Nine-Passenger Awesomeness

The car show pictures from a couple of weeks ago got a decent response, and I will try to do more of that sort of thing if opportunities present themselves. Naturally there are plenty of websites dedicated to old cars, and I frequent a few of them.

My favorite is Curbside Classic, which has been around for a couple of years. Apparently all older cars go to Eugene, OR to live on forever, based on the volume of vehicles the site's founder finds and photographs in his daily travels. But there are other contributors to the site who live in other parts of the country and find cool stuff as well.

CC does occasional themed programming, and this week they are highlighting vintage products from Chrysler Corporation. I have a personal bias toward anything From Mopar (that's a colloquialism for a Dodge, Plymouth, or Chrysler), having grown up riding around in a Plymouth station wagon and a Dodge Polara (among other cars). You may remember that my car show posts featured a Chrysler 300E, a Dodge Polara, an Imperial Crown, and a Plymouth Satellite; I was pleased that I was able to get pics of at least one model from each brand.

The basic body style worn by the 1959 300E carried through the 1961 model year, before the fins finally got clipped for '62. Today on CC there is a magnificent 1961 Chrysler Town & Country station wagon from a car show in Moline, IL. I love station wagons in general, but I'm going absolutely nuts over this one.

I personally prefer the 1960 models, which look similar but have much more attractive front ends (those angled headlights on the '61 spoil it for me). But back to this wagon. What an incredible shade of blue—according to the brochure for that year, it was called Capri Blue and the top is Parisian Blue. And of course the interior is a matching shade of blue. That's one of the things I miss most about cars: interiors that aren't gray, beige, or black.

Only 760 of the three-seat models were made for model year 1961, which isn't surprising considering this was an expensive car at the time, listing at nearly $5000 before options. People who bought station wagons were somewhat less likely to care about luxury (that sure changed with SUVs), and people who bought luxury cars were less likely to want or need a station wagon.

Go look at it again. LOOK AT IT. It's 219 glorious inches long! It's so hard to believe that cars like this were ever made, and people drove things like this as big and outlandish as this as just their everyday cars. Look at the details: those doors have no frames around the windows, and there is no center pillar between them. That's right, this is a hardtop station wagon. Chrysler wasn't the first to build such a car, but I'm pretty sure they were the last.

Check out those chrome handles on either side of the rear window, the rear view mirror mounted on the dashboard, the nine decorative trim pieces on each side behind the rear wheels (because I guess eight would look too plain, but ten would be overdoing it). The steering wheel is clear lucite, for crap's sake. People sat around and thought of this stuff, and it got put on the car. Oh, and there's no shift lever coming out of the steering column because the automatic transmission was operated via pushbuttons on the left side of the wheel (out of view in the interior pic, but you can see them in this picture to the left of the speedometer and behind the steering wheel).

With modern cars, it's "if we make the tail light lenses out of a slightly thinner plastic, we can save six cents per car." And "beige and gray interiors go with everything so those are the only two choices we need, and let's only offer six color choices for the outside because everyone's going to want silver, white, or black anyway." I know Detroit's old ways were not sustainable, but this is some car. For what you paid for it, you really got something special.

(There are some additional pictures of this Chrysler, from a different event, here.)

Addendum: following up on my remark above about new-car colors, I just saw this chart that backs up my assertion. Over 60% of new cars bought worldwide in 2012 were white, black, or silver; if you include gray, the number jumps to 76%. Boring.