I’m assuming these were base V8s, which of course put the lighter and smaller Plymouth at even greater advantage with its 230 hp 318 compared to Chevy’s 195 hp 283 and Ford’s even smaller 164 hp 260. FWIW, the little Chevy does pretty well under the circumstances to make up for its deficit in cubic inches and car weight. And the Ford was also the heaviest, by far.
Actually, the Chevy was only slightly heavier than the Plymouth, oddly enough.
Here’s the curb weights for these:
Ford Galaxie 4 door sedan: 3647 lbs
Chevrolet Bel Air V8 4 door sedan: 3345 lbs
Plymouth Fury V8 4-door sedan: 3265 lbs
The reason (in part): that poly wide-block 318 V8 was a lot heavier than the lightweight Chevy and Ford V8s.
Believing car ads in the ’60s is equivalent to believing everything you read on the internet today. And no Galaxie had the 260. A ’63 would have had a 289 (its debut year) and a 3 on the tree, and maybe with optional overdrive. Most had the 352.
The first printing of the brochure confirms my memory, that the 289 replaced the 260 part way through the model year, but it was not there at the beginning. All the better for a Plymouth comparison ad. 🙂
The 260 replaced the 292 at the beginning of the ’63 model year. It wasn’t until mid-year that the 289 replaced the 260. I’ve attached the initial brochure.
That ’63 Ford with a 260 could have any one of four different transmissions, also. It was the only Ford V8 that could still be bolted to the two-speed Ford-o-Matic.
The 260/2 speed Ford-o-Matic powertrain must have been a sluggish combo in this full sized Ford body.
As a kid our family owned a 1963 Country Sedan wagon with the 260. Probably an early-year car.
Ford’s good showing in the emergency stop is unexpected, given the car’s higher weight. And things like city passing and the hill climb *where the Chevy did well) would take advantage of the SBC’s breathing in a wound-out low gear in the PG
Sixty years later I can still recall the sound of my Uncle’s SBC/PG ’63 Impala screaming it’s low gear guts out in the 25 to 35 mph range on steep hills of southeast Oklahoma.
When it finally made the “great leap” from low to high gear it would loose speed uphill until it kicked down to low gear again.
My Aunt’s 318/Torqueflite Dodge sounded and felt (the few times they allowed me to drive) much more peppy, refined & quieter on the same streets & roads.
Here’s the updated mid-year brochure…
The most relevant item in the ad is the “incomplete third heat” for Ford in the hill climb. Slightly different times aren’t nearly as important as a failure.
So what if a Plymouth performed better and had a better warrantee. It far out uglied Chevy & Ford and had acquired a rep for bad quality it had yet to live down. No wonder it could not regain 3rd place in the sales race.
Only die hard Chevy fans would consider the ’63 Chevy an attractive piece of automotive art.
The ’61 Bubbletop Hardtop and then the ’65 Impala…..yes.
The ’63? Meh.
I’m not a diehard GM fan but I like the 63 Chevy the second most of the X frame years behind the 61. 65(and really the whole 65-70 range) don’t do it for me, I personally find the X frame years were more attractive interesting and expressive designs.
I don’t find the 63 Plymouth ugly in the slightest though, a little dull perhaps but nothing close to the weirdness of prior years.
Ugliness aside, the fact that Plymouth feels a need to show the Market that it can outperform either a Chevy or a Ford isn’t much of a brag. Was this ad the result of some type of an executive at Plymouth demanding proof that their car can beat the other two? Lousy marketing idea. Very inside politics. Were they trying to resell a 1959 Plymouth or 1960 Plymouth owner interested in trading in their finned rust buckets for the smaller car?
What a frozen mind-set. Plymouth wasn’t just competing against Ford or Chevy, it was competing against any vehicle sold in 1963, foreign or domestic. Give me a reason to buy that ugly heap, not tell me that the ugly Plymouth is a few seconds faster than the better looking cars.
Bottom line – bad sales presentation.
I forget. Wasn’t this about the time that Mopar started their “5 years/50,000 miles” warranty?
Yes, that was new for ’63.
I may be misremembering, but wasn’t that 5/50 warranty a gimmick in that it applied to the powertrain only, and that the warranty for the rest of the car was reduced to the pre-1961 domestic standard of 90 days/3 or 4K miles?
The 5/50 warranty as introduced in ’63 covered all major powertrain parts, and was transferrable to the new owner on selling the car. It was certainly not a gimmick; it was a revolutionary giant leap upward in warranty coverage of parts that cost a lot of money to repair, and were much more likely to need repair in 1963 than they are today. I don’t know what the non-powertrain warranty was on the ’63 Chrysler Corp cars, but they were built much more sturdily than the ’62s.
I remember reading in Lee Iacocca’s book, he said one of the few times Ford and probably GM paid any attention to what Chrysler Corp did was when they introduced the 5/50 warranty.
While the warranty was real, it was also a very clever marketing and PR move. The corporation offered a long warranty on the toughest parts of the car. Mopar drivetrains were quite good during that era. That was the part of the car that was least likely to have trouble during the first five years or 50,000 miles.
Which car was better half way through their expected lifespan? I find some car reviews to be limited value for someone who keeps a car a long, long time (like me). But is it durable or at least affordable and easy to maintain?
