Plymouth

~ the eulogy ~

Walter Chrysler put the first Plymouth on a stand at Madison Square Garden on 7 July 1928. His company sold mid-price cars and had nothing to fight Chevrolet and Ford with at the bottom of the market, so this was the entry. The name came off Plymouth binder twine, made by the Plymouth Cordage Company, picked by Joe Frazer because farmers already trusted the word on a spool of rope.

It worked for a very long time. Plymouth sat third in American industry sales behind Chevrolet and Ford until 1960, which is a position most car brands never get near and almost none hold for thirty years. Production peaked at 973,000 cars in the 1973 model year. By 2000 it was down to 108,546 against 459,988 Dodges built on the same platforms in the same plants.

That last comparison is the whole cause of death. From the K-cars of the early 1980s onward, nearly every Plymouth was a Dodge with a different grille, and Chrysler ran two dealer networks selling the identical vehicle to the identical customer at the identical price. The company noticed. It just took twenty years to act, because the dealers were the ones who would pay for it.

~ the dossier ~

~ third place ~

The brand's good decades ran on cheap, honest sedans. The Valiant arrived in 1960 and stayed in production in one form or another for sixteen years, throwing off the Duster coupe along the way. Above it the Fury and the Belvedere carried the middle of the range through two decades. None of these are cars anyone writes about now, and they are what paid for everything that follows.

The Barracuda went on sale on 1 April 1964, two weeks ahead of the Ford Mustang, which is the single piece of trivia that has kept a lot of Plymouth history alive. It was a Valiant with a fastback glass rear window at that point rather than a proper pony car, and Ford outsold it by an order of magnitude, but the date is the date. The E-body Barracuda of 1970 is the one that ended up on posters, and it was discontinued on 1 April 1974, ten years to the day from the launch.

~ the beep beep car ~

The Road Runner arrived for 1968 and it is the clearest thing Plymouth ever did. Muscle cars had gotten expensive and full of trim, so Plymouth took a Belvedere coupe, stripped the interior down to a bench seat, left out the badging, and sold it cheap with a large engine available. Then it licensed the cartoon character from Warner Bros and fitted a horn that went beep beep.

It sold in numbers nobody at Chrysler had forecast, and it produced the Superbird in 1970, a Road Runner with a nose cone and a rear wing tall enough to open the trunk under, built to satisfy NASCAR homologation rules. Dealers could not give the Superbirds away at the time and some were converted back into ordinary Road Runners to move them. They are now worth more than the houses they were parked outside.

~ 3 november 1999 ~

Chrysler had actually been planning the opposite. After killing the Eagle brand in 1998 it intended to give Plymouth its own models again, with a retro look shared across them. The Prowler was the first of those, a factory hot rod that reached showrooms in 1997, and the PT Cruiser was meant to be the second.

Then Daimler-Benz took over and looked at the numbers. The announcement came on 3 November 1999. The PT Cruiser was launched as a Chrysler instead, the Prowler and the Voyager were moved to Chrysler as well, the Breeze was dropped after 2000, and the only Plymouth left for the 2001 model year was the Neon. In Canada the name had already been retired from the car lines the year before.

~ the last one out of belvidere ~

The final Plymouth was built at the Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois on 28 June 2001, one of 38,657 Neons made for that model year. It was ordered by a DaimlerChrysler executive named Darrel Davis: Bright Silver Metallic, LX trim, every option on the sheet except an automatic gearbox, window sticker at $18,210. He kept it. It went to auction twenty years later with 68 miles on it and sold for $19,000, which is roughly what it cost new.

None of this was ever going to reach me. Turkey taxes cars on engine displacement and has done for as long as there has been a Turkish car market, which is why the roads I grew up on were full of 1.3 and 1.6 liter hatchbacks and essentially empty of anything American. A brand whose entire proposition was a big cheap car for a country with cheap fuel has no shape here at all. The Barracuda and the Road Runner arrived in Turkey the way most American cars did, as pictures and film footage, and I would not know what one sounds like from ten meters away.

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