Old Chevrolet Impalas and Ford Galaxies make regular appearances on the web pages of Barn Finds. And why not, millions were built in the ’60s and ’70s and it seems everyone had one – or certainly knew someone who had one. But how about the third leg of the Big-Three stool, ChryCo’s Plymouth division and its Fury? They show up too but not in the same numbers. But, today, we’re going to give Plymouth the due that they rightly deserve with this fantastic 1967 Fury VIP four-door hardtop. Located in White Plains, New York, and discovered by T.J., this fine-looking Mopar C-body is available, here on eBay for a BIN price of $55,000. There is a make-an-offer option too.
The full-size Plymouth Fury’s ’67 lineup started at the top with the VIP, such as our subject car, and then descended downward with the Sport Fury, Fury III, II and I trim levels. The VIP was available in only two or four-door hardtop body styles and managed an output of over 18K copies. Plymouth, in totality, came in fourth place in the ’67 production race with 628K units. For comparison purposes, number one Chevrolet generated a volume of 1.9 M.
The listing for this VIP is extensive! For starters, it is stated that it has only experienced 17K miles and there is documentation to authenticate that recording. The seller claims, “The car has been home-garaged every day for its entire life. It has not been restored or modified in any way“. Apparently, when the original owner died, a few years after its acquisition, his widow put it up for proper storage. There’s no doubt about this Plymouth’s appearance, this hardtop’s formal lines are commanding and the deep, rich code GG-1, finish, said to be “a mix of green, black and metallic” must still look like the day that it rolled off of the Windsor, Ontario assembly line. The seller assures us that it is the original finish. Here’s an Instagram link that will take you to a collection of an additional 136 photos.
Power is provided by a 325-gross HP (the seller claims 330 but Plymouth documentation clearly states 325), 383 CI V8 engine that is said to have, “never been moved or gone into. I have replaced the original cork valve cover gaskets with new cork OEM gaskets. There are no leaks and it does not burn a drop of oil. The car starts and idles beautifully. Never overheats“. Additionally noted is, “I’ve taken the car up to 115mph on a straight, and it just hunkered down like a freight train on rails. Not a single rattle, shake, ping, or knock. Just a smooth, steady, powerful acceleration“. As is usually the case, a TorqueFlite A-727 three-speed automatic transmission provides the hook-up.
The interior’s condition matches that of the exterior. It is suggested that “All the fabric, vinyl, walnut inlay, plastic, glass, and chrome are still as crisp, saturated, firm and fragrant as the day it was assembled“. It is considered a premium trim package environment with some special VIP features. One notable item is that this top-drawer Plymouth was built without A/C – not that unusual for ’67 but it seems that higher echelon cars from that era often have it. Regardless, this hardtop has a dealer-added Allegro Mark IV A/C unit and a second NOS unit is also included in the sale. The seller adds, “The compressor belt is not currently installed and comes with the sale” so I’d assume that the installed unit is non-working.
OK, now for the elephant in the room, the price is $55K. Yeah, there’s a make-an-offer option too, but $55 large as a starting point? In spite of this car’s stellar presentation, I’m not feeling it, how about you?
Does gramps on the porch come with it?
Wow, what a really nice C-body. ’67 is probably the pinnacle year of the C-bodies, and arguably of Chrysler itself. The stacked headlights are the bomb.
55K is pretty steep, even for a car this nice. Maybe 30?
Nice car , for $55,00 air should be working.
For $55,000, the bumpers and wheel covers should be gold-plated! AND the A/C working.
For $55k it should be a convertible. And I say that as someone who loves 4-doors.
Remarkable find but I have to agree with Rex Kahrs, $55 is pretty optimistic. It’s a beauty for sure but it’s not a ‘Cuda or a Road Runner. For that price, the seller shouldn’t cheap out, and he should get the A/C working.
The seller has some lofty dreams alright. $55K? I wonder which of his drunk buddies told him to go for that?! Unrealistic, no matter how many miles are on it. At the most I see $18K-$22K. TOPS. It’s not the ‘holy grail’ but it is rare find.
Hopefully the seller comes back down to earth and adjusts the price to a more realistic level.
The seller will rethink his price when he still has the car for the next 7 or 8 months. Or a year or two. He may be hoping to find somebody out there with more money than brains, but those buyers are pretty scarce.
Why on earth would someone list a gorgeous car like this and NOT Repair the A/C before selling it ????
Nice car and all, but I’m pretty sure this one was for sale a few years ago for for at least thirty or forty thousand less.