I was curious about the Nationwide Testing Institute which ENFORCED the rules … did they also write them, so Plymouth had to win? My suspicions where heightened when a search disclosed that they got the name trademarked in January 1963. Hmmm, very timely. But it actually seemed like a legitimate test organization, based in Hoboken, and became one of the defacto certifiers of mobile homes before the US government got involved. They even tested bicycles.
It does say that the institute made the rules, so yeah the rules were designed to show the Plymouth in the best light possible since it was “asked (paid) for by Plymouth” The reality of course is that most of those tests are of acceleration and if you can win one of them it is likely you are going to win the others as well. The fact that it also won the economy run though is impressive.
As is clearly stated in the ad, this “showdown” was “asked for” by Plymouth.
It is not beyond belief that Chrysler/Plymouth ran the tests on their own before the NCTI was signed up to do it for the ad campaign, and that the results were favorable for Plymouth.
The results were obviously going to favor Plymouth, given its quite considerably larger engine, more torque and hp. And an intermediate gear, if they tested automatics. There was certainly no reason to rig this test.
Well worded, Paul.
Once again we agree.
FWIW, the “Nationwide Consumer Testing Institute” that supposedly performed the testing was registered in New Jersey on October 1, 1962 as a for-profit organization. The only other info that can be found are a couple of pictures of someone in a lab coat with the name on the back testing some bicycle parts.
As I recall they were a “results for hire” outfit. I used to see their logo on ads for a number of products, including cigarettes. Needless to say, whoever paid for the testing got the results they wanted.
I’ve owned something similar to these three cars over the years.
1962 Chevy Biscayne 2 door sedan 6 cyl PG in 1972. A good car but I never was in love with the rectilinear styling from ’62-’64. It was #2 in “speediness”.
1963 Fury 2 door hdtp. 318 auto (loved the push buttons) in 1975. Thought the styling was odd, but I could live with it. It was the fastest by far! And the nimblest.
1963-1/2 Galaxie 2 door hdtp 260 auto. in 1980 ( the last of the small 260s) A luxury boat (to me). Loved the styling, the ride. But slowww.
I’d buy the Plymouth or the Ford over again, But I liked my ’60 Chevy (owned in the ’90s) styling a lot better than the ’62-’64s.
More apt: “Plymouth beat Ford and Chevrolet in 8 out of 10 advertisements”.
Interesting that Plymouth even paid for a double-page spread of this in LIFE magazine:
Anyone one else notice that lights on the roofs and that the Plymouth is the only one illuminated? I guess that’s to show that it ‘won’.
It is rather intriguing that Chrysler would name names in an ad, though. Back then, it was unusual and most ads would not identify competitors so blatantly.
I remember these ads in the Pittsburgh papers when I was growing up. I used the plural “ads” because these would come out each year in the early 60s, and the rank order was always the same — Plymouth would win 8 of 10; Chevy won the hill climb every year, and Ford was given one win (emergency stop in ’63, not sure if it was the same metric every year, but probably). Even as a kid, I was quite skeptical…
Chevrolet looked at those ads and said, nuh uh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbsrO_h3QI8
Of course, this Chevy-produced video is hopelessly biased, but it’s still fun to watch that sleek 327-equipped Impala hardtop streak across the screen.
Here’s a little something to ponder: what if Chrysler’s new 273 LA engine had been available a year earlier and been in the Plymouth instead of the heavier 318? Would the results have been the same (or even better) for Plymouth?
No. With 50 fewer horsepower? It would have been slower and almost certainly would have been beat by the Chevy.
There’s a reason buyers paid extra for the 318 after the 273 became standard in 1965 on the Belvedere.
But only 15 fewer horsepower than the Chevy 283…
The power rating on the 2bbl 318 is a fairy tale.
Plymouth’s good looks? Yes, for ’63 I agree. Another time was ’59.
I remember seeing these advertisements in old issues of magazines at our school library. It’s easy to see why Chrysler took this approach. In 1962, the market share for the corporation as a whole was down to around 10 percent. In 1957, Plymouth alone had claimed almost 10 percent of the market!
Plymouth (and Dodge) had a much-improved line of cars for 1963, but the key was getting people into the showrooms after the corporation’s quality debacles of the late 1950s, and the styling debacles of 1961 and 1962. The corporation had to take strong measures such as this to get the buying public’s attention.
I’ve always like the 1963 Plymouth – even the front end, with its outboard-mounted turn signals. The entire car looks tauter and more “eager” compared to its competition. The 1962 models were a big improvement in build quality compared to its predecessors, and the 1963 models added much better looks to the total package.
Several lifetimes ago I had a 1963 Plymouth Belvedere with the 361 CID version of the Chrysler B Block. As you can probably guess it was quite the performer; full throttle acceleration would wind the rear axle up against the leaf spring, causing severe wheel hop. At that time I thought that the Plymouth front clip was incredibly ugly but now, some 50 years later, it has grown on me. I put over 45k miles on the Plymouth in the two years I drove it, mostly just going to school, to work, and hooning around in general. Under my stewardship many of the systems on the Belvedere started to give up the ghost. The final straw was a massive leak from the automatic transmission that was beyond my ability to correct. I could not see spending several hundred dollars on a car that I purchased for $400 to start with. In the spring of 1971 the Plymouth dealer in my hometown was closing his dealership and was selling off his inventory at reduced prices. There was a 1968 Roadrunner that I really wanted, unfortunately the $1500 he wanted for it was beyond my resources. I tried for two months to get my grandmother to lend me the money but no joy. I ended up buying a 1965 Catalina off the back row of the local Pontiac dealer.