All these years, and we’ve never had a proper ’65 or ’66 LTD four door. I wrote my ’65 LTD CC “It Launched the Great Brougham Epoch” using a two door hardtop, which was really all wrong, as the semi-fastback coupe was hardly a proper brougham. And I can hardly ever remember seeing any of those coupes back then. The LTD was all about the four door, at least the first two years. In 1967, the LTD got its own unique roofline, although that was really just thanks to a fatter C pillar.
But here at last, we have a proper ’66 LTD four door, shot in front of the Capitol, no less, by Rui Meireles, a new Cohort poster.
There’s only two shots, including this one from the front. And I see the license plate leaves no doubt as to its identity.
It seems a bit retrograde comparing the ’66 LTD against a Jaguar Mk X for quietness, given that the ’65 was pitted against a Rolls-Royce.
And quieter than a Grosser 600, even. Gott im Himmel! These Amerikaner…what’s next? That their damn LTD handles better than our European cars?
Well, it most likely does than Lord Bath’s 7 passenger Daimler limo.
Enough of that. It seems Ford scoured the continent for cars to show up with its quietness.
Let’s wrap this quickie look at Ford’s Brougham for the People with a shot of one of the Lehmann-Petersen stretch sedans, which is unusual in being a hardtop.
As is apparent from this shot of a ’65, there’s a third side window that apparently rolls down too. I wonder if that sealed well and was as quiet as the factory sedan?
More on the original LTD: CC 1965 LTD – It Launched the Great Brougham Epoch PN
The extended wb LTD hardtops were produced by Detroit Steel Tube (Andy Hotton).
I’ve always assumed that it was cheaper to butt a coupe rear and 4 door front together and make rear glass to fit than both rear glas and rear window frame. Thats the same recipe as the K Car lime, exc the K already has the frames.
Kludge together a roof, cover it with vinyl to hide the seams, job done.
a coupe rear and 4 door front together and make rear glass to fit than both rear glas and rear window frame. Thats the same recipe as the K Car lime, exc the K already has the frames.
Same with Cadillac factory-built limousines in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, using the rear shell from the coupé and front shell from the sedan. The rear doors appear to be partially fabricated from shortened coupé’s doors (rear part) and sedan’s rear doors (front part).
They were called Fleetwood Seventy-Five Limousines.
And Ghia did the same for the 1957-65 Crown Imperial limousine using 2-door Imperial hardtop for Chrysler. http://imperialclub.org/Articles/GhiaLimos/index.htm
And, sadly Lido’s later K-Car limousine and executive sedan as well.
I think the 2nd limo here is actually a prototype – it looks like a section’s been added behind the front door, and a standard rear door used, a la the Lehmann-Petersen Lincolns. You can see the outline of the door opening at the rear of the inset panel.
Whatever, these are amazing limos. You’d have to park halfway into the road to clear that rear door on a city street. From what I’ve read, the target market was government agencies who wanted a limo on a budget.
And the dreadful front-drive version…
Nice find! The only thing wrong is that this one wears the wheelcovers from a 68 or 69 model.
It is funny how these never became popular as old cars, while the 60-64 Fords were getting respect even in the late 70s. Like you, I cannot recall the last 4 door early LTD I have seen.
My father had a 66 Country Squire which shared its grille with the LTD. Once I was used to that one, the stamped aluminum grille on the lesser models looked cheap (even before most of them got bent up in parking lots).
Oh, about 14 years ago I saw someone driving a white 66 Monterey S55 while I was driving my 67 Park Lane. Followed him and we met up in a parking lot of a market we obviously shop at. Ooo, nice car with a 428. About a year later, he is into big cars, I see him at the market and he has another car he just bought. Yep, it is a 66 LTD in gold as pictured in the brochure above along with the 428. I could have just died…
It’s probably the boxiness and proto-brougham legacy that kept collectors away. As much as a treat it is to see a 65-66 now in 2019, 20 years ago box when Panthers were still thick on the ground these early LTDs didn’t look quite so special. Plus 60-64s seemed to hold up significantly better.
