The Mobile Director option was one of the signature features of the 1967 Imperial, a pricey package that was supposed to transform the big Imperial Crown Coupe into a rolling office. Despite its novelty value, the Mobile Director package missed the mark in almost every way, and is extremely rare today.
The 1967 Mobile Director option was really a production version of a 1966 Chrysler show car called the Imperial Mobile Executive. Unveiled in December 1965, this was a customized charcoal metallic 1966 Imperial Crown Coupe with a clever front armrest that could rotate to become a rear desk/table, with a detachable lamp and a front passenger seat that could rotate 180 degrees to create a rather cramped “conference table” environment. The car was often shown with a typewriter and sometimes a portable television for rear-seat passengers, although neither was an integral feature.
Its most notable feature was its suite of office electronics. The Mobile Executive had an additional rear-seat center console that contained a Dictaphone voice recorder, a radiotelephone, and a Stewart-Warner Datafax unit that could send or receive facsimile transmissions while on the road.
The Datafax system was not new — it had been around since the 1950s, the first mechanical facsimile system to work over Bell Systems phone lines. Compared to the fax machines of the 1990s, it was cumbersome and slow: Chrysler said the one in the Imperial Mobile Executive could transmit a picture or report in as little as six minutes! Likewise, mobile radiotelephones had been around for years, although car phones were still fairly rare, and quite expensive to operate.
This concept car was apparently well-received, so Chrysler, in a fit of misguided enthusiasm, decided to offer a similar setup on the 1967 Imperial Crown Coupe, called the Mobile Director option.
Inevitably, the show car’s electronics were discarded for the production version. I don’t know what Stewart-Warner Electronics was charging for a compact Datafax machine at this juncture, but I imagine Chrysler considered the cost prohibitive. As for the radiotelephone, I’m not sure you could even buy a car phone outright at this point. Most people who used them in this era leased them, paying a monthly rental charge plus an installation fee and airtime charges, often written off as business expenses. Chrysler might have been able to offer some kind of prewiring option, but actually offering the phone to customers would probably have involved dealer partnerships with local vendors. It would be almost 20 years before automakers would begin offering mobile phones as factory options.
This left the Mobile Director option with three features: the folding desk/table; the swiveling front passenger seat; and the detachable high-intensity lamp, which could be plugged into any of the Imperial’s four (!) cigarette lighters.
The desk/table was a clever piece of work. When folded and lowered, it could flip forward to become an armrest for front seat passengers, and if it was in the way, you could remove it entirely and put it in the trunk. Chrysler supplied a filler cap to cover the mounting hole when the desk was removed.
For obvious reasons, the Mobile Director option was only offered with front bucket seats. The passenger-side swivel mechanism precluded any fore-aft adjustment of the right passenger seat, so anyone with longer-than-average legs was out of luck.
This option remains an instant conversation piece, and I can see why its concept car predecessor wowed car show visitors, but there are several points about it that I find very puzzling. First, Chrysler advertised the all-new 1967 Imperial as “the newest prestige automobile in a decade,” and “a totally new way to travel,” so I wonder at the wisdom of giving it a signature option that had been so prominently associated with the outgoing Imperial — the car the new one had theoretically made obsolete.
Second, it’s never been clear to me why the Mobile Director package was offered only on the two-door hardtop coupe, not on the four-door Crown or Imperial LeBaron. If you really intended to use this setup as a “traveling board room,” wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a four-door model that would allow everyone to enter and leave with more dignity?
That gets into another, stickier point about this option, which is the question of where the owner (the putative “you” in the ads and brochures) was expected to sit. If you were driving, you couldn’t use the folding desk/table yourself unless you got out and switched seats. The press photos of the 1966 Imperial Mobile Executive had suggested that the busy owner/tycoon would sit in back, perhaps with a secretary in the front swivel seat to do the typing. However, to do that on the move would require a chauffeur in addition to the secretary, and would make entry and exit rather complicated.
