1968 Chevrolet Caprice Coupe: Chevrolet’s Middle-Class, Medium-Price Luxury Contender

By the 1960s, the old brand ladder once promoted by GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. — “a car for every purse and purpose” — had become a glut of competing GM models in the medium-price field. The 1968 Chevrolet Caprice, the fanciest version of the full-size Chevrolet, went head-to-head not only with the luxury-oriented Ford LTD and Plymouth VIP, but also low-end Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick models, and proved a formidable contender.

The luxurious Chevrolet Caprice was introduced midway through the 1965 model year. It was ostensibly a response to the popular new Ford LTD, but in a broader sense, it was really just the latest salvo in the ongoing war between the low-price league and the medium-price brands. Cheaper brands like Chevrolet and Ford had been pushing upwards in price and appointments, while the mid-price brands had fielded cheaper downmarket models to siphon off business from the low-price marques.

This has often been described as a breakdown of the “Sloan ladder,” the product plan GM had formulated in the early 1920s, but Alfred P. Sloan himself saw it as an inevitable byproduct of postwar trends — the market for new cars was increasing, but the amount of money buyers could afford to spend on a new car was increasing faster. Although most of Sloan’s 1964 book My Years With General Motors (actually authored by James McDonald) was written in the late 1950s, long before the LTD and Caprice, it was already apparent by then that interest in basic stripped-down cars was diminishing as the the low-price brands added “new, more expensive series of cars which were, in effect, part of the medium-price group in everything but name.”

The following table shows how the Caprice fit into the medium-price two-door hardtop scene in 1968. The listed prices are not base prices, but include power steering, the cheapest available automatic transmission, and an AM radio, which used car price guides considered basic equipment. (You could still get most of these cars without those features if you really insisted, but few people wanted them that way, and you’d be penalized significantly in trade-in or resale value.)

Model	Price New (2-door HT)	One-Year Trade-In Value	Production (All Body Styles)
Buick LeSabre	$3,619	$2,025	62,413
Chevrolet Caprice	$3,569	$1,950	115,500
Ford LTD	$3,511	$1,900	138,752
Mercury Monterey	$3,549	$1,725	15,145
Oldsmobile Delmont 88	$3,599	$1,875	66,624
Plymouth VIP	$3,623	$1,950	17,513
Pontiac Catalina	$3,518	$1,950	240,971
Pontiac Catalina with Ventura trim	$3,623	$2,025	N/A

(No production total is available for the Catalina’s Ventura Custom Interior, which was an option package, not a model.)

As you can see, this was a pretty tight grouping: All these cars were priced within $112 of each other, which amounted to less than $4 a month on a typical 36-month car note. Of course, the actual price could vary a lot depending on which additional features you specified. The mid-price brands tended to be less generous with basic amenities like foam-padded seats and courtesy lights, so you might pay a little extra for those, and they charged more than Ford or Chevrolet for options, even where the optional equipment was identical. However, the point was that these cars were all directly competitive and similar in price, and the Caprice was squarely in the middle.

Since 1966, the Caprice had distinguished itself from the rest of the full-size Chevrolet line with a distinctive roofline for the two-door hardtop Caprice Coupe, featuring a smaller, more upright backlight and wider sail panels with blind rear quarters. For 1968, it also dispensed with vent windows, which required completely new side glass. Chevrolet made this body style available in the 1968 Impala line as well, now generically known as a “custom sport coupe” to better distinguish it from the regular full-size Chevrolet sport coupe two-door hardtop.

Candidly, I’m not a big fan of this roof design, especially in its 1968 iteration: It was more severe even than the four-door sedan or four-door hardtop roof, and it threw off the proportions of these cars in a way that I find awkward. Also, while this body style drew attention at the time for deleting the vent windows, GM’s Astro Ventilation flow-through system always left something to be desired.

The semi-fastback style of the regular Impala sport coupe was falling out of fashion for big cars by the late 1960s, but I still think it’s held up better aesthetically than the custom sport coupe. Still, anything “formal” was catnip for buyers in this class, and the sportier full-size Chevrolet sport coupe would lose a lot of ground over the next five or six years.

