posted at the Cohort by Nifticus
We can’t let a month or two go by without a big Chrysler, so here’s your fuselage fix for June. A first year 300 four door hardtop, at that. In a stunning shade of…Burnished Bronze Metallic, I presume. And it’s for sale, so if you’re really hankering for a big fusie, this looks pretty good.
$12,999 CAD, that’s about $9,500 greenbacks. What’s the verdict? It’s in Vancouver, naturally.
The interior is showing a bit of wear, but it’s pretty decent. Of course, the overall ambiance is more like a Coronet 500 than a Chrysler letter series. Oh well; 1969 was a bitter pill for lovers of those splendid ’65-’68 Chryslers.
It’s got its charms, though, in a mean and hulking sort of way.
A bit of a nasty wrinkle and tear in the vinyl top. That must have been redone, I assume. or can they wrinkle up like that?
Dang, that’s a beautiful car!
“or can they wrinkle up like that?”
It’s a Chrysler product from the late 60s – of course they can wrinkle up like that! 🙂
And boy, there’s a lotta rust bubbling up under there.
Wrinkly vinyl roof aside, I would absolutely drive this. These fuseys are at their best when they exude a slightly sinister vibe, and this one hits that note.
It wasn’t only Chrysler that had issues with vinyl tops in this era. My step-mother bought a new Buick Skylark circa 1970 that the dealer was never able to get the vinyl roof to fit to her satisfaction. I believe that they finally ended up just taking the vinyl off and repainted the car; or perhaps she just traded it for something else. She worked as some sort of coordinator for the school system and was on the road a lot. There was a period when she traded for a new vehicle every two years.
It probably wouldn’t fit in my garage or else I would be “on it”.
It’s shocking how cheesy the interiors were on the fuselage Chrysler’s. There was a lot of hate on for the interior of the 74 Newport that was reprised last month, but this is a lot worse. That was plush in comparison. These cars would be good looking if they weren’t so awkwardly bulky. But I still kind of like the Imperials, which were the bulkiest of all..
The 1968 B-body interiors were also a huge retrograde step relative to the ’66-’67 ones, especially the HVAC controls. To be fair to Chrysler, GM also flushed any behind-the-wheel pride of ownership from their big sedans at roughly the same time. Suddenly you couldn’t tell the misaligned, sagging injection-molded dash surround of a Cadillac from that of a Caprice without finding a badge to read.
I think GM cars had decent interiors thru the 1970 model year. It was 1971 when they really tanked, so two years later. I also liked the fuselage styling (if only they had been a little less bulky). Too bad they didn’t have the quality of the 66-67s.
I read that Chrysler determined the 1965 Chryslers would be superior to the competition from GM and Ford.
And they were.
Sales rocketed.
After 1966 they seemed to be decontenting, especially the interiors.
From pictures online, the dashes of the 68’s don’t seem a lot different than those of 67, and they seem pretty nice. Styling wise, is prefer the 68’s to the earlier models. At the time, they didn’t make much of an impression, and their rectilinear conservatism seemed a little staid. In retrospect, I admire their cleanliness.
I always thought the Three Hundred’s were the best looking of the fuselage cars, wish the hidden headlights were also available on the New Yorker’s as well, plus gotta love the aggressive front end styling.
Good car for these guys . . .
They’ve got the look but they smoke filtered. Yuck.
To each his own, but to me after the ruler-designed clean yet unimaginative straight line ’63-64 GM-copycat ’65 to ’68 Chryslers, (and I had a ’65 Newport conv and a ’66 NYer 6 window sedan), fuselage Mopars to my eye were a bold, futuristic and refreshing change, GM-copycat loop bumpers notwithstanding (I liked them). Even GM copied that same tumblehome in ’71. We had 4 ’71 to ’73 Plyms and 1 ’72 T&C over a long period of years, kept coming back to them, and yes, the instrument panels in particular came off as really cheesy, with the worst fake plastic wood ever, especially in comparison to the great dash panel in Dad’s ’67 Fury III, but the vinyls were of very good quality and wore like iron, the carpeting sturdy, and door panels and door pulls pretty good also, compared to some other brands, wear-wise, I can tell yuo after at least 1/2 million miles of driving them. Design is left to the individual to decide, but I wish the panels, though they had better gauges than GM (gages in GM-speak LOL), or Ford, and that mattered, had been of better quality.
the 1965 Chryslers were not GM inspired, they were designed by the 1961 Lincoln designer, Elwood Engel, and they were an evolution of his design.