The Crown Coupe had auxiliary door handles so a rear seat passenger could open the doors themselves, but the secretary or driver would still need to get out of the way first. The desk/table would also need to be swiveled out of the way or folded up, which would require first relocating anything sitting on the desk, like a heavy mechanical typewriter. This seems like it would pose a cumbersome multi-stage problem for a rear-seat occupant who needed to make a hasty trip to the little executives’ room after a three-martini lunch.
If you were traveling with children, the table could be used to let the kids entertain themselves with board games, but if there was a second adult besides the driver, they would either need to play with one of the children until the next rest stop or be consigned to the passenger seat behind the driver. (If they were mad, I suppose they could sit in the rear-facing passenger seat, playing solitaire while staring at the kids in icy silence, but that seems more like a scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation than a recipe for road-trip harmony.)
A busy executive who really was looking to get some work done while a company driver steered the ship was probably better off with a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. The 1967 Brougham didn’t have an elaborate fold-out desk, but it did have folding seat back trays with reading lamps, and a competent installer could probably have hidden a compartment for a mobile phone in the fold-down center armrest. Better still, both you and your secretary or bodyguard could get in and out without too many awkward contortions.
There were a few people who appreciated the Mobile Director option. Collector Michael Amodt owns a white and red Imperial Crown Coupe (once featured in Special Interest Auto magazine) that was purchased by a San Jose physician who still made house calls and appreciated having somewhere to write case notes. However, buyers who might have been interested in feature tended to be put off by the price, which was a whopping $597.40 (the equivalent of more than $6,000 in 2026), close to 10 percent of the base price of a 1967 Crown Coupe. That was a lot of money for a swiveling bucket seat, a detachable lamp, and a folding table, and it chilled sales. According to Amodt, only 81 cars were sold with this option in 1967.
This was not a particularly good year for the Imperial in general: Buyers didn’t seem very interested in the all-new 1967 model, which was now essentially a Chrysler New Yorker with a lot of love-’em-or-hate-’em styling eccentricities. There were a few commendable points (Imperial standardized front disc brakes, while they still weren’t even optional on any Cadillac but the Eldorado), but the nicest thing I can say about the exterior is that I like the color. (Note: I originally described this car as Haze Green, which is what it was originally painted, but Haze Green was a lighter, mintier shade; this coupe has been repainted in a darker green closer to the factory Forest Green.)
As for the interior, it seemed to have high-quality materials, but I want to know who signed off on making the leather seats look like they’d been pre-vandalized, and giving a $6,500+ car a steering wheel that looked like a radioactive green hula hoop was a very strange choice.
Despite the weak sales of the 1967 version, Chrysler actually brought the Mobile Director option back for the 1968 Imperial Crown Coupe, with the price cut to $317.60.
It no longer seemed to be prominently featured in brochures and ads, and it sold no better than it had in 1967. The production figure that’s most commonly quoted is 55, although some estimates put the total at as few as 10 cars.
The dismal sales leave me to wonder if Chrysler actually expected the Mobile Director option to sell at all or if it was just a gimmick, a showroom novelty item to drive interest in the new Imperial. If it was a gimmick, it strikes me as awfully desperate for an all-new model, and it mostly served to underscore the lack of coherent direction that was keeping the Imperial from being taken seriously in the luxury car market.
There WERE people back then who often worked out of their cars, whether traveling salespeople or on-the-go executives, but I don’t think this package served them well. It was just not very well thought out, and it was expensive for what you got, which made it seem more like a toy than a set of useful features. The Mobile Director option is best-suited to the role it usually plays today: wowing children of all ages at car shows and cruise nights.
Above all, I think this Imperial stumbled over a basic fact of the luxury market: Affluent buyers are often accustomed to being driven, and some of them love luxurious two-door coupes, but generally not at the same time. Even in the really high end of the market — the Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Mercedes-Benz models that cost far more than most domestic luxury models — the two-door models tend to be owner-driven. After all, how many people dream of riding in the back seat (or non-adjustable front passenger seat) of their own posh coupe?