Sort of the same deal with gen 1 Tauruses versus GM G-bodies. Being a trendsetter means you have to ride out the trend first before you become retro; being the last of a dying breed means you sort of are as soon as production ends.
I’ll put my marker down on the last Detroit sedans being more collectible 30 years from now than their CUV equivalents.
Sorry, there’s no way a 2019 Taurus or Impala will be more collectible than a 2019 Wrangler. Sedans like that don’t have a strong image on their own, and they won’t be symbols of life in 2019. They’ll just be the last new car that Gram and Pop Pop bought.
I think few, if any 2019s, will be collectible in 2050.
The ’65s were Ford’s first stab at the semi-unitized shell/perimeter frame format (rather than traditional self-supporting frames), which may have had something to do with their not seeming as robust as the previous generation.
Yes, that car has “Brougham” all over it! The first Brougham!
The original ersatz luxury car! Photographed in front the Capitol–how appropriate!
In 1966, a 1966 Cadillac, or even a handsome Lincoln (they were still), would have been a metaphor for our country and government. Today, this 1966 Ford, or a new Cadillac CT5, seems the better fit….but I digress.
I remember these “quiet” ads in old National Geographics when I was a kid (they were old then, as I couldn’t read until the 1970s).
As a kid, pre-driving age, I’d buy into many of these claims. “The Galaxie is quieter”….”the Volare station wagon gets 30mpg highway, better than imports”…
At some point, I, and America, wised up… and America began to abandon Ford, and Ford’s bigger and smaller Detroit rivals.
According to a 1994 Collectible Automobile article, the claim re Ford vs RR was true.
The idea came from Barney Clarke, of J. Walter Thompson, Ford’s Mad Men.
He hired acoustic experts Bolt, Beranuk and Newman to conduct the test and it was certified by USAC. According to Clark, the Ford was significantly quieter than the Roller,
but he believed that the public would scoff at what it perceived as excess hyperbole.
The ad copy was written so as to imply the Ford had a “slight edge”.
Say what you will of Detroit and/or FoMoCo, but they did SOME things right.
Since autos are really a product of the culture that spawns them, it’s no surprise that a big wide, flat country populated by a generation of buyers who had gone thru the depression and helped win WWII, at great personal sacrifice, would demand uber comfort. These people had no interest in “feel of the road” or any other such baloney.
They grew up feeling it, smelling it via dust in their noses, and seeing it thru cracks in the floors of rickety jalopies, and were out on it often enough changing flats and fixing breakdowns.
So it’s no surprise that America did creature comforts like A/C and power assists best. It’s no surprise that big lazy V8s to power all those accessories became the norm. It’s no surprise that vast engineering resources went into producing the quietest ride that they could muster. And Ford did it best, at that time.
Here’s a link to a 1976 C&D article by Pat Bedard, who put this much more eloquently than I could.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/40003349@N03/shares/q11jNv
“The sun may never set on the standard-size car”. . . . well not for another four decades anyway.
At some point big cars weren’t considered “standard-size” anymore.
Ford still makes a “standard-size car”. It’s called the Escape.
I agree, from 1950 thru my formative years, autos were a product of the culture that spawned them.
America was not only more affluent, it was more optimistic. While the railroad had shrunk the country, America’s burgeoning roads (even pre-Interstate) linked cities that were far apart, or farm communities. Covering long distances requires speed and relative quiet, the antithesis of an urban car.
In some ways, 1965-66, marks “Peak America”.
So, I found (what I consider to today to be) our ersatz government a fitting back drop to the original ersatz ‘luxury’ car. The picture and the word ‘ersatz’ (which I may be misusing–as kid, I learned it meant imitation) just hit me, and I had to comment.
Thank you for that, Roger. I’d forgotten just how much I enjoyed reading Bedard’s stuff.
The Rolls was beautifully made, but essentially an anachronism from an engineering and overall performance standpoint by 1965. David E. Davis, Jr., tartly noted that the 1965 Rolls showed what “spare-no-expense craftmanship can do for a 1939 Packard.”
It’s not surprising that the Ford really was quieter than the Rolls.
