The domestic luxury-car field saw output rise by a healthy 11 percent in 1968, but the Imperial went in the opposite direction — down by almost 13 points.
At least on paper, the Imperial should have done much better. It had a newer body and a broader range of models than the Lincoln Continental, yet it was outsold by a three-to-one margin. The Imperial’s share of the luxury-car market fell to 5.2 percent, which was close to the lowest it had been since being spun off as a stand-alone brand in 1955.
What went wrong? The Imperial arguably had some meaningful advantages, such as superior roadworthiness for an American luxury car partly due to its torsion-bar suspension and Torqueflite automatic transmission.
The Imperial’s styling wasn’t iconic, but it had trendy features such as brougham-style rooflines, full-width taillights and a trunk-lid logo big enough to be seen from outer space.
A new front end in 1968 fixed the biggest problem with the previous year’s design, which looked inordinately busy. In addition, the trim on the modernist dashboard was switched from a fairly generic woodgrain to more distinctive “antique bronze.”
Even so, Motor Trend magazine wasn’t impressed with the Imperial’s looks, suggesting that the car “may not turn many heads with its Dowager Queen styling” (Sanders, 1968; p. 68). Neither were Richard M. Langworth and Jan. P. Norbye, who described the Imperial’s design as “conservative and not very distinguished” (1985, p. 207).
Meanwhile, Popular Mechanics reported that in a survey of Imperial owners, almost 38 percent of respondents ranked workmanship as their biggest dislike (Hartford, 1968).
Workmanship issues undercut ownership experience
The Popular Mechanics owner report on the Imperial started off in a decidedly unflattering manner for a luxury car.
“Whistling down the pike isn’t the thrill to some Imperial owners that it is to others,” wrote auto editor Bill Hartford. “The problem is that high-speed driving only worsens the problem of air and water embarrassingly leaking into this regal automobile. Imperial owners tell us there’s only one reason for their discomfort: poor workmanship” (1968, p. 100).
Owners also complained about spotty paint jobs, doors not closing tight, and sloppy trim and upholstery fit. That’s not a good sign for an automobile that cost twice as much as the average new car in 1968. Yet a Popular Mechanics survey found that almost 48 percent of respondents bought an Imperial because of past experience with the brand. The average owner had had 2.65 Imperials — and some more than a dozen (Hartford, 1968).
“All in all, Imperial owners are an overwhelmingly faithful lot,” concluded Hartford. “They love their car and, even though there are some things that make ’em fighting mad, it’s obvious they’re not going to switch” (1968, p. 228).
Imperial didn’t grow with booming luxury-car market
Perhaps the core problem was that the Imperial inspired the loyalty of past owners but wasn’t winning over many new ones.
So while the luxury-car field saw total output soar by 74 percent between 1958-68, Imperial sales stayed relatively flat. To make matters worse, Imperial production in 1968 — a good year for the U.S. auto industry — was slightly lower than it was in the deep recession of 1958.
While Chrysler was having trouble simply maintaining the Imperial’s sales, Ford had an instant hit when it unveiled the Lincoln Continental Mark III. The personal coupe consistently outsold the entire Imperial lineup.
Ironically, the Imperial saw sales jump in 1969 after losing its unique sheetmetal. Alas, that was only a temporary reprieve. Sales continued to struggle through 1975, when the brand was mercifully discontinued.
Also see ‘Car Life’s faint praise for redesigned 1967 Imperial hints at why it wasn’t a hit’
Langworth and Norbye argued that making the Imperial share more body parts with the Chrysler “doomed” the brand because it “just wasn’t ‘different’ enough to cause many buyers to opt for one instead of a New Yorker” (1985, p. 210). That may not have helped, but until 1975 sales were comparable to the supposedly good-old days when the Imperial had unique sheetmetal.
The fundamental problem was that Chrysler was in over its head. The Imperial’s failure to gain traction illustrated how the automaker wasn’t big enough to compete model for model against a much bigger General Motors and Ford.
Instead of spending a boatload of money trying to build a stand-alone luxury brand, might the No. 3 automaker have been better off sticking with its previous strategy of only offering the Imperial as a limited-production, top-end Chrysler?
