The Plymouth Car Brand Reconsidered

The Plymouth car brand has now been dead for more than a decade. Most reading this will know that DaimlerChrysler, the company formerly known as the Chrysler Corporation, killed the Plymouth car brand in 2009, before the parent company’s later realignments as FCA and now Stellantis. So, yes—Plymouth is gone.

But should it be forgotten? Absolutely not! The Plymouth car brand has not only made rich contributions to automotive history but also even includes at least a couple of models that Stellantis should take a serious look at rebooting for the modern automotive era.

Below, we’ll review some examples of both cases, with a look at what we see as the Plymouth car brand’s most important contributions to the automotive world.

Plymouth Road Runner: The Plymouth Car Brand’s Iconic Contribution to Muscle Car Culture

Through its various incarnations, the parent company of the Plymouth car brand always reserved the flagship Chrysler marque for the vehicles it wanted to position as its more premium, upscale models.

With the Dodge and Plymouth brands, however, it was another story. Overall, the Plymouth car brand held a place in the Chrysler family similar to the position of Buick among GM brands. Buick has held a “more upscale than Chevrolet but less prestigious than Cadillac” position in the GM family, and Plymouth was in a similar notch in the food chain between the more everyman-facing Dodge and the more luxurious Chrysler.

But when it came to their efforts to reach youthful consumers who wanted a sportier and more performance-oriented experience, Chrysler wasn’t afraid of being playful and feisty with the Plymouth models.

Fueled by the enthusiasm for performance of engineers in the automaker’s Mopar parts division, the marketing gurus in the corporation weren’t afraid of dreaming up playful paint colors like Plum Crazy. Nor were they afraid of audacious branding moves like applying the name of a cartoon character to badge-engineered, performance-boosted versions of lower-echelon luxury cars the automaker was building on their B platform as the Plymouth Belvedere and Plymouth Satellite.

The thinking behind the Roadrunner was astonishingly simple stroke of genius for the Plymouth car brand. In the 1968 model year they just dropped a 383 V8 into a midsize, 2-door Plymouth Satellite/Belvedere body and paid Warner Bros. 50 grand. This gave Plymouth the rights to slap a decal on the fender bearing the Warner Bros. cartoon character’s likeness, and to recreate the “beep-beep” sound for the Plymouth Road Runner’s horn.

With that, a legendary muscle car was born, destined to become deeply entrenched in the hearts of loyal Mopar enthusiasts, staying in production in various incarnations until it finally died in 1980 with the end of the rather anti-climactic malaise-era version built on the bones of the Plymouth Volare.

With all the model-name reintroductions that Chrysler/FCA/Stellantis has launched in their performance car lineup over the years, like the Super Bee and Demon, it seems curious that they haven’t resurrected the Road Runner with a Hellcat power plant. One consideration is that Road Runner belonged to the now-defunct Plymouth car brand. But there seems to be no good reason why they couldn’t rebrand Road Runner to breathe some new life into the Chrysler lineup, which now includes only two models.

Why not add some luxury appointments and styling cues to the Dodge Challenger and rebrand it as a Chrysler Road Runner, perhaps as a rival to Cadillac’s V lineup? But for now, Stellantis does not seem to be pouring much imagination into the Chrysler brand.

Plymouth Barracuda

While it took Chevrolet until the 1967 model year to develop a rival to Ford’s Mustang in the pony car category, the Plymouth car brand was right in step with Ford when they released the first Barracuda, built on the Plymouth Valiant platform and boasting the option of a 273 cubic-inch V8, rivaling the earliest Mustang’s 260 cubic-inch V8s.

Granted, the Barracuda never enjoyed the stellar sales or iconic status of the Mustang. But Mopar enthusiasts have somewhat of a contrarian streak. Mopar fans, in particular, seem to be more about pure power and performance rather than pretty body styles, and the Barracuda fits right into that mindset as a rawer alternative to the Mustang.

Like the Road Runner, Barracuda is another model name that probably warrants a hard look as another in the succession of revivals that have taken place in the Chrysler family over the past two decades.

