Autos: Specialty Market

After a crash program to speed engineering and styling, Chrysler Corp.’s Chrysler-Plymouth division last week rolled out its first 1967 Barracuda, a sleek new car with long hood, short trunk, fancy waffle grille and such flashy features as a wall-to-wall rear window, snap-open gas-tank cover, wood-paneled dashboard. The Barracuda, which began in 1964 as a jerry-built fastback body mounted on an old-fashioned Valiant chassis, up to now has been a pretty tame fish in a very turbulent pond. The completely new Barracuda, whose prices will start at approximately $2,500, comes out just in time to catch the hottest new car market since compacts first made their appearance. The demand for “specialty” cars, with their bucket seats and 150-m.p.h. speedometers, has increased 700% since 1963. Next year more than a million will be sold, accounting for one out of every nine U.S. auto sales.

Everybody Has One. Specialty cars date back to the early 1950s when Ford introduced the Thunderbird and the Mark II Lincoln Continental, and Chevrolet came out with its fiber glass fendered Corvette. Then in 1963, Buick introduced its Riviera. The market really began rolling two years ago when Ford brought out the hot, bright, popularly priced Mustang. Every other auto division in Detroit rushed to produce something like it. Dodge pushed the Charger, Oldsmobile the Toronado, Cadillac the elegant Eldorado, and American Motors Corp. the Marlin. Chrysler-Plymouth cut a year off the development time of the Barracuda in order to get it on the road this year. Lincoln-Mercury has introduced the Cougar to fill the price gap between Mustang and Thunderbird. Chevrolet this fall introduced its Camaro, a frank copy of Mustang, to go along with the Corvair Monza which had been its interim lower-priced specialty car. In February, Pontiac, which already has the Tempest GTO model, will bring out its brand-new Firebird—also being built in a crash program—as the twelfth entry in the specialty field.

Though Detroit calls them specialty cars, buyers refer to them more naturally as sports cars. With one available in just about any price range from Mustang’s $2,461 to Eldorado’s $6,277, young-in-heart drivers of all ages are snapping them up. Cougar has gone into overtime production to keep up with demand, and General Sales Manager Frank E. Zimmerman expects to sell 180,000 this model-year. Mustang, which opened up the market two years ago, continues to do better all the time; sales of 46,042 last month were 4,000 higher than sales in October a year ago. “They are distinctive cars,” said Chrysler-Plymouth General Manager Robert Anderson of his Barracudas last week, “and the owner can feel that he is expressing a bit of his personality by driving one.”

Styling with Stripes. To match any shade of personality, Detroit offers specialties in three styles—fastback, hardtop and convertible. Unlike more staid buyers, specialty shoppers like to load their cars with such sporty extras as tachometers or rally stripes painted across the top of the car. A earful of extras naturally means a higher profit for both dealer and manufacturer. Bevond that, dealers like the specialty models because they attract people into showrooms who often begin by looking at a sports car, end up by buying another model. Four out of ten people who came in to look at the Cougar, reported Zimmerman last week, had not been in a Lincoln-Mercury showroom in the past three years.

Zimmerman also noted that 15% of Cougar buyers are women (for less expensive Mustangs, the figure rises to 50%). To the delight of Detroit, most of the women who buy such cars are young working girls in the age (20-35) group that the automakers most want to capture. The driver in that group, said Chrysler-Plymouth’s Anderson last week, “is a prime new-car prospect for many years to come. We want to start him off in a Barracuda. We want to keep him as a customer for a lifetime.”