NOTES:
Production figures and specifications are from the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006), Flory (2004, 2009), Gunnell (2002) and (Wikipedia (2022).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International; Lincolnwood, Ill.
- Flory, J. “Kelly” Jr.; 2004. American Cars, 1960-1972. McFarland & Co., Inc.
- ——; 2009. American Cars, 1946-1959: Every Model, Year by Year. McFarland & Co.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Hartford, Bill; 1968. “Chrysler Imperial: Gorgeous on the Outside, Gutsy on the Inside.” Popular Mechanics. April issue: pp. 100-101, 228 (linked via Imperial Webpages).
- Langworth, Richard M. and Jan P. Norbye; 1985. The Complete History of Chrysler Corporation 1924-1985. Publications International, Skokie, IL.
- Sanders, Bill; 1968. “Luxury: The great American dream.” Motor Trend. May issue: pp. 56-63 (linked via Imperial Webpages).
- Wikipedia; 2022. “U.S. Automobile Production Figures.” Page last modified Jan. 26.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES
- oldcaradvertising.com: Imperial (1968); Lincoln (1968)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Imperial (1968, 1969); Lincoln Continental Mark III (1971)
Thing is a lot of people still looked at Imperial as a limited edition top end Chrysler. I was going through images online of the 67-69 Chryslers and Imperials and quite a few pictures were labeled “Chrysler Imperial” To people back then moving up to luxury Imperial would always be a Chrysler, as to us it will always be “Dodge Ram”. Meanwhile, Chrysler Corp used as much Chrysler sheet metal as it could get away with starting in 67. I would imagine the 1967 Imperial buyers accepted that, and figured that at least they would get a car that was put together right. They were wrong and by the 68 model year word was out. As for Lincoln, they were offering a personal luxury coupe and personal luxury sedan, luxury cars you didn’t need a tugboat to help park. Imperial only carried a distinctive body from 57-66, and the Exner creations were an acquired taste. Cadillac was still the standard of the world then, Lincoln owns a niche market, and Imperial was for Mopar dealers and executives to drive to the country club.
In writing this story I noticed that a number of automotive magazines referred to the 1968 Imperial as a Chrysler Imperial. Was that because the automaker was already starting to move the Imperial back to a sub-brand status?
Once again, Chrysler had two problems with the Imperial: In most urban areas it shared the same showroom floor with Plymouths and Newports, and the sheetmetal after 1967 was like a deluxe New Yorker. The second and bigger problem that after 1966 almost all of Chrysler’s full-size cars suffered a myriad of workmanship issues. G.M.’s C-bodies at least were distinctive enough apart in 1967-1968 to maintain their brand identity with the Cadillac at the top hierarchy, and did not suffer from the quality issues that the Chryslers did (even though the 1967 Olds 98 was butt-ugly, in my opinion).
I think Imperial’s “original sin” as a brand was its artificiality – while Cadillac and Lincoln had been founded independently of GM and Ford, and then given a great deal of divisional independence, Imperial started out as a niche Chrysler model that the management found potentially more profitable as a separate brand.
Artificiality in itself is not a problem as long as you make sufficient effort to distinguish the new product. Unfortunately, Chrysler seemingly found it difficult and made Imperial follow a similar styling language to the Chryslers that it should have been set apart from. Elwood Engel’s work on the 64-66 cars was a step in the right direction, but a too late and half-hearted one (who wants a wraparound windshield in a 1966 car?), which pushed Chrysler into a damage control mode of reducing the costs of fielding Imperials by switching them to the C-Body and reducing brand-specific elements until the LeBaron became the New Yorker Brougham.
Just offhand, but I wonder if “Imperial” became a little awkward, reeking of colonialism. I may be looking at this through 21st century eyes. However, Studebaker was in no hurry to revive the Dictator nameplate.
That’s an interesting idea given the political dynamics of the times. I would imagine that those drawn to luxury cars might have had less concern about the implications of the word “Imperial,” but at least some potential buyers might have been sensitive to public sentiment.
What’s interesting about the brand is that earlier in its life the Imperial’s persona was quite loud, e.g., the 1961 strikes me as being more outrageous than the 1959 Cadillac (go here for further discussion). However, by the 1967 redesign the Imperial had a more understated, modernist persona.
