There is a purity in the Imperial lineage that few, if any other car
'brands' can claim: they were, year after year, simply the biggest and the
best that the company had to offer. In modern times, companies offer a
variety of prestige versions of the different types of automobiles they
make, and so you can get both a big, a medium size and a small Lexus or
whatever. The given name is merely a brand that implies that what you have
is the most prestigious version of a vehicle type in their inventory.
Not so the Imperial. In each year until it was discontinued in 1975 it was
always the biggest car you could get from the Chrysler Corporation. There
was no such thing as a mid sized, or small, or SUV, or pick up Imperial.
These cars come from an era when prestige meant size. It is noticeable that
these cars always had the biggest engine possible, as well. If you wanted a
smaller engine you would have to get a regular Chrysler.
Of course, bigness in and of itself was not the only defining element of the
cars. They always had the most and the newest luxury extras and they were
always the first to get them. While today just about any car can have power
everything, when innovations such as cruise control were introduced, you may
be certain that it was the Imperial that had them first.
This single minded approach may have been a contributing factor to the
demise of the Imperial. The economics of the car business dictated the
modern approach and a relatively small line of unique cars became less and
less viable. My neighbour has a 1973 Chrysler and you just about have to be
an expert to tell it from the Imperial, which is hardly the point of having
such an expensive line. Once Imperial lost their own individual sheet
metal, the writing was, as far as the Chrysler Corporation was concerned, on
the wall. While I have been one of the sharpest critics of the company and
how it handled the Imperial as a whole, even I must admire their
unwillingness to "cheapen" the extraordinary lineage the name always
connoted.
Witness the name LeBaron. In our world, it means the ultimate with
everything version of that year's Imperial. In the public's eye, it is a
discontinued K car of no great merit, and I say that as one who owns and
loves one of them. All I'm saying is that the name is no longer an
indication of excellence and prestige. Post 1975 attempts to use the
Imperial name again led to some good cars. The ones from the early 1980s
were designed to be competition for the Thunderbird, large luxury coupes.
Those from the early 1990s were an upscale version of the Chrysler New
Yorker. What this proved was that it was quite easy to use the name again,
and that there might even be merit in so doing, but it was still going to be
a tough sell to the buying public, whose understanding of what Imperial
stands for is that they are always the biggest and the best of what the
company has to offer.
Hugh
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