No version of the 1967–1968 Imperial was very common — Chrysler’s posh full-size luxury make was a distant third in the domestic luxury market — but the convertibles were especially scarce: 577 were built for 1967 and just 474 for 1968. This 1967 Imperial Crown convertible is one of those very rare cars, but despite its high price and luxury features, it was a throwback to the bad old days of Chrysler styling.
Before World War 2 and for a while afterwards, most automakers’ in-house styling studios were subordinate to engineering. The designers might suggest directions, but it was the body engineers who had the final say unless the designer had a strong personal connection with senior management. At Chrysler, of the most notorious results of this pecking order was the Airflow, whose controversial streamlined shape was designed by engineers, with the role of the company’s Art & Colour department limited to detailing and interiors — decoration rather than actual styling.
GM was the first major automaker to alter this balance, making Harley Earl, head of GM Art & Colour, a vice president of the corporation in 1940. This wasn’t just a matter of rewarding Earl with a better title; it meant that he was now on an equal footing with the VP of Engineering and the general managers of the production divisions. This was the way of the future for Detroit, but other automakers — including Chrysler — were slow to follow suit.
Styling of postwar Chrysler cars was under the aegis of chief body engineer Oliver H. Clark, who reported to Fred M. Zeder, who was not only head of engineering, but Chrysler vice chairman. Zeder, in turn, had considerable influence over president K.T. Keller, a former railroad man who famously insisted on taller cars because much of the country still wore hats. The result was cars that were well-engineered and well-trimmed, but terribly stodgy. The 1950 Chrysler Windsor pictured above is a case in point: It has some nice detailing and an attractive interior, but the shape is decidedly ungraceful.
By the mid-1960s, Chrysler had undergone a series of neck-snapping reversals: They’d shaken up the industry with sleek new designs orchestrated by Virgil M. Exner, who became director of styling in 1953 and the company’s first VP of styling in 1957, but things had soon taken some turns for the weird. After Exner was forced out, his successor, Elwood Engel, kicked off several years of angularity, imitation, and fussy eccentricity. This 1966 Imperial wasn’t actually designed by the body engineers, but it might as well have been, since it looked like it had been styled with a T-square, broken up only by the busy-looking grille.
This brings us, in a long-winded way, to our featured convertible. When Chrysler had switched to unit construction for 1960, the Imperial had remained body-on-frame, but that was a production hassle that the big luxury car’s limited sales didn’t really justify. So, for 1967, the Imperial moved to the unitized Chrysler C-body, shared with the corporation’s other full-size cars.
The problem this presented was that the square-rigged styling of the unitized 1965–1968 C-body, with its straight-through fenders and sharp creases, was very recognizable. Since the corporation had several other versions of it, Engel’s designers seem to have exhausted their best ideas for dressing it up without cost-prohibitive structural changes by the time they got to the 1967 Imperial.
So, the Imperial got different exterior sheet metal, different front and rear clips, and a whole lot of decoration. To be fair, the total amount of decoration was still modest, especially compared to some of the really berserk designs of the 1950s, but the net effect was often in questionable taste.
The worst offender was probably the very busy grille, which was actually three horizontal chrome grilles separated by a body-color surround that was supposed to align with the lenses of the front marker lights in the bladed fender tips.
It was plainly intended to distract from the Imperial’s resemblance to the cheaper Chrysler New Yorker, which it did to a point, but the results could best be described as “needlessly cluttered.”
The other C-body cars had a sharp, almost bladed crease through the lower half of the fenders and doors. On the big Chryslers, the section of each body side above that crease was concave, giving these cars a very distinctive appearance. It was exactly the opposite of the Coke-bottle voluptuousness GM was pursuing in this period, but that wasn’t all bad.
The Imperial replaced the single lower crease with two roughly parallel ones, separated by a completely useless chrome rub strip. I can’t call it an improvement, nor was it especially pleasing to the eye.
In back, the rear fenders got large chrome caps (whose shape didn’t seem to bear any particular relationship to the rest of the car) separated by full-width ribbed taillight lenses.
The Imperial rear treatment was quite a bit different from the elaborate taillights and rear bumper of the New Yorker: The decklid, rear bumper, taillights, and rear outer fender sheet metal were all-new. However, since the styling of these cars was really defined by the rigid rectangular shape of the body sides, the overall resemblance was still hard to miss.