Plymouth Valiant: The Plymouth Car Brand in its Most Trusty, Reliable Flavor

Like its badge-engineered cousin the Dodge Dart, the Plymouth Valiant, especially in its four-door version, was once the butt of jokes as a nerd’s car. But this point of view was not truly deserved, for several reasons.

First of all, there were performance versions built on the platform, and even the utilitarian, family grocery-getter versions were capable of respectable performance if equipped with at least a 318 V8. Moreover, even the stalwart slant-6 had enough power to hold its own for most everyday driving situations, and even had a cult following among hot-rodders interested in torque capabilities of the an inline six-cylinder engine architecture.

But there are many more reasons to love the Plymouth Valiant. For a long run from the late 1960s and well into the 1980s, a Plymouth Valiant was a dream for someone who wanted a cheap, reliable used car. Even in the 80s, finding a good one for under a thousand bucks was a realistic possibility.

Supply was plentiful, since nearly 3.6 million units were built from 1960 through 1976, according to Classic Industries. Inexpensive replacement parts were also readily available through the OEM, aftermarket, or junkyards. And with either the slant-6 or the V8, they were virtually indestructible.

Sure, like all cars of that era, Plymouth Valiants were higher maintenance than today’s cars, requiring more frequent “tune-ups,” spark plug changes, and such. And, yes—sometimes they did break. But in most cases the things that did break, even adjusting for inflation, were far cheaper to fix than the things that break in today’s lower-maintenance cars, and especially cheaper for a backyard mechanic to fix DIY.

Like most cars of their era, the tragic flaw of the Plymouth Valiant was rust—which, combined with the fact that collector appeal took a lot longer to develop for these underrated cars, is likely one of the main reasons why seeing a Plymouth Valiant of any vintage on the road today is a relative rarity.

Plymouth Duster

While it was basically just a submodel of the Plymouth Valiant with a 2-door fastback design, the Plymouth Duster deserves special mention among the best of the Plymouth car brand for several reasons.

No, it wasn’t a sports car, as such, but even in a utilitarian six-cylinder version the fastback design offered a sportier-looking alternative to the youthful buyer on a budget. Plus, the Duster was also available in some trim levels that offered truly formidable performance, including the Duster Twister and the 340 Duster.

The Duster is one of the models built on the Chrysler A-Body platform, which holds a place in my heart because a 1971 model of the Dodge version, the Demon, served me well as a backup car during some of my younger and more vulnerable years—and a reliable backup it was!

Plymouth Reliant K-Car: Saving the Plymouth Car Brand in the Malaise Era

Yes, it was basically a box on wheels, a little car (at least for its time) that looked like it was trying too hard to look like a big car, creating a vibe like a five-year-old boy trying to dress up in one of daddy’s suits.

So why does the humble Plymouth Reliant warrant inclusion in our list of the Plymouth car brand’s most important models? Mainly because, along with its badge-engineered K-body cousin, the Dodge Aries, the Plymouth Reliant helped save Chrysler when the automaker was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The K-Car was developed under the leadership of Lee Iacocca, who, lest we forget, headed up Ford’s product development division when the Mustang was created. While the K-Car was about as different a vehicle as you can imagine from the Mustang, it fulfilled Chrysler’s purpose in hiring Iacocca as President and CEO: turning the automaker around from the brink.

Born in the wake of two successive crises of rising fuel prices for which Detroit was ill-prepared, the Plymouth Reliant and Dodge Aries sold over 2 million units and proved that U.S. automakers could indeed meet increasing demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars that could compete with the Toyotas, Datsuns and Hondas that were beginning to eat Detroit’s lunch.

Over the years, K-cars became the butt of jokes, and after their production ceased in 1989 their near-disappearance from American roadways was comparatively swift. Yet they were arguably somewhat underrated. While they looked small on the outside, the interior experience felt surprisingly roomy. In their base models, their performance was far from thrilling, but their power was reasonably adequate for everyday driving, and the rack-and-pinion steering and strut suspension gave them unexpectedly tight handling and smooth rides compared to many American cars of the immediately preceding generations, especially small cars.

The clean-lined design of the Plymouth Reliant has aged well, and the few remaining survivors have even generated some interest among more contrarian collectors, according to Hagerty. As such, be it ever so humble, the Plymouth Reliant deserves a place in the pantheon of significant models from the Plymouth car brand, as an important transitional vehicle from a key transitional phase of American automotive history.

