(first posted 8/3/2013) Virgil Exner’s disappointment over his 1955 Chrysler Falcon two-seater not being green-lighted for production was deep and lasting. He loved sports cars, and was an enthusiastic and competent driver of them on the track as well as the road. In 1960, he and his team made another stab at a Corvette-fighter, this time based on the all-new 1960 Valiant. It clearly carried certain Valiant styling themes, and had a distinctive front end that would eventually get recycled. Its most unique aspect undoubtedly was its asymmetry, in an effort to capture the feel of the off-set “lay-down” Indy roadsters that were predominant in US circle racing at the time. And unlike the big DeSoto hemi V8 of the Falcon, the XNR stayed true to its Valiant roots: a hot Hyper-Pak 170 cu.in. slant six is under its asymmetrical hood.
Here it is, the most powerful American small six to date by far. Its output from 2.8 liters has been claimed to be 250hp, but that seems dubious. Nevertheless, the XNR was timed at 153 mph on the test track, and Exner himself took it to over 135. Hot stuff, especially for a six in 1960.
The KNR was based on the Valiant’s underpinnings, could have been built on the same lines, and was projected to sell for $3000, or about 25% less than a base Corvette. Undoubtedly, a production XNR would have had a more realistic windshield and possibly toned down a bit, but otherwise, the XNR was quite production-ready. Chrysler’s dysfunctional management at the time scuttled the plan after there was already considerable enthusiasm in the press.
The XNR’s asymmetry is resolved in a dramatic cruciform “bumper”, and instead of the trademark “toilet seat”, there’s a very large fuel filler. Must have a saucer back there somehow…
Needless to say, the XNR’s loop bumper foreshadows Chrysler’s infatuation with that on its “fuselage” cars starting in 1969. For that matter, the basic design concept that resulted in the production 1960 Valiant was being called “fuselage design” already then.
Like a number of other Ghia-built Exner one-offs, its builder tried to turn it into a limited production car for themselves. The Ghia Assimetrica was shown at a number of European car shows in order to find a sponsor or investor. The Assimetrica was of course toned down, with a real windshield and folding top, and a more conventional tail. In fact, this is undoubtedly closer to what a production Plymouth XNR would have looked like. No serious backers were found, but a small number were supposedly built, but none have survived.
Wow. What might have been. Although how would V8 obsessed Americans felt about a little hot six?
Excellent question. Look at how they responded to a Pontiac OHC six.
With a yawn. Sadly, a large part of our society are sheeple – herd animals. When V8s were the rage, they had to have one in their cars. When SUVs were the thing, they had to get one – to go from urban apartment to urban office compound. Now, with hybrids – I have my difference with them, but I do admit that there are uses where the technology makes sense. And it makes sense to commercialize it so as to find its strengths and build on them.
But it does NOT make sense for every user. There…rant’s over. But yeah. A miraculous in-line six like this one was; and even though it did get some respect and long life, it never got enough. Started out as a powerplant for a frumpy economy car; ended as power for an outdated pickup-truck line. And in-between…powering a hay-harvesting mill…
Ah, what might have been. Imagine had the Six been carried into the 21st century, with a new-technology aluminum block and maybe an overhead cam.
Well, with the Pontiac OHC six, particularly the Sprint, I think the big issue was that a V-8 was very little more money and had a lot more power and torque. On a ’67 Firebird, for instance, the 326 H.O., which had 285 gross horsepower, was cheaper than the Sprint, which had 215 hp. Since gas was cheap and didn’t appear likely to be in short supply, the V-8 was a better value, especially if you were going to order automatic (since at that point either engine would have been stuck with the two-speed).
If the first oil crisis had happened a decade earlier or the Pontiac OHC 6 survived the 1970s just in time for the 1973 oil crisis, things could had been different.
250hp from 170 cid is quite impressive for 1960. I want one!
P.S. 250hp from 2.8L was quite impressive until recently (mid-oughts).
True, but it was probably a gross figure. Also, the Hyper-Pak engine got that output at the expense of anything resembling low-end torque. The really remarkable thing about modern hot engines is not so much their output (well, okay, that, too), but that they’re also tractable, flexible, and quiet to a fault, which the hot engines of the ’60s usually weren’t…
So called “hot engines” from the 1960’s were rough, noisy and notoriously hard to keep in tune. One would quite literally have to spend every weekend tinkering with them to make them run right.
