a while I found that one person with whom I could communicate in a language I knew, who told me we were going to Ukraine. But there was a stop at Kosice, where I could take another train to BP.
Only then they told me that they split the wagons near Bratislava: most of the train went to Budapest (as advertised) and a couple wagons, included mine, were hooked to a train to the west. All of which was never explained when I bought the ticket, or at least in a language I could understand.
I had to wait for a couple hours at the station, already noon, with barely enough money left for a sandwich, and terrified of losing that last and very slow train. I finally arrived in Budapest late in the night.
Like I said, having the company of at least one chalet girl would have done wonders to ease the emotional pain and utter boredom of a train to nowhere. But I believe I wrote a poem or two in that trip, so there’s that.
This is important stuff, mainly for me and you. There are at least two of us!
Reminds me of the time my mother and sister and I went to Europe for a month and had eurail passes.
In the evening, we would go to the train station and get on whatever looks like the nicest train, a TEE if possible, and get off the next morning wherever it was that we ended up. The Paris to Amsterdam train was the best. One morning we woke up and the train had stopped somewhere in Germany that looked remarkably like rural Kansas. It was the end of the line and the train wasn’t going anywhere for the next eight hours except into a rail yard. So my mother decides to hitchhike to the nearest town and try to scare up a taxi leaving my sister and I aged 11 and 14 standing next to the rail tracks.
Anyway, she got a ride from some guy that had a flower farm and was friends with a florist in our town in California who on weekends was a chaperone in the local ski club. I already had a reputation for being the kid that kept jumping off the chairlift or whatever, and on a couple occasions after that he would say “so your mom left you beside the road in Germany and hitched a ride with my friend Ralf?” as though that would explain everything.
Love this. In my case I was on a train from Belgium to Vienna. Dead tired I fell asleep. When I woke up I was in a train yard in France. I had zero French back then and this was when dinosaurs ruled the earth so no current technology if as my sort. Looking back it is hilarious
So, it was not only me! LOL
Yes, once you are safe, it’s hilarious. At the moment, not so much.
I started reading this and halfway through wondered; who’s writing this anyway?
Figured it was either Nic or my girlfriend who took the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Beijing twice.
Twice!! Now I know that I am comparatively sane.
Well, that’s the least of her adventures.
My relatives are from that area just north of Highway 10. We lived up there for 5 years when I was young lad and helped them milk the herd some days. Not quite the end the earth, but you could see it from there!
Godforsakenly beautiful area. If you’ve ever read ‘Giants In The Earth’ you know what I mean. The cousins have a huge grain farm now.
Gobble, gobble, gearheads.
That Fargo truck thou…
Giving IH Scout I vibes
I love learning about new (to me) vehicles like this
Tks Torch, Happy Turkey day all!
I’d should have a wood chipper in the pickup area
That’s really cool-looking! Now I want to build an RC version of one. Guess I’ll add it to the ever-growing list of “someday” projects.
Alas, the country is no longer called Turkey. As of 2022, they’re now known officially as Türkiye.
I’m aware, but I reserve the right to spell it the old way one day a year to preserve this tortured conceit. Thank you.
Next thing you know, you’ll want to take us all back to Constantinople!
It’s nobody’s business but the Turks.
Istanbul not Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Because Miklagarðr sounded too like Tolkien and can only ever be typed in bold italics, Царьград was just too odd and also the emperor Constantine was not someone to be mucked with at the time.
Gulf of Mexico…just sayin’
Happy Turkey Day Torch family.
Happy Thänksgivinge!
I get that. But is it no longer ok (in whatever sense) to use the word/spelling for a country as it exists in your own language, as opposed to that country’s language? E.g. in English we call it Germany, not Deutschland.
Or, is Türkiye now officially the English spelling?
So a non English speaking country decides how it is spelled in English?
In other news:
The Illuvia in España stays mainly on the Playa.
(more or less)
That’s what I’m wondering. I don’t have a position on it. I do note that on English language maps, what used to be Ivory Coast has been Côte D’Ivoire for a while now.
That’s because they also requested that everybody refer to them that way
Türkiye is the official English spelling, as per the United Nations.
I’m still struggling with East and West Germany.
That truck looks like it could be a character from Thomas The Tank.
We can call him “Turkey the Truck”
Happy Türkiye day! Enjoy all the Turkish delights you can eat!
Just remember that if you’ve a (meal) date in Constantinople, they’ll be waiting in Istanbul. Set your GPS accordingly!
Cheers, from one of the resident Hosers.
Hey, even Old New York once once New Amsterdam. Now you’ve gone and done it . . . I just fished out “Flood” from my CD collection.
Why on CD? I can’t say.
People just liked it better that waaaaayyyy!