I suspect that the fundamental problem was that Chrysler was aiming too high — they just didn’t have the cachet for a luxury brand. Imagine if they had instead settled for a high-end New Yorker somewhat along the lines of the 1963-64 Salon. And if Chrysler executives felt that they needed to ride around in a corporate limo, they could have stretched a New Yorker and slapped on an Imperial nameplate. That would likely have saved the automaker a boatload of money that could have been better spent elsewhere.
We could wonder also what if Imperial was a separate brand more early, almost right from the beginning in 1926 or 1927 if things would have been different? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Imperial
Or what if Chrysler had acquired Packard right after WWII?
Or, a thing a mentioned a while ago, what if Chrysler had gone a step up with the New Yorker occupying where Imperial would have been, while the Windsor or Newport step where the New Yorker was leaving a field more larger for DeSoto at the same occasion?
In a comment above it mentioned that Imperial was a Chrysler Corporation companion make, unlike an independent make brought into the fold. The Big 3 companion makes are now all gone. Mercury, Pontiac, Plymouth, deSoto
However good this Imperial may have been in absolute terms, as a luxury car, it wasn’t as different from a Chrysler as a Cadillac was from a Buick, or a Lincoln from a Mercury. Not that there was anything wrong with Chrysler engineering or styling as such, but it’s a bit much to ask people to pay the premium for an Imperial when its roots in a lower-priced (though still very nice) car are all too apparent. It invites the question ‘Well, what do I get…?’
In those times, would an Imperial buyer have been impressed by seeing on the same showroom floor a Plymouth and a Chrysler? Would that same Imperial buyer have felt “special” when looking around that showroom and seeing the typical Plymouth buyer and realizing that their salesperson was just as comfortable selling a Valiant as the highest level Imperial? I believe that this is where Cadillac excelled in most of their markets. The Cadillac dealership was a standalone operation with an appropriate ambiance with that level extending to the showroom floor people that the buyer interacted with. Unfortunately, without the sales volume to support being they were going to be compromised. At least for the competition’s Lincoln brand it was paired with the upper level of Ford’s brand.
As for the Imperial as a product, I don’t remember ever thinking of the Imperial as a direct Cadillac competitor. It lacked the Cadillac’s aspirational aura. One item I remember being told about for Cadillacs was that their quality control standards for trim pieces was far higher than for any of the rest of GM – surface blemishes that were fine for a Buick were rejected for Cadillac production.
I would point to a market segment failing by Chrysler was not giving Imperial a competitor to the Mark III. The Mark did more for Lincoln’s desirability than probably anything since the Kennedy Lincoln (and it delivered boatloads of profit to Ford). ChryCo’s sole response was to do a mid-size Cordoba, which did do very well for Chrysler but missed a wonderful market opportunity that could have justified the use of the Imperial name.
The dealer situation strikes me as a potentially unsolvable problem. That said, a hot car such as the four-seater Thunderbird in its early years did fine being sold by Ford dealers. Of course, the T-Bird was competing against premium-priced rather than luxury makes.
It’s interesting to consider whether Chrysler could have reorganized its dealers differently in 1960. For example, what about a DeSoto/Chrysler/Imperial dealer network, with the DeSoto eventually getting smaller cars needed to boost volume? I suspect that it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as a Lincoln-Mercury pairing, but that illustrates the challenges Chrysler faced.
Like you I’ve wondered whether the Imperial might have been better off with a personal coupe, but I suspect that such a model would have worked best if positioned against the Toronado and Riviera instead of the Eldorado and Mark series. Iacocca arguably aimed too high in his positioning of the 1981 Imperial — if Chrysler was struggling to cultivate the cachet needed to succeed in the luxury car field back in the 1960s, they certainly couldn’t do so in their diminished state in the early-80s.
If Chrysler only had the funds for one personal coupe, it did make sense that they focused on the mid-sized field. The big volume was there, as Ford showed in 1977 when the Thunderbird was repositioned. The T-Bird was also instructive in that it offered some higher-priced models that presumably were quite profitable. Chrysler might have had a harder time selling higher-end Cordobas because the car had a badge-engineered corporate sibling that effectively undercut its cachet. We discuss further the downsides of Chrysler’s penny-pinching here.