The Honda J-Series 3.0 litre in my Accord makes 240 hp, or 80 bhp/litre. It’s smooth and quiet.
Hey, that’s a feature, not a bug!
Of course those were gross hp in ’60, so probably something under 200 in today’s terms, but still, 65-70 hp/liter is pretty impressive.
Another rousing cheer for the old slant six. I owned two of them back in the day. Other than their water pump which would eventually break, they were as close to totally bulletproof as existed in 1960 – or 1990 for that matter.
One can only dream of how Plymouth’s future would have looked with this car. If it had been put into production is is unlikely that both: 1) It would have been a serious contender to the Corvette in terms of sales and 2) It would have survived the massacres of the 1970s as result of the energy crisis and Chrysler’s financial woes.
If the Plymouth XNR did overcome these two obstacles, I’m very certain that its cult following would have kept it around and Chrysler management would have valued Plymouth a bit more in the later years.
It found no backers because it was hideous…….though the front end did make to something, somewhat…..
I see a lot of 62 Dart in the contours of this car. As with almost everything Exner did, there is a lot of things going on with it, and it takes awhile to take it all in. I think I like it. But I’ll get back to you.
If the production headlight layout was like the Assimetrica’s, no. Just no. If they resolved it by stretching the loop to full-width….yes!
+1
“and possibly toned down a bit”
I think this has to be a strong contender for Understatement of the Week! I agree with nlpnt that it was unlikely to be released without a full-width front end.
It would be interesting to see replicas of this rather than the belly-button Cobra
Don’t forget that the original Corvette came equipped with a multi carbed “Blue Flame Six”. Chevy switched to their new v8 in 55 though. American manufacturers knew that the public fell in love with Henry’s bent eight back in ’32. It was the stuff of dreams and legends. By the end of it’s run the flathead 8 was slower than the new OHV I 6. In Europe the straight six was the provence of MBZ, Bmw,Jaguar and Aston Marten. The more proletarian makes made do with fours and even twins. At home no native dream machine could be complete, or successfully compete without the 8.
How cool,he named the car after himself. Exner-XNR-get it? I built the Premier 1-32nd scale model some 50 years ago. I was always intrigued with its off center look and, especially that horizontal cross shaped rear bumper. Cool car, but probably too ahead of its time to be a sales success had it gone into production.
Cool catch on the name
There are at least two or three Assimetrica cars that survive. One at Blackhawk. One at the Portland roadster show last weekend.
I started grumbling that manufacturers have stopped trying to do things like this, until I realized that they are doing exactly this today. There are really very, very few platforms in production now, with vastly different cars built atop them. Take GMs Alpha, currently a Cadillac AND the Camaro. The car really was ahead of its time. The amazing thing is that when you look hard, you see the Valiant underneath, and the idea of a Corvette fighter is all the more amazing. A car built to battle the Corvair used to battle the Corvette. Today, we see this with damn near everything out of the VAG empire utilizing the A platform, from a Golf to an Audi Q3 to a Skoda Octavia.
This is yet another test comment.
I’m pretty sure not. The factory claimed 148 hp for the 170 with Hyper Pak (vs. 101 in stock trim), 196 hp for the 225 with Hyper Pak (vs. 145). Chrysler were pretty openly known for understating their engines’ horsepower ratings at that time, but not by anywhere near enough to jump the gap between 148 and 250.
I’m quite inclined to agree. I’ll rephrase that a bit.
Inclined at 30°, it’s to be hoped!
2.8L = 170.866 CI @ 250 hp = 1.46 HP per ci at the time that was astonishing considering it was just 4 years after Chrysler broke the 1hp per cubic inch barrier in 1956 in the 300B with the 355 Hp 354 Hemi and Chevrolet with the 283hp 283 FueI Injected engine.
I wonder what if the XNR was made as a 2+2 model. Would had been ahead of the Mustang and the Avanti?
Impressive effort by Exner. Not a fan of all his quirks, but this one works. The rear cross-shaped bumper is particularly distinctive, which probably means that feature, which IMO is one of the best, would likely not have made it to production.
Moot point as they elected to nix the idea and destroy the prototypes. A crime against automotive history. And while they shot this one down, they happily let Virgil go ape on such oddities as the ’60-’61 Plymouth, the ’61-’62 Dodge or the Valiant. The mind boggles.