Well said Roger! I have often thought of that old Patrick Bedard article when people lay into the big Ford land yachts through a modern day lens. Your words speak quite accurately to my grandparents generation, and the reason they preferred comfortable cars like this. For some time, I have actually thought about doing a CC write-up on this so specific article because he does such an eloquent job of capturing why people liked these cars. I just hadn’t got around to it because I didn’t have a digital copy. Even me, who does not like broughams or wallowy suspension, will come away with some love for those big ol’ Fords after reading Bedard’s fine prose.
It is very frustrating that this site does not have some kind of thumbs up feature.
Nice job.
I will join Roger here. Having spent lots of wheel time in big sedans of the 60s I can say that the Fords really were quieter. The Mopars had a much more “mechanical” feel. You both felt and heard the road more. Ford really did its homework on NVH. They operated more smoothly and isolated passengers from the road much more. (And, no surprise, they swapped places when it came to performance).
The GM stuff was more or less in the middle. That’s the way I remember it, anyhow.
Yes. Chrysler cars were all unit body, and they really hadn’t figured out entirely how to isolate the passenger cell from the rest with a unit body. Much like a Honda HR V today, relatively.
The redesigned full size 1965 Fords (the 1966 is a light facelift) used a perimeter frame, replacing the cowbelly shaped one from 1957. The body was stiffer than before, like a unit body, and only mounted to the frame at several points chosen as being the low points of vibration. A 1965 Lincoln, even being at least a thousand pounds heavier, transmits more harshness through the floor to the passenger cell. It is based on the 1961 unit body design.
This is true, although Ford also just added more sound insulation to the LTD. This was a trick Ford applied to a lot of its pricier trim levels — the Ghia editions of various European Fords, down to the Fiesta, did the same thing — and a canny gimmick from the salesperson’s standpoint. If you could get a customer to take a test drive, or even a test ride, in the pricier model, it would feel like a quieter, more solid car, even without focusing on the upholstery or interior trim.
Tried TWICE to add a comment, both times
YOU ARE POSTING TOO FAST
Same thing happened to me so often that I figured two workarounds…
Always copy the comment in case the server goes funny.
1. Reload the web page (that solves the issues 99% of times).
2. Log in to your Curbside Classic account (that prevents the lovely message from happening 99% of times).
If you open two CC windows you can log into one and use the other to read and comment. It is the best of both worlds.
I kept getting that even after closing and opening this site yesterday, and on the first comment I tried to post that day.
Oh look, that posted – even though I got a message saying it was a duplicate comment so it wouldn’t be. First comment of the day again.
That photo with the US Capitol building in the background totally reminds me of the ending credit scenes of the old FBI TV show, with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. driving around DC with his Ford product car.
I was thinking more like:
Hello, Stebe, this is Chin Ho. I’m here with Dan-O.
You’re not gonna like this, but we a wrong turn..
With the introduction of the Plymouth VIP in 1966 to compete with the Caprice and LTD, perhaps this was the start of the ‘class distinction’ of each marque being lost and price overlap into Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Mercury, and Dodge territory, and why we no longer have Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Mercury, and Plymouth today.
Absolutely! This was another milestone in the unraveling of the Sloan Ladder. Although it may not seem like, car shoppers were as value oriented then as now. Why spring for the extra cost of a Mercury when an LTD offers the same and more features plus ‘prestige’ at a more affordable price. For the price difference, the LTD buyer could specify power convenience options which would still require greater outlay to have on the Mercury.
The generation who had endured the Depression and sacrificed so much during WWII, then to experience unprecedented widespread prosperity, acted on their pent-up desires for a bit of comfort and luxury. Who can blame them?
This was where Ford had a big advantage over GM. Mercury was much less important to the parent corporation’s overall performance than Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac were to GM.
+1, Good point, the diminishing of Mercury seemed to have had no noticeable affect on Ford whereas as B-O-P contracted and Chevrolet only held or lost ground, GM suffered real damage.
For Mopar, Plymouth was being supplanted by Dodge, a process that began in earnest with the 1960 Dodge Dart. The attitude of Mopar loyalists was generally that a Dodge was a better car than Plymouth. It was the car for those who knew enough to know Mopars in general were superior but couldn’t quite swing a Dodge. More than one old-time ‘Dodge’ man told me that, back in those days of rabid brand loyalty.