Neither the rear wheel skirts nor the vinyl roof were standard on the Caprice (the skirts were $26.35, the padded vinyl roof was $89.55), and you could have either or both on an Impala. (You could even get the skirts on a Biscayne, although the vinyl top was only available on hardtops, which the Biscayne and U.S.-market Bel Air no longer offered.) However, the kind of buyers who were interested in the Caprice seemed to have been more willing to pony up for such features, and I think dealers were more likely to specify them on cars ordered for showrooms.

There was still no six-cylinder Caprice, so the standard engine in 1968 was the Turbo-Fire 307, with 200 hp. As full-size Chevrolets had kept getting bigger and heavier, the adequacy of the base V-8 had diminished, especially with the engine modifications involved in getting it to pass the new federal emissions standards that took effect for 1968. Car Life needed 13.8 seconds to reach 60 mph with a lightly equipped Impala 307 with Powerglide.

While you could order a Caprice with the big Turbo-Jet 396 or 427 engines, the optimum choice was the powertrain in the car pictured here, which was the L73 Turbo-Fire 327 combined with Turbo Hydra-Matic. The L73 was a new variation for 1968, with a four-barrel carburetor and 8.75 to 1 compression, allowing it to run on regular gasoline. With TH400, the L73 offered decent performance, and it was the best all-around value of the available powertrain choices. The lower compression ratio sacrificed 25 hp compared to the still-available high-compression L30 327, but the L73 was cheaper upfront (only $63.20), any loss in gas mileage was offset by the lower fuel cost, and you’d get about $50 of the cost back at trade-in time. Like the L30, the L73 also put over 200 fewer pounds on the front wheels than either Turbo-Jet engine.

The biggest selling point for a Caprice or LTD compared to rivals from medium-price brands was nicer interior trim. Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick dealers really wanted buyers of their low-end models to splurge on the extra-cost deluxe or custom trim options. If you did, it would give you an interior more comparable to the Caprice or LTD, but it would add another hundred bucks or so to the tab.

By contrast, the Caprice was at the top of the Chevrolet line, not the bottom, so Chevrolet had given it a nicer interior to entice Impala shoppers. The medium-price brands were stepping up their game in this area (for instance, the 1968 Delmont 88 came with front and rear armrests, which had previously required you to order the deluxe trim), but if you wanted your friends and family to say, “Gosh, that sure is a nice car,” a Caprice or LTD still gave you a bit more for a little bit less.

This car has the standard front bench seat, but where Chevrolet hoped Caprice buyers would spend extra was on the optional Strato-Bench, which had a divided backrest with a center armrest. This would set you back an additional $105.35, plus another $42.15 if you wanted headrests. (Head restraints wouldn’t be compulsory under federal safety standards until January 1969.) For $158, you could order Strato-Buckets instead, but interest in full-size cars with bucket seats was rapidly fading. (The Impala Super Sport, which included buckets and a center console, had reverted from model to option package for 1968.)

One fascinating detail I gleaned from Kelly Blue Book: While there wasn’t a vast difference in the price of factory air conditioning between the low- and mid-price brands at this point, A/C was worth considerably more on cars with a medium-price brand. On a Caprice or LTD, factory air was worth about $200 in trade on a late-model used car. On a full-size Pontiac, Oldsmobile, or Buick, it was worth an extra $325 to $350, and the difference in value was greater than the difference in initial retail price. That was one of the few areas where the “true” medium-price models had a clear advantage when it came to residuals. Otherwise, only the Buick LeSabre seemed to have a measurable edge in resale value because of its more prestigious name, and its advantage over a Caprice was modest.

Personally, I’m more partial to the sporty buckets-and-console style than to this kind of tufted-button bench seat luxury, but I find the interior treatments of the early Caprice a good deal more tasteful than the ’70s iterations. Also, I like the interior styling of this car a lot better than I like the exterior.