Related Reading
Rare Find: 1967 Imperial With Director’s Chair Option – Chrysler’s Luxury Statement (by Rich Baron)
Vintage Car Life Review: 1967 Imperial – A Renewed Imperial To Battle In The Luxury Leagues (by Rich Baron)
Car Show Classic: 1967 Imperial Crown Coupe – For The Last Time, It’s Not A Chrysler! (by Tom Klockau)
A different seat and/or rotating apparatus would have been required to use the idea on a four-door Imperial, the B-pillar sitting further forward than the door’s trailing-edge on the two-door cars. There are images on-line of one Director with seatbelt webbing on the rotated seat. Would this be after-market? Based on the location of the (male) end of the lap-belt in one of your images, I can’t visualize how it would work. Did Chrysler in 1967-1968 really think secretaries so expendable they weren’t given a seat belt able to be used when seat was rotated?
Had it been economically or technically viable, the Datafax (able to send or receive a US Letter-sized page of text in six minutes) would have attracted some. That speed sounds now unimpressive (or compared even with the 14.4 kbit/s of the 1990s) but given the alternatives in 1967-1968 (driving, walking or using the US Mail), six minutes a page would have seemed fast.
The four-door models had shorter front doors than the two-doors. (I don’t have the door dimensions, but it’s pretty obvious looking at them.) However, (a) at these prices, I think they should have been able to sort that out, and (b) I’m not convinced the swivel seat was bringing that much to the table, if you’ll pardon the expression. On a long-wheelbase limousine, it might have been a different story, but for an owner-occupant, having to choose between facing backward in the right front seat or being trapped in the back seat just does not sound appealing.
I think so, yeah. This car’s belt retractors look like they’re in the same place as on the standard coupe and convertible, which was behind the front seats, angled forward, so back seat passengers wouldn’t trip over them getting in and out. I can’t see any way someone could use them with the seat facing backward. Very few people wore seatbelts back then, and no U.S. state required them to be worn, so I think Chrysler just didn’t consider it a priority.
Oh, I agree. The whole appeal of the Datafax system for business users was that faxing a document, even if it took a while, was still faster than sending it by messenger or Federal Express overnight. However, aside from the cost of the installation, I think sending fax transmissions from a car would probably have posed some challenges: Airtime charges for radiotelephones were hefty, so the per-page transmission cost would have been high, and if it took six minutes per page, the transmission was more likely to be disrupted by signal interference or interruption. I’d actually be very curious to know whether Stewart-Warner or anyone else published studies on the practicality of mobile fax transmission with ’60s technology. It had a lot of POTENTIAL appeal, although its real-world practicality was maybe another matter.
Thanks for that; agree that even if the scaled-down Datafax could have been produced at reasonable cost, the solid-state electronics that would have made the thing reliable when so subject to jolts were still years away. Chrysler’s Bendix “Electrojector” fuel injection in 1958 had fewer moving parts and that didn’t end well. Maybe though there wouldn’t have been demand. In the 1990s, the Toyota Celsior (the JDM Lexus LS) offered the option of a fax machine in the glovebox. Although said to be reliable and installed with Toyota’s typical neatness, it didn’t catch on, even in that nation of early-adopters.
You have to wonder what kind of connection (radio telephone?) would have given that fax machine that kind of speed; anyone else remember that scene in the (1968) film “Bullitt” where they are standing around for what seemed like forever waiting for a fax of a photo from Chicago?