When Dodge had designed full-width taillights for the 1965 Monaco hardtop, cost considerations meant that the central section was just plastic, with no lights. The Imperial was considerably more expensive than any Dodge, so both outer sections on each side were illuminated; only the two inner ones were just red plastic.
I do like the ribbed taillights — one of the few details on this car that look okay, in my view — but I think the effect is spoiled by the enormous round medallion containing the Imperial eagle. Chrysler in this era was still desperately trying to identify the Imperial as a separate marque, so exterior identification was plentiful, but that only underscored the nature of the problem. A 1967 Cadillac or Lincoln Continental was readily identifiable even if you stripped off all the badges; the Imperial, not so much.
The Imperial cost a good deal more than any Chrysler-branded 1967 model, so it had a fancier interior, with walnut veneers on the dashboard and doors. Imperial also found it in the budget to throw in gauges for coolant temperature and oil pressure; a New Yorker or 300 had only an ammeter and a fuel gauge. However, the bones of this dashboard were not that different from other C-body models, and I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen one of these cars where the wood paneling seemed properly aligned.
If, as I have previously argued, the 1965 Cadillac De Ville line had the most attractively designed seat trim of any luxury car of this decade, the 1967 Imperial surely had the ugliest. The leather upholstery was fine, but the vertical pleats made it look like someone had slashed the seat covers with a box cutter. (As these cars age, the upholstery tends to split along the pleats too.) It’s particularly disagreeable in a convertible, which is more vulnerable to that kind of vandalism — if I had one of these cars, it would take a couple of months to train myself not to have a panic attack every time I walked back to it after leaving it parked with the top down.
If I sound overly harsh about the styling of the Imperial, I want to emphasize that I rather like the other 1967 C-body Chryslers. The Newport and New Yorker four-doors are a bit of an acquired taste, like blue cheese, but I like blue cheese, and their angularity is a nice counterpoint to the exaggerated swoopiness of contemporary GM B-body cars.
This yellow 300 convertible, meanwhile, is broad-shouldered and rather handsome, with far less of the Imperial’s dubious costume jewelry. True, it wasn’t as plush inside and it lacked a lot of the Imperial’s minor convenience items, but it was substantially more attractive and tasteful for a lot less money.
Considering all that, it’s not a mystery that the Imperial convertibles of this vintage were so rare. The limited sales couldn’t be blamed on the shrinking market for luxury convertibles, which hadn’t yet dried up completely in 1967: Lincoln sold 2,276 of the similarly priced Continental convertible, then in its last year, while sales of the 1967 Cadillac De Ville convertible hit 18,200, 31 times as many as the Imperial Crown convertible.
On the other hand, the De Ville convertible looked like this in 1967 …
… while the Imperial looked like this.
I know these Imperials have their dedicated fans — Chrysler loyalists, champions of the underdog, and the handful of people for whom the looks hit just right. After staring at these ’67s for a while, however, I’ll take the 300. It may not be as fancy, but it seems to have actually been styled rather than merely over-embellished.
Related Reading
Vintage Car Life Review: 1967 Imperial – A Renewed Imperial To Battle In The Luxury Leagues (by Rich Baron)
Curbside Find: 1967 Imperial – Stately Space-Age (by Rich Baron)
Curbside Space Traveler: 1967 Imperial Crown Coupe – The Empire Strikes Backwards (by Paul N)
They made a lot of expensive panel changes to differentiate it from a Chrysler, and the decoration ensures you know it’s not a Chrysler, that it’s a more expensive car, but somehow the end result looks rather disappointingly generic. Vague. There seems to be no positive theme, just ‘not like a Chrysler’.
But I reckon that if not for those dual lower body creases, it would almost look more than halfway to the Fuselage cars. Should we then see it as a Fuselage precursor?
I think Chrysler was the master of spending big money on completely different pieces of Chrysler vs. Imperial, but in ways that most people never noticed.
If I would have been around back then, I would have bought an Airflow, not only because of its practicality. Sometimes the law of physics could also create art. If we all had a collective aesthetic sense, this planet would surely not be overpopulated today, not even if we never had a single war.
From the side, that Imperial slightly resembles a somewhat earlier Electra 225. Compared to lesser Chryslers, the flatter sides seem to make it fit a full-sized luxury car image than, in my opinion, cheap-looking creases on that 300 pictured. One can notice an Engelesque Lincolnisation of the Imperial, to a certain degree, here.