Grandfather had one … good times in the back seat …
He told you that? Or did you catch him on the downstroke?
LOL … “ME” … he’d reluctantly let me borrow it for proms, dances, etc … our Falcon Sprint or VW Fastback didn’t have much of a back seat and the Club Wagon wasn’t much of a “classy night out” driver … …
The VIP was a beautiful car, but a tough sale. With all but a very few Plymouth dealers dualled with Chrysler, a Fury with a Newport price tag in the same showroom as a Newport was hard for a buyer to justify.
Had a comparable percentage of Ford dealers been dualled with Mercury and Chevrolet dealers been dualled with Oldsmobile or Buick in the mid-’60s there wouldn’t have been enough of a market to justify the LTD and Caprice Classic, and the VIP was Plymouth’s answer to those models.
Indeed, they perfectly reflected their divisions’ place in the *real* corporate pecking orders.
Ford Division was the name-on-the-door, able to tread on Mercury as it pleased, so the LTD came first.
Chevrolet was limited in terms of how it could innovate upmarket but its’ “USA-1” sales status was such that it was clear to match Ford model-for-model even if it took a midyear crash program
Plymouth, as noted, didn’t have a dealer channel to call its’ own. The VIP was allowed to be brought into being, but would-be buyers had to resist the upsell to a Chrysler Newport.
A Satellite VIP and even a Valiant VIP would’ve made much more sense, as long as the “no jr. editions” policy stayed in place for the Chrysler brand.
This car deserves the proper color wiper frames & an adjustment of their parking positioning. Not sure why there’s a pic of the points & condenser.
JoeNYWF64,
Without going thru the car brochures for each brand to see which listed A/C as an option, I’m going to go by memory here, and I welcome anyone who can confirm or correct my comments.
For Imperial, I had a 1968 Crown convertible that was sold new in Wisconsin without A/C, but I have never seen a 1969 or newer Imperial without A/C.
For Cadillac, I’ve seen a 1969 and a 1970 without A/C, but both were commercial vehicles [hearses]. That tells me it would probably be possible to special order a 1970 Cadillac without A/C, even if it was listed as standard equipment.
For Lincoln, because of my factory training on the automatic folding tops, I did a lot of work on those over the years. I’ve seen 1967 and earlier without A/C, but can’t remember a 1968 or newer that didn’t have A/C.
Probably the #1 reason the big 3 luxury makes all made A/C standard equipment about the same time, was AMC’s announcement that all 1968 Ambassador cars came standard with A/C. For probably 80% of the US population [by geography] this was a big deal.
Hey Bill Mc……. Imperial started making a/c standard in 1969 because (and this is just my opinion, not fact) 1968 was the last year for the Imperial convertible.
It’s kinda hard to judge Cadillac by specialty vehicles such as hearses because 1) they were not built by GM, frames with frontends and motors and windshields were sent to coach builders and 2) hearses (until probably the 90s) were bare bones, no a/c, p/w, p/dl, usually not even a radio.
Lincoln stopped making convertibles in 1967, so one would assume it was probably around the early 70s a/c was standard.
Again, all this is my opinion, but in my head stands to reason.
Angel,
The late 60s saw A/C being widely accepted by the buying public, both in the car and the home, as well as many office work spaces. A/C quickly became a necessity, rather than a frivolous extra. For example, If you look at photos of New York city cabs around 1970, they actually began displaying signs on the outside of the cabs proclaiming the car was air conditioned.
Your logic is quite good. When it came to the Imperial, with the changeover to the new Fuselage body shell and it’s new dashboard in 1969, it also made sense to simply make A/C standard, especially when 95% of buyers opted for the A/C.
Many options ended up becoming standard equipment when it made more sense financially for the automaker to simplify the number of parts it required rather than handling [for example] around 100 various parts needed for a non-factory A/C car.
I think the Japanese were champions of the concept of shipping all their cars as fully optioned examples, while US cars could be bought as a “stripper” model, all the way to fully optioned. The Japanese realized they made more $ from well optioned cars, and the standardization of parts also made the cost of the options go down. It was a win-win situation that American manufacturers were slow to pick up on.
As for commercial Cadillacs, having owned several dozen of them and researched how coachbuilders designed and built their vehicles, I am very familiar with how GM shipped a basic commercial vehicle chassis unit. Those cars destined for hearse/ambulance builds had fully assembled dashes and firewalls with windshield posts but no glass, and most had the full front end in place. If a buyer wanted A/C or other options like an AM/FM radio, they could be ordered that way from GM.