No, sir. For one thing, the XNR was heavily based on the ’60 (to ’62) Valiant. Also, the prototype was not destroyed. After its run on the show circuit when it was new, it was sold to a Swiss, who sold it to the Shah of Iran, who sold it to a Kuwaiti, a photo of whom driving it was included in a May 1969 “National Geographic” article about Kuwait. Then it wasn’t seen or heard from for quite awhile, and there was widespread fear it had been destroyed in the Iraqi attack on Kuwait or the subsequent American
warpolice actionmilitary activities.And then it showed up again in the States in 2012—to the tune of nearly a million dollars; see here (which repeats the bogus “250 hp” claim). Just prior to that auction was this.
Well, the first prototype didn’t get destroyed obviously.
I actually misread the last sentence of the post — it’s the Ghia Assymmetrica that was supposedly built in several copies that no one can find a trace of today, not the XNR. A thousand pardons and a well-deserved Stern rebuke.
Some of the slant 6’s of that era were aluminum if memory serves me correctly.
They built a little over 50,000 aluminum Slant-6 blocks from mid-’61 to early ’63 production. They were all RG blocks (225); the LG (170) aluminum engine was never commercialised. These blocks have an open deck and integrally cast iron cylinder liners. Cylinder head was cast iron. A copper/asbestos multilayer head gasket was used, and it did surprisingly well given the technology of the time.
The tendency of Americans at that time to drain the antifreeze at the end of winter and run straight water led to the relatively early corrosion death of many of these engines.
The block itself weighs about 77 pounds. I used to own five of them, and a fun trick was to call up a machine shop, tell them I’d be bringing in a Dodge 225, then walk in through the front door carrying the block in my two hands and say “Here’s that Slant-6 I called about; where shall I put it?”. I’m down to my last one, the original engine in my Lancer.
The XNR has an iron 170 engine.
Nobody thought to send any of those alloy blocks down here but the resistance to using actual coolant as opposed to water would have killed them off like everthing else that had an alloy head or coolant component.
Also see all but the first seven pics here.
Not much of an XNR fan, but the toned-down Assimetrica isn’t all that bad. A production version would have been interesting but probably wouldn’t been much of a success. America was definitely getting into the V8 craze at the time and the Slant-Six, as good as it was, just wouldn’t have went over that well in a domestic sports car (as proven by the first Corvettes). I might even go so far as to suggest that the Prowler was a latter-day Assimetrica as many have pinned a big part of the Prowler’s failure on the lack of a V8 in a retro-hotrod.
It is easy to see where Dodge General Manager M.C. Patterson got the idea to slap the ‘warthog’ nose onto the front of the ill-fated, downsized 1962 Dodge. It didn’t look that bad on the Assimetrica but on the downsized Dodge? Not so much.
I agree. The US was not into six cylinder power in the early 60s. The Corvette never became more than an oddity until the V8 arrived in 1955. Neither the Corvair nor the Pontiac OHC 6 sold well compared to V8 competition. This car would have sunk quickly without at least optional V8 power in 1962.
Jamming even a small V8 into the XNR/Assimetrica might have been tough, too. It kind of looks like the whole point of the exercise was to take advantage of the Slant-Six’s ‘slant’. As I understand it, rather than any real engineering principle, that was a primary rationale of the engine having a tilt to one side. Getting a taller V8 underneath a hood that had been designed to take advantage of the six’s lower height would have been a big problem if the car ever saw production.
It’s a real pity the modern, inline six-cylinder engine never made much of an inroad in the domestic market after the arrival of the small V8, other than as a bottom-feeder engine for the frugal. It’s worth noting that the very popular Cummins diesel in the Ram pickup is an inline six. With all the ersatz ‘Hemi’ crap for current Chrysler V8 engines, you’d have thought they’d have made similar use of the enormous brand-equity of the Slant-Six moniker for the Cummins diesel.
I just don’t get Virgil Exner.
Hard to say for sure, but my guess is that unless the XNR would’ve eventually failed in the marketplace.
First, like much of Exner’s post-Forward Look efforts, the styling is a bit overwrought; this at a time when the Corvette was being toned down and cleaned up for 1961, after its “rolling jukebox” styling of 1958. Second, it just seems like there has always been a limited market in the US for two-seat automobiles, and it’s ruled by the Corvette; newcomers may have a few years of successful sales at first, but after that it’s all downhill. Third, this probably would’ve entered the marketplace as a ‘62 model, at which time the Chrysler Corporation made the mistake of introducing its infamous downsized models. It’s very likely that the XNR would’ve received no further development, or simply would’ve been axed.