I think the writer has never been in sales. As an insurance agent, I can see that for the time, it would have been a very interesting and attractive set of options to have. The car speaks of success to a reasonable level, it is well appointed for the day, and for those meeting clients or prospective clients at their job sites or out of office locations, a very practical set of options. Try filling out a multi page paper application on your lap or on top of your briefcase lid (back in the day) and see how well that works out. Plus, the novelty of it would have been worthwhile. Call on a professional class of people and they would have all liked it, even if they may not have bought it themselves. As a final and unintended benefit, it would have provided the rest of the family a place to play cards or some kind of board game while on family vacations going down the highway. Distracting to the driver, yes, but to think that those types of activities are not happening today is somewhat optimistic. I know that my family would have used it that way on the way to grandparents houses. So much better than a lap board! It is surprising to me that more cars weren’t sold with this option, but that may have been a marketing issue and not a value issue. Correctly marketed to the right demographic, this car should have done much better than it apparently did. Thank you for writing about it.
I agree with your thoughts.
I see it as not practical in motion, rather it is useful as an office on sites lacking such facilities.
The idea of it made sense, the execution did not. Let’s say you wanted to fill out a multi-page form after making an insurance sale. Having a solid surface to write on was certainly worthwhile, but assuming you were flying solo, using the desk/table required you to swivel the passenger seat around, unfold the desk, and move to the passenger seat to use it (which probably required getting out of the car, unless you were unusually limber and had short legs). When you were done, you had to get back out to get into the driver’s seat before you could move on. The actual convenience of that does not seem high to me, especially for the equivalent of more than $6,000 USD in today’s dollars.
I always like Imperials, no matter the year. Prior to 67, The Imperial was on its own body-on-frame platform. In 67, it began using the New Yorker platform, although with a longer wheelbase. Certainly, the Cadillac DeVille also shared a basic platform with other full-size GM cars. I do think these cars are beautiful. The styling is very clean and uncluttered. And I don’t see many of them. Always glad to see one at a car show!
I think the ’67 Imp was a very clean design thankfully and finally removed from the ’50s era windshield.
At worst the buyer was purchasing a less than common luxury automobile.
Maybe the designers watched the Dean Martin “Matt Helm” movies.
I agree the execution wasn’t ideal, but it was so much better than using a lap board or the top of the trunk to do paperwork on-site. By the standards of the day, it was way ahead of its time. There is value beyond the practical side for having something perceived as unique and leading edge. Car phones were very expensive and cumbersome with poor coverage early on, even into the 1980’s. But having one was great if you were selling on the road. I could have been interested in this option had I been selling in the 1960’s…but I understand that not everyone would have been. Just like today when not every salesperson buys one of those Mercedes vans that can be customized as an office. Glad to have seen this car featured today.
Veeerrry interesting, but shtupid.
“ouch”.
I have never seen this before. Aaron, you keep surprising me!
I can’t see much utility in this option. For one, sitting backwards in a moving car would make me motion sick. Then there is the problem of putting pen on paper in a car that is hitting bumps and ruts. I could go on, but it is clear that this option would never be successful.
They had bad sales because they were at a minimum, homely but compared to the Continental and DeVilles, they were just ugly. The Lincolns and Caddys had a huge presence on the road that said money and power. The Imperial was a sad also ran. The 69 models competed much better, at least in the looks department.
Hysterical. Not entirely, silly, useless though.. (and who, over a certain age, doesn’t like to gander at a “high tech, typewriter??)
Can ya still get those cone shaped, water cooler, cups? lol
Can’t be/have been many “2dor, Imperials” of this era.
With the initial meager sales, it’s easy to see why the price of the Mobile Director was nearly half for 1968; Chrysler was simply trying to get rid of remaining inventory.
With that said, they actually took another stab at it four decades later on their latest generation, new 2008 minivan with the ‘Swivel ‘n Go’ option. This time, it was the 2nd row seats that spun around to face the 3rd row with a small table mounted between them. Trouble was, space was quite cramped, even for small children (don’t even think about adults sitting back there) as well as the front seats needing to be moved all the way to the most foreward position.
As one might have guessed, it went over about as well as the Mobile Executive, with the Swivel ‘n Go option lasting for three years before it was mercifully yanked.
Thank you for calling this for what it is or was – a useless gimmick. For the number of articles about these cars, in which nearly 100% mention the Mobile Director option, you would think it was a popular option. The miniscule take rate puts the option in perspective.