The main complaint I would have had as a potential buyer would have been with that horrible interior which was a far cry from that of the decade older Chryslers. Not only the boxcutter-ripped seating annoys. The beancounter-plagued dashboard constructed with cheap plastics, beginning with Engel’s “art” affecting all Chrysler products beginning with the previous year. When the most expensive of their products happen to share identical fuel- and ampere guages with Valiants and Darts, doesn’t this relay a somewhat confused message to someone shopping for a luxury brand?
As far as “cars designed by engineers instead of by designers” goes, this is most evident in the Imperial’s dashboard design. To drive one daily would be like sitting in an Art Deco (slightly exagerated, of course) apartment building whose apartment is furnished with cheap furniture. For me, that would be more unbearable than to sit in a modernist gravestone with windows which is attractively furnished from within.
The last let-down is what helped Ford Motor Company stay behind General Motors which was installing engines which were shared across the board, while each General Motors division had built their own engines, with minor exceptions shared between low budget compacts and intermediates, namely the Chevrolet 6-banger.
It probably didn’t bother most Chrysler owners that they were sharing the same engines with motorhomes and that they were riding on rear leaf springs. But that would heve been quite a large pill for me to swallow
The thing about the sharp-edged concave creases on the 300 and New Yorker is that if nothing else, it has a coherent theme. It’s not a theme to every taste, and it’s very severe, but I look at it and think, “Okay, I see what you’re doing there.” The Imperial lacks that. If it were just slab-sided, I think it would be very bland, but the double crease and the chrome spear aren’t doing anything — they’re a bit of texture (which is hard to overlook once you notice it), but to no particular end.
According to people who’ve lived in the cool-looking Art Deco apartment buildings that still stand in various parts of Los Angeles, the problem with them is that while they look very cool on the outside, their fundamentals are frequently awful: The plumbing is disastrous, the wiring often actively dangerous, the stairs are treacherous, the elevators are troublesome, insulation is lacking, and handicapped accessibility is a nightmare.
In that sense, I feel like the Imperial has the opposite problem: Its fundamentals are not bad (though they’re also not very special, and its repair record when new was not good), but however much money Chrysler spent or charged, they just didn’t know how to dress it at all.
The concave side of a sheet metal stamping is inherently rougher than the convex side of the same stamping. I used to see this in non-automotive stampings but the same principle would apply to auto stampings. I don’t know what Chryslers received to smooth out the concave surfaces to get a quality paint finish. Being Chrysler – maybe nothing. At least the Imperial was thankfully free of that problem.
Quote “One can notice an Engelesque Lincolnisation of the Imperial, to a certain degree, here.” Yes, except for the stamped side decor, this convertible. looks like a 1965/66 Cadillac with a Lincolnesque front clip with an – as correctly stated – out-of-place-looking rear quarter end trim. Similar to later Dodge’s copying of GM’s 66/67 c-pillar design for the 68 Charger. Would I want a 67 Imperial ? Honestly: rather no. But that set of mind is due to the grille, not to the rear. Imho Imperial did better and upped in that matter in the later model years wherein I say it culminated with the 74/75 water fall front clip. Pristine to my eyes and possibly pushing Lincoln to remodel the 77 Continental resembling to that style and also to the Mk V front
I think one was destroyed in “Point Blank”
It was. That is such a cool and weird movie; I endlessly go back and forth about whether or not Walker is actually alive. I hope so, but it doesn’t matter really.
One of the bad guys drove a Black 1966-67 Charger too, possibly the first usage of a Dodge Charger as a macho bad guy car, pre-Bullitt.
I have a hard time understanding why the Chrysler Corporation kept stringing along the Imperial brand from 1968 through 1975. On a per car basis, they spent rather a lot of money to differentiate Imperials from lesser Chrysler models. I suspect most folks couldn’t tell them apart without looking at badges. It doesn’t appear there were a lot of buyers who cared.
On the other hand, there were obviously still a tiny group of Imperial loyalists, and it was a halo brand for The Chrysler Corporation. Since (I don’t believe) there was such a thing as a standalone Imperial dealership, I guess it really didn’t cost Chrysler that much overall.
The grille is a huge let-down, clearly imitating the ’63-’64 Continental’s but not succeeding. The Chrysler’s front end is much more interesting and actually looks more expensive too.
Looks at the lead picture……
Ah, _NO_ ~ it’s not old fashioned nor bad looking .