The Plymouth VIP was a ‘flash-in-the-pan’, fading away by 1970 MY. One supposes Mopar buyers looking for a bit more luxury opted for a Monaco. After all, everyone knows Dodge was a better car…
And nearly everyone forgets the “Gran Coupe” and “Gran Sedan” that replaced the VIP atop the Plymouth lineup in, what, 1971-72 (or maybe 73). Ford sold a bazillion LTDs but Plymouth buyers were either cheap or got upsold to Newports.
I guess the name VIP didn’t catched on. Had Plymouth used another name like Belmont (a nod to the 1954 show-car), I wonder if the ball game would had been different?
I remember the Gran Coupe, which came out as a 1970-1/2 model. Essentially, it was a very creative way to use up leftover two door sedan body shells. Ford and Chevrolet discontinued their full-size 2 door sedans at the end of the 1969 model year. The Gran Coupe combined some Sport Fury trim and VIP trim. It returned for 1971 as a two-door hardtop and added side stripes.
Put your money on “upsold to Newports”. And given the closeness of the price, the salesman didn’t have to push in the slightest.
I’ve always felt that the Newport was THE “deadly sin” of Chrysler Corporation. With the introduction of that line, the entire corporate line under the New Yorker became obsolete. Definitely the Chrysler marque going too far downmarket.
@Syke: The Newport existing wasn’t a Deadly Sin, the Newport being a C-body (at all, or starting in 1962) was. Chrysler was without a direct competitor to the Olds Cutlass until 1975 and didn’t get a four-door luxury midsize until the 1978 LeBaron.
Meanwhile the relatively-stripped but gunboat size Newport was eating not only the Fury VIP’s but all other non-fleet fullsize Mopars’ lunch while GM had no problem selling both Cutlasses and Caprices even in rural areas and Canada where combined Chevy-Olds dealers were common.
(one more try…)
Indeed it’s been discussed here before that part of the VIP’s failure to thrive probably came from Chrysler-Plymouth salesmen upselling prospective buyers to a Chrysler Newport.
Ford was the “name-on-the-door” division with free reign to step on Mercury as it pleased, Chevrolet was expected to defer to the B-O-P divisions in terms of midprice innovation but was allowed to match Ford model-for-model, and Plymouth didn’t even have its’ own dealer channel and did some of its’ best work on the A and B-body platforms in the 1960-75 era, while the “no jr editions” policy for the Chrysler marque was in effect. Might as well have just made a Valiant VIP and a Satellite VIP but no Fury VIP.
Alternative universe strikes again – Australia did get a Valiant VIP!
I always enjoyed reading Rob Walker’s Formula 1 racing Reports in Road & Track. He had the nifty knack of making them sound like a letter from a friend, or at least it seemed that way to an unsophisticated teenager.
Like J P, I thought the 66 LTD and Country Squire looked pretty good, ALL the lesser models? not so much.
My family actually owned one of these, it was dark green with a parchment vinyl roof and a medium green Tricot interior. It had a 289 that was adequate for the job, but had it been available, a 351 would have been a better choice.
Quiet? I guess so.
What I remember about that car? The steering was overassisted as was typical of cars back then, but not as bad as my aunt’s 64 Plymouth Savoy. But the overwhelming memories are of the interior. The instrument panel was pretty blah. I think I preferred the contemporary Chevrolet or Plymouth to the Ford that was basically 2 long strips with a hard cliff above the horizontal speedometer to try to cut glare. And the upholstery looked grimey from the day we got the car as a 3 year old used car. Tricot was new to Ford that year, and was touted as being used in negligee (sp?). But they could not have tested it for stain resistance as it was impossible to clean yet anything that came into contact with it left a stain.
Bottom line? I would prefer the nearly identical 65 model.
That upholstery was laughingly called “panty cloth.”. Durability wasn’t a strong point, either.
I rode in the back of one once. It really did have the feel of pantyhose
Oooooooh, but it felt so good to sit in!
