The car that wasn't there. At first...

 

I call this one "The car that wasn't there." It's a 1962 Dodge 800.  When Dodge rolled out its disastrous 1962 model line in the fall of 1961, the one thing missing was a big, BIG car. 

It's a whole corporate cloak-and-dagger thing.  Suffice it to say, the boys at Highland Park got pantsed by their former CEO William Newburgh. 

Things got out of hand when Newburgh overheard Ed Cole (GM) talking about their forthcoming small Chevy, and only hearing whispers, Newburg panicked.  Upon getting back to the HQ, he ordered that the full-size Dodge and Plymouth's proposed for 1961 be shrunken, and fast.  This threw the whole styling and engineering sections into total chaos. They had to shrink the length, and to get the proportions right, the width as well.

Things got completely out of hand when, in short order, Newburgh was shown the door in a conflict of interest scandal.  Chrysler ended up with a CEO named Lynn Townsend who was a bean counter, and accounts make lousy heads of car companies. 

THEN things went totally out of control when Chrysler found out that Chevy wasn't shrinking any vehicle, but it was coming out with the compact Chevy II.  By that time, and with Townsend not wanting to waste tooling dollars, it was impossible to stop the development of the small cars slated by Dodge and Plymouth. But reader, the body dies were literally cast, and there was no going back without a massive loss. 

In short, Newburgh had screwed Chrysler's pooch. 

So all Dodge dealers had in the fall of 1961 were intermediate shrunken-up Dodges to sell. And they were ugly.  Well, not ugly, but weird. Obtuse angles. Asymmetrical lines. Unexplained bludges.  Dealers complained and buyers ran to GM, Ford, and AMC.  Even Studebaker benefited from the stumble.   OK, they had the look that only a mother could love. 

Vice President of styling Virgil Exner, the man who just five model years before had been hailed a hero, was given his walking papers.  Never mind that Exner had warned the higher-ups that this would be a catastrophic disaster.  The dealers demanded retribution on someone, and Exner was axed. 

Quick thinking, in the late fall of 1961, Chrysler decided to make a new Dodge out of that year's Chrysler body.  From the cowl back, this is a Chrysler Newport. But, from the windshield forward, it's a 1961 Dodge front clip with a restamped hood.  

To make it look different, Chrysler's new head of styling, Elwood Engle* (a man as exciting as his name sounds) brought out a box of disused trim pieces from previous years and taped them to the body of a cobbled-together test mule.   Dodge's new symbol, the "Fratzog" ended up on the grille, faux vent fins from the previous year's Chrysler made it to the front fenders - you know making do with parts are in the warehouse. 

The irony? The 1962 Chrysler was a 1961 Dodge with a 1961 Chrysler front clip and redone rear quarter panels that did away with Dodge's funky reverse forward high fins. 

There was no time to fix the rear of this Dodge 880. If you were sitting behind a 1962 Chrysler or a 1962 Dodge 880, they looked exactly alike, save for the names Chrysler on one and Dodge on the other.  

To confuse this even more, let us ask "What of Chrysler's 1962 Chrysler wagon?" 

It didn't start out as a definned Dodge, and it couldn't use the Chrysler wagon body that had fins as big as a wedding cake, so it used the Chrysler front clip, mated to the 1961 Plymouth station wagon body.  And when the 1962 880s came along, they too used the Plymouth body.  One thing carried over from the previous two years was the hardtop senior station wagons - a body style both dropped by GM in 1958 and Ford's Mercury division at the end of the 1960 model year. 

What of the 1962 full-size Plymouth? Well, there wasn't one. 

Instead, Chrysler took its Newport and dropped the prices so low it stood in for a Plymouth.  This damaged Plymouth's ability to sell cars, because its shrunken "full-size cars" weren't beauty winners in their own right, either.   It also damaged Chrysler's reputation as a maker of better cars.

In 1963 Chrysler got its cars the "Clean, Crisp, Custom" look, and Dodge carried on with the Chrysler body that had been a Dodge body.  For 1963 they got rid of this gawd awful front end and got new round taillights. 

Dodge made do with the basic body through 1964, getting an almost modern look from the rear. 

In 1965, All was made right, sort of. All three brands got all-new vehicles.  But that is a post for another day. 

*Cookie is sure he was a lovely man, but the cars he created at Chrysler were hit or miss.  The 1965 Dodge was a yawner, as was the 1969 Plymouth.  And we won't even discuss the 1966-67 Plymouth Belvedere/Satellite or the concurrent Dodge Coronet.