Plymouth Voyager

So what, you may ask, is a minivan doing on a list, in a publication for auto enthusiasts, of the most notable models from the Plymouth car brand? First of all, it should be understood that virtually any category of vehicle will have some form of an enthusiast following, and vans and minivans are no exception.

But even if we leave aside a niche of the enthusiast community that gets excited about vehicles like a Honda Odyssey modded into a 700-hp sleeper, or a Peugeot minivan built into a full-on race-car, the minivan is a vehicle category that holds a significant place in automotive culture and history.

It isn’t much of an understatement to say that entire generations of Americans spent their most formative years riding in their parents’ minivans, with everyday use cases ranging from quick runs to a youth soccer match to cross-country family roadtrips.

And while the Plymouth Voyager certainly wasn’t the first minivan, it was among the defining breakthrough vehicles of the category, as a badge-engineered cousin of the more-popular Dodge Caravan. It is tough to argue with nearly 2.6 million units of the Plymouth Voyager that, according to CarSalesBase, were sold in the U.S. from 1983 through 2001.

Whether you look back on experiences with minivans with dread or nostalgia, or even if you have no experience with them at all, any attempt to downplay the important place of the minivan in automotive history and culture seems fatuous. And the Plymouth Voyager is one of the most salient examples of the category.  

Plymouth Fury

As with the choice of baseball players who get inducted into the Hall of Fame, there is a certain level of subjectivity in selecting an automaker’s most significant products. In choosing to include the Plymouth Fury on this list of the Plymouth car brand’s most salient models, I feel a similar sense of subjectivity.

One obvious reason for this is that a Plymouth Fury was indeed part of my early life. My older brother owned a third-generation (1962–1964) Fury with a pushbutton automotive transmission. With a white paint job that had already gone chalky before the car was even ten years old, it was a long, streamlined land-yacht even though, for its day, it was considered a midsize car. Notwithstanding the decaying paint and metastasizing rust, it possessed a strong cool factor even though, with a workhorse slant-6 engine, it was far from muscle car and certainly not a sports car.

Another, less personal factor that makes the model memorable, however, is the place it took in the pop-culture imagination when a Plymouth Fury was featured as a car that seemed to possess a malevolent, anthropomorphic intentionality of its own in the Stephen King novel Christine (1983), and later in the movie of the same name.

Sure, it’s subjective, but among the larger Plymouth car models, the Fury from its flashy, tailfinned origin in 1956 until a more subdued era began with the fifth generation in 1969, was a standout in its distinctive styling.

The research for this article also turned out to be a big memory refresher when it comes to the Fury, because I had actually lost sight of how long the nameplate actually endured. The name lived on as the Plymouth Gran Fury until 1989, giving the model a remarkable 33-year run. That alone makes a strong case for including the Plymouth Fury in the pantheon of the Plymouth car brand’s most representative models.

Bottom Line on the Plymouth Car Brand: Gone, But Unforgettable!

Yes, the Plymouth car brand is gone, but it certainly deserves to be remembered. And thanks to legions of ultra-loyal enthusiasts of Mopar performance motoring—if you don’t believe me, just take a look at what’s on display at SEMA every year and visit the Mopar booth if your able to attend, or watch Mark Worman’s Graveyard Carz—there will almost certainly be well preserved, restored, or resto-modded Plymouth cars around for decades to come, especially in the muscle-car models like the Plymouth Barracuda and Plymouth Road Runner.

Also promising is the Mopar division’s strong commitment to continuing to support owners with restoration and performance parts built to easily fit older Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth vehicles with restoration and performance parts, including high-performance crate engines like the Hellephant.

But beyond the classics like Road Runner and Barracuda, the marque also produced many other models that are worthy of preservation, and maybe even some that are worthy of resurrection by Stellantis under the Chrysler or marque.

Or perhaps even some of the Plymouth nameplates warrant a look even for the RAM lineup. If Ford can bring the Maverick back as a compact pickup, how about a competing Fury pickup from RAM?

And, without question, there should be a Chrysler Road Runner.

Are you listening, Carlos Tavares?