As the Caprice became more and more popular in the coming years, it was de-contented like everything else, but the people who designed these early interiors were clearly conscious of the cost premium the Caprice commanded relative to an Impala (a Caprice coupe listed for nearly $200 more than an Impala custom sport coupe), and they had the good sense to make sure you could see exactly where most of that money went. As Sloan and McDonald had put it, this was a medium-price car “in everything but name,” and it looked like one.

In 1968, I don’t think most buyers made the kinds of direct comparisons I’m making here on price and resale value. A lot of people chose new cars based on brand loyalty, reputation, their relationship with the dealer, and what the salesperson talked them into, rather than on which model gave the best deal on padded seat cushions and electric clocks or what would be worth an extra $50 in trade after two years. If they were Consumer Reports subscribers, shoppers might be aware that Consumers Union had repeatedly dinged the full-size Chevrolet for “a relentlessly poor Frequency-of-Repair record” — a contemporary Catalina, LeSabre, or Delmont 88 scored better in that regard — but it’s probably easier for me to compare these things today than it was for most contemporary new car shoppers.

However, looking at all those factors makes clear that the Caprice had become a serious player in the mid-price field. The Caprice actually outsold both the Delmont 88 and the LeSabre in 1968, making it No. 2 in this price segment. Also, while the Caprice didn’t sell quite as well as the LTD this year, it was telling that the Chevrolet now had better resale values than the Ford and had residuals that compared closely with its ostensibly more upscale GM siblings.

Alfred Sloan, who died in February 1966, did not see these kinds of shifts as categorically problematic, calling them “simply a recognition by the industry of the consumer’s new purse and a catering to his new desires.” What he might have criticized, at least privately, was the growing over-specialization. Mid-price full-size cars like this Caprice, the LeSabre, or the Olds 88 were really what GM did best, and where had they found the sweetest balance between volume and per-unit profit, so the whole GM system became optimized for building cars like this. That worked out great as long as there was a big market for plush domestic full-sizers, but as the market divided and shifted in multiple other directions, it eventually led to a house of cards collapse. The corporation had become too dependent on a specific set of conditions that were no longer sustainable, and GM simply couldn’t adapt quickly enough or completely enough. As Sloan said, “Any rigidity by an automobile manufacturer, no matter how large or how well established, is severely penalized in the market.”

As a modern collector car, this Caprice probably commands more interest because it’s a Chevrolet than because it was once a popular mid-price luxury model. The Baby Boomers who’ve driven the collector market for the past 30 to 40 years weren’t terribly interested in medium-price luxury cars when they were teenagers, and thus haven’t been too keen to pay high prices for them today, especially if they’re not convertibles. This very low-mileage Caprice coupe, which has only about 4,400 miles on the odometer and looks practically new, seemed like an exception, selling for a whopping $53,900 at Mecum Kissimmee 2023 — far more than a contemporary closed-body 1968 LeSabre or Olds 88 could command. Since then, however, the buyer has made at least three unsuccessful to flip the car for at least what they paid. Their most recent attempt (at least that I could find) stalled out after bidding reached $45,000 in January 2024.

 

Related Reading

Dawn Of The Brougham Epoch: 1965 – 1966 Ford LTD, Chevrolet Caprice, Plymouth VIP, Ambassador DPL – The New Low-Cost Luxury Options Of The Mid Sixties (by Rich Baron)

Curbside Classic: 1965 Chevrolet Caprice – The LTD Reaction (by Paul N)

Vintage Review: 1965 Chevrolet Caprice 396 Tested By Motor Trend – Fast And Soft (by Paul N)

1965-69 Chevrolet Caprice Ads: How To Sell A Luxury Chevy (by Eric703)

1965 Chevrolet Caprice Vs. 1965 Buick Electra 225 Custom – Working-Class Luxury Takes On The Establishment (by me)

Curbside Classic: 1966 Chevrolet Caprice – Chevy Joins The Great Brougham Epoch (by Tom Klockau)