FYI – somewhere in my hoard I still have one of the original 1941 to 1965 Cadillac Master Parts book, and parts were still listed thru 1965 for Stickshift Caddys, even heater delete panels, but these were in theory only available for commercial chassis cars!
Beautiful car, but $55K will stop a lot of readers from going any further. No A/C is a bummer and for the asking price should be working.
No AC is a big plus. It’s unnecessary complication that messes up the engine art underhood. I will walk away from a vintage car with AC unless it’s a serious luxury car or an Elite Survivor. Verboten in musclecars. From my recollection as a kid in the ’70s, almost everybody had a cool car and almost none of them had AC. That didn’t change until well into the decade. One cannot accurately look at vintage cars through 2022 glasses.
Something tells me the seller is thinking $55K cuz the engine is the same as a standard Roadrunner.
Kind of a neat car. Very cool it was ordered with the HP383 instead of a two barrel unit. Pretty optimistic the guy is asking mid-year Vette $$ for an old Plymouth, albiet, The nicest 67 on the planet. Maybe that one guy on the planet is out there, good luck to the seller……
VIP status and doesn’t have power windows? What is Plymouths definition of VIP?
In 1967, you could buy a Cadillac with crank windows.
Yes, CC, that was the low end Calais. I believe they were standard in the Calais, but you could option p/w in the Calais if you wished.
Back in the 60s you could pretty much order your car however you wanted it. Switching out crank windows for power and vice versa.
My father was the type to switch out p/w for crank. But also, he’d never buy a Cadillac or anything with p/w, auto trans., p/s, p/b. Too many things could go wrong, in his words.
Thanks for sharing! My dad was kind of the opposite – when he needed a car, he needed it immediately, and on a tight budget. I remember him being thrilled with the power windows on the family’s 1970 Dodge Polara, which he found the day after the gas tank fell out of our 1965 Chevy Impala wagon. A few years later, he was overjoyed to find a loaded, 1973 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham when my sister drove the Polara for 30 miles with a. seized water pump. She literally burned the paint off the hood.
What was the last yr 1 could buy a caddy or lincoln or imperial w/o a/c?
The entire instrument cluster was flood lit in a beautiful bluish green shade. Every switch and dial was fully visible at night. My family had a Fury 3. It lasted over 100,000 miles, but the rear quarters and lower front fenders rusted after six or seven years. Overall, it was a good car.
Beautiful car. My first car was a ’67 Plymouth Fury II. Wish I still had it. Hope this doesn’t sound too critical, but I think this car has had some repainting. The close-up of the rear deck lid around the name appears to show orange peel, and the corner piece attached to the right rear quarter above the outer tail light doesn’t seem to fit properly. Was it in a collision? Maybe these are just imperfections in the photos, but I’d want to see this car in real life. And I agree, the A/C should be working. Given the asking price the car should be perfect, or darn close.
Beautiful car. Elite Survivors are the most intrinsically valuable old cars of all. The real thing. In a class by themselves. The market is awakening to their value over megadollar counterfeit restorations. These aren’t going to get any cheaper because they cannot be duplicated at any cost.
My college housemate had this same car, same color with big block handed down from Dad. It sounded amazing when he blasted off.
Antenna was missing, so I made a squiggly coat hanger as a joke, but his radio worked, so he drove it like that!
55$?? Not worth it at all a Snow White 71 gtx 1 of 1 was sold for 55k and 15-18k is the maximum value for this car…….
NADA price guide lists the HIGH VALUE as $17,000. Of course this car is worth about $8,000 to $10,000 more because of it’s history and condition. So like everyone else suggests above, it’s WAY overpriced.
The owner suggests the under dash A/C is a factory authorized unit. However all the Chrysler product under dash A/C units were made by Airtemp, Not Mark III, and even the under dash compressors were the V-2 Airtemp compressor. So this means it was likely sold with the A/C when new, but the dealer went the cheaper route by installing this unit.
Great car, idk about 55k but still a nice find.
Love it. 383, Torq-flite w 3.23 rear ⚙️ is a perfectly matched drivetrain.
I’d go 27K cash money, max. And I want the chilly wind functional upon delivery.
I remember an early 70 Fury with the hidden front lamps and it
had like this the entire instrument cluster was in 30° forward and
flood lit in green shade. Like forward to the future.
For this i would start an auction from 12k with reserve on ~20k
Nice survivor but oversized for some parts of the world.
