Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s Your Turkey Day Car From Turkey!

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!