In Canada the 2-door hardtop wasn’t even available in 1965. My parents had a ’65 Galaxie 500, and I seem to recall some family talk along the lines of, gee too bad we don’t have an LTD. We got an XL in ’66, and in ’67 we had our LTD. They were all company cars, and my dad finagled the LTD by making a case that it was more suited for our upcoming month-long road trip to Expo 67, & the Maritimes, as opposed to the bucket and console setup.
FWIW, in the little known facts department, ’65 & ’66 Canadian-market LTDs actually used the Mercury Park-Lane interior. I’ve never been able to find out why. I’ve attached a montage comparing them, US on the left, Canada on the right, ’65 top. ’66 bottom.
Good observation on the CC LTD having ‘68 hubcaps. I prefer the deluxe grill and parking lights too, J P.
The 1966 LTD/ 7 Litre/Country Squire is my favorite full sized Ford – it’s a well done update of the ‘65 and nice transaction to the ‘67, maybe that’s why it was the best selling big Ford of the 1960’s (and ‘70’s).
A ‘66 Galaxie 500 XL Convertible was the Presidential car used in Cile and the ‘66 model (with a couple face lifts) was produced in Brazil until 1983.
I believe Mercury had a hardtop Limo too, at least in 1965.
yes they did.
I’ve been blind for more than 50 years to it because my family owned a ’66 Galaxie 500 and I loved that car. But I see it now: the fake coke-bottle hips grafted onto this car’s flanks are amateurish. And they look all wrong on the flossy LTD.
It was a holdover until they could do it right in ’67.
What a neat car, in the perfect color. It must be 289 propelled, unless someone removed the displacement badges on the lower front fenders. Everything with a 352 and up got them; I bought a ’66 390 badge at a swap meet when I was 12 or so. I grew up with two ’66 Galaxie 500 two-door hardtops in my neighborhood (this was in 1990 or so, in Michigan). One was a nice blue 390, the other a rusty pink 352 driven daily by my neighbor’s pretty (older than me) daughters. I remember that someone had just cut the passenger frame rail right out of that car, and they continued to drive it (for a short time). Both cars had the badges.
Those engine callouts were nasty to remove. Each of the “fingers” across the top had a pin on the back that attached to the body by pressing into a plastic grommet in the fender hole. I was taking them off my 67 and broke the pins on both sides. It took me several tries to gingerly pry two good ones from junkyard cars. Those thin potmetal castings were brittle by the time they were ten years old . Those fingers would bend easily too.
I remember one Sunday afternoon going the armory with my dad. He was in what was I guess the Canadian equivalent of the reserves. We came out and someone had stolen the 390 emblems of his near new ’67 LTD. I distinctly remember the jagged remains of those grommets you speak of.
Talk about pissed! I remember going with him to the parts department of the dealer to get replacements.
BTW, what in the world were you doing that you had to take yours off? I don’t recall you ever mentioning that you repainted your car!
I did in fact get it painted and removed all the trim to do so. I really should have kept that car longer.
Ford’s “LTD of today” is the top trim F-150’s, Explorers, or Expeditions. Very few sold as ‘base models’. [Not counting fleet pickups.]
I miss when car designs didn’t look alien from architecture, is there a more perfect shape to compliment the capitol building?
Ford was usually much worse than Chrysler at copying successful GM designs. The ’65-’66 LTD is the exception. I might go so far as to say it was better than the stacked headlight Pontiac it was aping.
As others have stated, it could be considered a “catastrophic success” in the ultimate damage the low-price brougham did to the middle-tier brands. Losing Mercury and Plymouth wasn’t so bad, but the damage to B-O-P was nearly insurmountable.
Four-door hardtops are the epitome of Detroit glamour, for me, taken as a group—the postwar equivalent of the prewar convertible sedan ? Only Lincoln managed that trick in the postwar era—and with a radically shortened roof dimension. But the rear-hinged door made up for that, sexy-wise.
There were four-door hardtop station wagons, fer hevvins sake ! Oh, those ‘fifties . . .