In my layering days, many was the time that my Mrs. drove the car to some distant county while I sat in the back seat and worked on other matters. But I didn’t need a reversed front seat to do that.
Another indignity of the Imperial marque, this involving leaving behind the unique chassis (and long-in-the-tooth wraparound windshield), Chrysler paddled mightily to give the 1967 model some cachet. The grille reminded me of the White House, and cost nearly as much to manufacture. The taillights were impressive, but a little goofy. I love it, but I concede mine is a minority view. The ’69 looked better.
The Mobile Director option is questionable to begin with, but to only offer in on 2 door Imperials really renders it useless. I doubt even Mr. Drysdale would go for it. Thanks to Aaron for getting into this often mentioned but never seen Imperial option.
I appreciate that society has greatly changed in the past 50 years but I cannot accept that the concept of a formal dressed couple “enjoying” a dining experience complete with fine china and all the trimmings inside their car even if it was an Imperial. I wonder what drive through served this up!
As a kid, I remember the seeing the occasional Imperial featuring in Get Smart.
I could see CONTROL getting one of these, and The Chief proudly demonstrating it to Max, of course Max turns it into something ridiculous. But it would need the whole package with the Dictaphone and Datafax and other CONTROL gadgets “engineered” into it.
As to two-way communication and putting a date on its progress, I remember that Don Rook (that was his ’41 Packard in The Godfather) had a big, yellow late ’60s convertible (for some reason I can’t remember if it was a Chrysler or Mercury – if the latter it may have been one of those faux-wood-sided ones, back in 1972 with an enormous whip antenna of the sort that you mostly saw on state trooper cars.
The first commercial car phone service in the U.S. became available in certain areas in 1946. We actually just passed the 80th anniversary in June of this year.
Image transmission by radio was tried as early as the 1920s but was too slow and unreliable to achieve commercial success, the first useful implementation coming in the late 1940s for telegrams, a receiving post office able to relay the message to the delivery van nearest the destination, the printed copy generated for the driver to deliver. Because most telegrams were short (charged per character), the transmission time was acceptable. In the US, mobile devices able to receive and print images over radio seem first to have come into use in the mid-1960s.
For those in offices (such as newspapers) hard-wired to the transmission infrastructure, receiving images “over the wire” had by the late 1930s (in the West) become routine. This image is from 1958 and was a “TELEPHOTO” distributed to the wire services. The vehicle is the one-off Auto Sputnik (Sputnik-car), built for the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, the Communist Party of Italy, 1921-1991) as a propaganda vehicle to travel around the land in the run-up to the 1958 general election. On the back is a model of the Soviet Sputnik 2 that flew into low Earth-orbit on 3 November 1957, carrying Laika, the “Soviet space dog”, a footnote in zoological history in being first animal to orbit Earth. The PCI’s Sputnik model had Perspex panels so a dog (sometimes living, sometimes stuffed) could be seen and even that was an attempt to manipulate voters through “associative cognition”, people trusting dogs in a way they don’t trust politicians, communist or otherwise. Unfortunately for Laika, the technology of the era precluded a return-flight and, some hours into the mission, she died of hyperthermia. Like the doomed dog, Auto Sputnik did not survive and although there seem to be no details of either the coach-builder or platform used, historians of the etceterini are certain it was based on the versatile Fiat 600 Multipla (1956–1967).
On a related note I wonder what the take rate was for the Airstream Flying Cloud 30 FB Office model trailer. This replaced the rear bunks with a home office for nomadic remote workers. It was also well over $100k so only well heeled digital nomads or workaholics need apply.
A lot of the concepts of the Mobile Executive exist in high end pickups today since most have some sort of work surface and document organizer in the console and mobile phones and computers with with wireless connectivity are commonplace. The mobile fax even had its moment in the 80s and 90s as immortalized in The Player “have your Range Rover fax my Range Rover”