I’ve never experienced this rag top up close and personal but I vividly remember new ’67 Chryslers, they were fantastic if too darn BIG =8-^ .
I see nothing bad about this car at all apart from the “Air Temp II” HVAC (with the evil servo) that when working beats GM’s Harrison output but when it’s on the fritz (normal after 20 years) I can tell you, it will cause baldness in the Mechanics trying to sort it out .
Were I an Imperial or rag top man I’d be proud to own and drive this massive beauty .
Those red front seats are hideous .
-Nate
Not everyone’s cuppa, but count me as a fan. My biggest issue is with the dinky convertible top. GM’s and Ford’s canvas tops look much more substantial.
Still don’t care for the Imperial from an aesthetic point of view. The only reason I would have to own one is because it is a 1967 car meaning any 1967 car is fine by me. However, for some reason, I am mesmerized by the 66-67 New Yorker/300 4 doors followed by the 1966 2 door coupe. The 67 Fast Top comes in third on my pecking order. . Number 1 preference, being the 67 4 door, based on their rear end treatments making my dream car a 1967 New Yorker 4 door. Just two weeks ago I saw an extremely nice 67 or 68 4 door Imperial one morning, in gold, on a single car transporter heading west on 680. Being high up you couldn’t miss it.
I find the 67 – 68 Imperial to be a beautiful car. Perhaps the coupe or sedan look better than the convertible. To me, it is a very clean and uncluttered design. I do think that the mid-60s were a high point in American car style. The Toronado, Eldorado, and Devilles were also beautiful luxury cars. Even the more modest-priced hardtops such as the Wildcat, Galaxie 500, and Impala SS were great looking cars. Past the styling excess of the late 50s and early 60s and before the opera window craze of the early 70s.
I think that the Airflow was the exception among products styled while Walter Chrysler was still running the company. He hired Raymond Dietrich to head styling, and often ran interference for him against engineering. Some of Dietrich’s later efforts were uneven, but they were often quite nice. Once the old man had his stroke in 1937 (IIRC) engineering took over and soon forced him out. I think the 1939 models were the last with his influence.
I personally like this era of Engel’s work at Chrysler, which seemed to develop the shapes popularized by GM in 1962-64. And I don’t think poor sales of convertibles affected this car alone – even in years when Chrysler and or Imperial are considered most beautiful, convertible sales were low as well. Chrysler buyers were just not convertible people.
But yeah, mistakes were made with this car. And I love them anyway.
I think Dietrich did the Airstream cars that Chrysler ended up offering concurrently with the Airflows, but he did not do the Airflows.
The ’35-’36 Airstream cars are credited to Phil O. Wright who entered the Chrysler Art & Color after stints at Walter Murphy coachbuilders, Auburn/Cord, and Pierce-Arrow
Never cared for the exaggerated concave sides of the NY/Newports of the era, must have been a nightmare for bodymen too… I’ll take the Imp anyday. A friend owns the super low mile gold ’68 that was on the cover of HCC some years ago, it’s truly magnificent in person. It was a trade in when he was Service Mgr. at the local Chrysler/Plymouth dealer.
The 1968 Imperial received a more coherent front-end treatment, but those 2 ridges on the body sides were now decorated with chrome!
As the Romans might say, “De gustubus non disputandem est” If you have ever driven a 67-68 Imperial, you might come away surprised that for all the shortcomings of a rear leaf spring vehicle, the torsion bar front suspension allows it to handle like a much smaller car. I find it a very agreeable, if a bit ‘floaty’ experience, but that was common for the time. The 440 provides more than adequate take off power and while a nearly 2.5 ton auto is going to have a 0-60 time of ‘eventually’ that’s not the kind of car this is intended to be. I own one (68 LeBaron) and am wasting quite a bit of hard earned money on restoration that will never be recovered by an evential estate sale. I also have a 68 300 convertible in restoration, and that is a vehicle with completely different character and a story for another day.
Poor Chrysler management, desperate to be perceived as one of the legitimate Big Three which seem to require a flagship luxury make, only to be saddled with one they could never fully establish as separate from Chrysler in the public perception. By the time the 1967 Imperial was being developed, applying rich-looking, impressive if not very original luxury car hallmarks to the C-Body platform was about their only option.
For those who seek a 1960s’ luxury car for a more modest entry price, the Imperials are your best choice.