And those seventies and eighties in Japan. See this JDM brochure for the T180 Toyota Corona EXiV: http://www.wald-licht.com/~oldcar/89_t_exiv_01.html
For all intents and purposes, the four door hardtop was in concept a four door convertible sedan with a steel roof attached. Pre-war, the convertible sedan had required a heavier frame and significantly beefier bracing and gussets to maintain rigidity. All that extra engineering and tooling, plus increased interior and top material work resulted frequently in the model being the highest priced in the line.
Into the 1950’s, Fisher, after five years experience building two door hardtops, made that logical leap into four door hardtops in Spring 1955. The ‘glamourous new style in fashionable motoring’ took hold like wildfire particularly in upscale model ranges for every make that field them.
I was delighted when we finally got for our family car, a black with white top ’63 Ford Galaxie 500 on which I learned to drive
Imagine if FCA brought out a hardtop version of the current 300 sedan. I’m not a fan of the 300, but a 300 4-door hardtop? That’s another matter, entirely…
Don’t overlook the 1958-’62 Mercedes Benz 300d. It WAS a premium four door hardtop, that was a six-window design, where even the rear quarter windows were removable.
Amazing that the mid trim 210 series Chevy was available as a four door hardtop.
Brings back memories of dad’s ’56: A red and white Bel Air verision. I have vivid memories of that car, because my parents rushed me to the hospital the night he brought it home, as I’d contracted lobar pneumonia and had a temperature of 105. I was later told that I died that night, but was revived.
Back then, the 210 series matched the Bel Air model for model, except for the convertible. Obviously the market was good for those kind of customers. I think that died with the ’59 models, by which time the Bel Air had regressed to the second line model.
We tend to love what we know and for me that was the 66 LTD two-door hardtop that my aunt bought new. It was just like the one that graced the cover of the 66 Ford brochure below but with a Raven Black top (painted not vinyl) over the Vintage Burgundy. This LTD was indeed a very quiet car. I still think the two-door, with its swept-back roof and concave rear window, looks better than the four-door. I never particularly liked that extra piece of chrome trim on the four-door’s C pillar. My bias also is due to being a huge fan of the 63 Grand Prix and happy with Ford’s copying some of its details for the coupe.
Per the above comments about the “panty cloth” upholstery. In the brochure Ford brags that it is “protected against soilage by Scotchguard.” I recall that seemed to work well on my aunt’s car (I cleaned it for her on a regular basis during the car’s first two years and before I went to college) and that the upholstery continued to look good for years – but perhaps more due to regular vacuuming and shampooing than the protectorant. 3M would get into trouble later on with the EPA re the chemicals in Scotchguard and I think it’s been reformulated at least once since.
“I never particularly liked that extra piece of chrome trim on the four-door’s C pillar. ”
An excellent point. That always kind of bothered me too. And that line seems to have been pressed into the steel C pillar on all 4 door hardtops, so the LTD just stuck a piece of trim on it to make it stand out even more. The 67 got rid of that little failure.
I’m almost positive that I saw this exact LTD in the parking lot at the National Arboretum in DC last summer. There can’t be more than one in metro DC in that color. Good to know that it’s taking in all the sights.
Somehow, that rear deck looks way too long in proportion, even for the cars of that era…
Yep.
Lord Bath my ath! Why would such a rich chap live in a matte painting, what? Anyway, even if was true, His Holiness’d have to have the local village widened so he could drive an LTD through it. That wouldn’t be so quiet.
I love the first photo – it really does look like a still from ’60’s show.
The LTD may well be mechanically refined, but it’s a bit of an elephant: it has a huge, overlong trunk and consumes a great deal (and has big round feet, come to that). Not an ugly car, but clearly penned by some oddball with a phobia about the driver being in the same parking spot as his tailights.
That overly long trunk appearance that some are mentioning looks like it is an optical illusion that depends entirely on the color of the car and the way it was photographed. The side profile of the dark (black) cars make it look like the front is short and stubby which, in turn, makes the rear quarter and deck look almost like a lengthy charicature.
But check out the photos of the lighter colored cars which were photographed from a different perspective. They appear much more balanced and the rear doesn’t look as nearly out of proportion.