I was looking at the photos on the feeBay page and noticed the dealer sticker on the rear bumper. Then it hit me . . . Karl Mozingo Chrysler-Plymouth.
Back in 1969 I had a summer job working for a company called ABC – U-Save Auto Rental in Silver Spring. It was a local discount car rental company with 3 locations in the Washington DC area; Silver Spring, Downtown DC, and National Airport. They offered 4 different types of cars: AMC Matadors, Javelins, Hornets, and VW bugs. “From $9.95 a day + 6 cents/mile”. All the AMC cars had 6 cylinder motors, even the Javelins.
The manager of that location was a guy by the name of Geza Mozingo, but he was known as “Mo”. He used to tell me the family came from Armenia [I think], and that if I ever met someone with the last name of Mozingo, they had to be a relative. Mo used to talk about his “big shot brother” who owned a Chrysler dealership somewhere in Ohio. Mozingo is such a rare name, it’s got to be the same guy.
Why does it have an Ohio plate on the front, and a New York plate on the rear??? And for $55k , the AC should be working.
Thank you, Bill,
Very informative. As I mentioned, that was all my opinion, not fact. But it is no secret that a/c was a factor in the demise of the convertible as was new “saftey” regulations
Angel, [and anyone following this thread],
The following comments reflect trends across North America in general. There are geographical pockets like southern California where convertibles are still fashionable. That said . . .
Yes, A/C in 3 major situations contributed to the demise of the convertible. We became a nation of “controlled temperature” once we achieved saturation in the percentage of (1)home, (2)office, and (3)vehicles equipped with A/C.
By the late 1960s even public buses in the hotter climes had A/C. I don’t remember the exact date, but I think it was 1970, when the New York Taxi and Livery Commission required all NEW taxicabs to have air conditioning. As NYC Taxicabs typically ran 24 hours a day with shift drivers and were often worn out & junked after about a year, within 2 years all cabs in NYC had A/C. When it comes to taxicab trends, “What starts in NYC quickly spreads across the country”
Another 2 lesser known situations that helped nail the lid on the convertible’s coffin and make A/C popular, was (1) the ever increasing lengths of hair in the male car buying public, and the fact that men no longer wore formal hats in public! And (2) the used car buyer’s market [especially for car dealers] where increasing numbers of used car buyers wanted an A/C equipped vehicle, even light trucks.
I collect photos of used car dealer lots. Looking at photos of car lots in the time frame of about 1965 to 1975, more and more cars on the front sales line had big windshield cards [or hand painted lettering on the windshield] proclaiming the car was air conditioned! About 5 years later, except for northern cities, those A/C cards were mostly gone, because dealers didn’t want non A/C vehicles on their lot. Beginning in the deep south and western areas, I noted an increase in the number of larger used car lots that displayed aftermarket A/C company signs that said “We install Air Conditioning”
While it’s correct that Federal roll-over standards helped stamp out convertibles, the new regs only really affected GM, as the other 3 [Ford, MoPaR, and AMC] had already stopped convertible production due to low sales and high manufacturing costs. Ford & MoPaR also knew there would always be smaller firms who would do the R & D for small batches of open cars to service the small numbers of convertible buyers.
GM was using the X folding convertible top that allowed a more compact top stowage compartment, and the new Federal regs would have required a huge re-design of the top mechanism and more importantly, a larger top storage area that would either gobble up trunk space, or result in a bulky top mechanism sticking up – much like the VW Cabriolet’s top.
So the demise of the convertible can be chalked up to 3 basic situations. The A/C lifestyle in home, office & vehicle, car buying habits changing, and the federal regs made convertibles more expensive.
There were over 100,000 convertibles sold in the US last year. While not a significant number to automakers, that’s still a lot of cars. True, convertible sales have been declining for years, there are quite a few folks who like them. You also have to take into account the number of vintage convertibles on the road. I have a ’97 Chevy z28 convertible and I take it out as much as possible on nice days. It does have A/C, but I don’t use it other than to turn it on once in a while to keep it functioning properly. I would think there are quite a few old ragtops on the road and depending on the model, some of them are quite expensive when offered for sale. The old rule “When the top goes down, the price goes up” still applies to new and vintage convertibles.
Tried to delete the duplicate comment but BarnFinds won’t let me.
My dad bought a frost green 67 VIP the first night they came out, off the showroom floor. Had the same engine, a sure grip rear, power windows, tilt & telescope wheel, A/C, AM/FM radio, reclining passenger seat. Nice car. Traded it for a 1968 New Yorker the night the 68’s came out.