(altho the 1963 and 1964 Pontiacs were gorgeous, the best of GM full sizers)
Dang, it’s almost as long as the Excursion next to it.
I like the car but imho the seller is on a fishing trip, especially in the current market. The price is far too high for what it is.. I expect there’s all kinds of rust underneath and under the shiny paint. You can see the rust under the vinyl roof.
At that price the seller should at least fix the obvious issues, such as replace the broken signal light, install a new carpet and scrounge some hubcaps. The fact he didn’t and the price being high suggests he’s not serious about selling . Sorry I’m having PTSD flashbacks from looking at similar rustbuckets in the past.
I agree 100%. Various telltale signs it is not a cream puff, as it should be at that price. Not a big fan of the colour either. There are more flattering/elegant Imperial colours.
These remind me much of 70s movie and TV bad guy cars. I also find it a very mature car.
Yeah, that is a Crack pipe price. It’s far from mint, it has issues, repro parts are unobtainium, and as an investment it sucks. Even if the 8-track sticking out of the dash features the “Peter Gunn Theme”, it’s still no deal.
Agreed. For CAD$13k, a fuselage Chrysler (even a convertible or the most rare 300-Hurst) needs to be perfect, and this one isn’t anywhere near it.
I agree with Seventeen Chariots (though I do like the colour) and Daniel M. And whether the car’s low stance is due to neglect, brutality, or misguided maladjustment, it’s going to cost money to put right.
Still, it’s a real fine twenny-footer.
It’s the car Robert Young drove in the first couple seasons of “Marcus Welby M.D.” (1969-1976).
The non-letter 300s were handsome cars, but the Highland Park bean counters likely concluded that they weren’t worth the effort when it was dropped for 1972.
I really like the color. The low stance & vinyl roof looks like trouble.
As far as TV goes, seeing fuselages always makes this play in my mind . The show was full of them.
That rust bubble is right at the seam the roof meets the quarter. I’m guessing this was repainted with the roof recovered at some point and if it wasn’t done properly and it had a rust problem there that wasn’t attended to properly it’s going to be a nightmare under there.
I do like the color though, not the low stance. I had my fill with that with my lowered Cougar in my 20s, and that doesn’t have mile long overhangs to worry about. I used to like the look at least but now wince remembering all the times I heard a scrape going over a speed bump or up a driveway curb. Luckily it’s probably an easy fix on a torsion bar era chrysler, and there’s a good chance the rear is simply axle dropped, just toss away the spacers.
You are dead on about the roof as I include a picture of that seam. As to the car I strongly dislike the wheels and tires. They do the car no favors. Also do not care for lowering the car as if that would make it more of a handling car instead of hitting things under it.
As for rust I can tell you exactly where it would have shown up. The first place would have been under the trim moulding at the rear where the mounts for the trim go through the dutch panel to the trunk. Every hole is a potential rust spot. Also the deep canyon below the window which wasn’t filled with butyl sealer and instead accumulated crap. The top of the roof, in a mild climate, can actually escape rust despite not really being painted much. Mine had a light dusting of paint which I would have to show in a COAL on my car from start to finish.
The interior is not as nice as the mid ’60s, but I feel that way about pretty much any American car from the post ’68 decade. I have seen these in colors other than all black and that would help a lot.
I love the color, and the stance is probably an easy fix, but to sell a four door with that sort of roof rust that price seems somewhere in the 2x to 3x range.
I’d be interested in seeing a period comparison of the fuselage cars against their GM and Ford counterparts. I remember a Consumer Reports review of the 1974 model year cars. It looked at the Chevrolet, Pontiac, Plymouth Fury, and Ford (Galaxie or LTD?). They were ranked in that order, with the first three judged as fairly close in overall quality. The Ford was a more distant fourth, although I don’t remember why. IIRC, the Fury, which had the 318, had the best gas mileage and still decent acceleration, not mush slower than the Pontiac, which had the 400.
I have driven by that car parked on Grandview a bunch of times looking at it lovingly from afar… glad to know the price, that’ll knock some sense in to me. Had a few “what if” thoughts!!
I had a couple other C-bodies back in the day, a ’67 and ’68 Monaco. My buddy had a ’68 Monaco and a ’69 Fury. Definitely loved those big boats.