As for Exner, in my opinion his earlier efforts were hit-or-miss – I personally like his pre-WWII Pontiac and Studebaker designs, and the Forward Look Chrysler products – but much of everything after that seems more than a bit overdone in my eyes. It may be a coincidence, but the shift seemed to occur at about the time that Exner had his first major health crisis (a heart attack in 1956). Perhaps it was a case of others meddling with his designs during his recoveries.
You really have to wonder how Exner’s failing health in 1956 affected his future styling, both his original renderings and others ‘tweaking’ them without his knowledge or consent. For example, the 2nd gen 1963 Valiant was nearly all Exner (Engel added the stubby ‘finlets’; a good move) and it was a pretty damn good looking car, especially the cleaned-up ’64 version (one of my favorite Mopars).
But, then, the overwrought 1st gen Valiant was supposedly pure Exner, too. And the whole experiment with asymmetric styling was definitely ill-advised. I can sure see Chrysler execs looking at those clays and thinking that Exner had lost his mind.
Not to mention that one of Exner’s last projects was the Stutz Blackhawk, and no one has ever accused those of being tasteful. So, I would say that, like any successful artist, Exner had moments of brilliance, and just as many that weren’t so…brilliant. All things considered, it was probably for the best that Tex Colbert cut him loose, even though it’s hard to pin any of the blame of the ’62 downsizing on him.
Mr Exner had a wierd sense of styling. the forward look was beautiful no doubts. but it took me a long time to appreciate the downsized car of the early 60’s. this sports car would have tanked the minute it hit the show rooms. On the other hand………..i would love a 62 dodge 2 door sedan in red. they really grew on me.
62 Dodge Darts get better with age. Compare the front to a 69 Mustang
Virgil Exner was SO right with the Forward Look, most everything else he did was much less well received. It goes to show that in the US, you only have to be right once (see Henry Ford)!
Motor Life, some 1961 issue:
The toilet seat is really the one aspect of Exner’s styling I find truly offputting on everything it was used on concept or production, otherwise I’m much more hesitant to criticize his work than others, I think artistically he was strong with car design, and had a lot of “firsts” that got cribbed over the years by more universally lauded design houses. I think his biggest flaw was that his designs had so much going on that there was no way to reel them in the way most motorama type show cars do for mass production, and when something is changed or omitted the whole thing no longer words. The Ghia Asymmetrica is proof of it, some may find it more “tasteful”, but it’s more like a first gen Thunderbird than a Corvette as a sports car design, in fact one could say it was the very first Barracuda Convertible, it looks like a Valiant without a roof and a restyled front end, with the only remaining trait of the XNR being the offset hood scoop. The loop front end is too mutilated from the original concept.
When I look at the XNR asymmetry the “lay-down” Indy roadsters aren’t actually what come to my mind, what I think of is the Jaguar D-Type and 50s Ferrari Testarossa racers, with their full width bodies and offset rear tunnel/fin. The XNR basically just moves the hood bulge off center to match, which I find kind of brilliant given the characteristics of the /6 intake location.
I was trying to figure out what the Assimetrica reminded me of and it suddenly hit me: a 1953 Studebaker Starliner convertible. And that’s not a bad thing, either. If they could have cleaned up the nose like, say, gotten ride of the grille high-beams and just went with dual outboard headlights, it might have had a better chance of seeing production. It even has potential of being an alternative to the 1964 Barracuda. Imagine how differently things might have turned out if it had been a stretched, 4-seat Assimetrica variant that came out a month or two before the Mustang.
Speaking of which, are there any pics of the rear of the Assimetrica? I sure couldn’t find any.
D type Jag mashed into an early Valiant, whats not to like about it, I’d rather have the slant 6 than the DOHC Jag engine just for ease of ownership and the XNR seems like it got along the roads ok.
The 1961 Ford Gyron concept car had a nice loop bumper too; it dispensed with standard headlamps and instead used a thin strip of lighting just inside the loop grille, looking remarkably like the LED illuminated grilles that have become popular in recent years.
The show on Netflix “Rust to riches”, is this the car, they built a pretty perfect replica of?
The boss of the shop talked a lot about the from where the body was moulded etc.
Sorry but to me it just does not work. Like many of the later Exner creations, there is a mix of too many things at once. It looks like one of those early land animals before nature decided on the form best suited for life outside the ocean. “Cleaning it out” would really mean a new car…