Chrysler 300 5th Gen (Letter Series)

This is Elwood Engel's Chrysler and it looks nothing like what came before. Engel had come from Ford, where the 1961 Lincoln Continental made his name, and he brought the same instincts: flat, slab-sided flanks with a single crisp edge running the length of the car, a tall upright greenhouse, a squared-off roofline, and a refusal of ornament for its own sake. The wraparound windshield that had defined Chrysler interiors since 1955 was abandoned, which alone transforms how the cabin feels. Against a 300F this looks like a car from a different company; against a 1965 Cadillac it looks tauter and less decorated. The letter-car details are quieter than they used to be. There is a specific grille treatment, a 300 medallion with a small running light built into it that Chrysler fitted to every car but dealers only wired up where state law allowed, bucket seats, a full-length console and, on the four-speed cars, a real tachometer. It is the most restrained letter car and the most modern-looking, and it has aged better than any of the finned ones.

The 300L never turned a wheel in anger, and 1965 is the most interesting possible year for that to be true. In November 1964 NASCAR banned the 426 Hemi on the grounds that Chrysler was not selling it in a production car, and Chrysler responded by boycotting the entire 1965 Grand National season. Richard Petty spent the year drag racing a Barracuda with the word Outlawed painted on the door. So the corporation that had just been thrown out of stock car racing over an engine was, in the same twelve months, selling its flagship performance coupe with a single four-barrel carburetor and no high-performance option at all. The 300L's 413 shares the RB block architecture the 426 was built on, which is as close as the connection gets. By 1965 the letter car had been a luxury cruiser rather than a performance weapon for years, and the fight that mattered was happening in lightweight Belvederes and Coronets. Chrysler settled it that autumn by putting the Street Hemi in a showroom, which made the engine legal and made the 300L look even further from the action.

The 300L's cultural life is entirely posthumous, and it is more interesting than its sales figures suggest. It ended a run of eleven cars across eleven model years that nobody has repeated, and the badge it retired went on to have a longer career than the letter series itself. The non-letter 300 continued into the early 1970s, Hurst built a gold and white 300 in 1970 that people still argue about, and Chrysler brought the name back in 2005 on a car that sold in hundreds of thousands and made the 300 mean something again to a generation that had never heard of a 300F. All of that traces back through the L. Among people who study Detroit design the 1965 Chryslers are Engel's arrival and the moment the corporation stopped chasing Exner's fins, and the 300L is the sharpest example of that shift. It has no film credits and no song lyrics. What it has is the position at the end of the alphabet, and the quiet satisfaction of being the letter car nobody was looking at while everyone chased the finned ones.

The easiest letter car to own, and by some distance. There is no cross-ram to synchronise, no push-button cable to adjust and no electroluminescent instrument cluster to fail, which removes the three things that make earlier letter cars fussy. What is left is a well-built 1965 Chrysler: a 413 that will run indefinitely and rebuild cheaply, a TorqueFlite that rarely complains, and a torsion-bar front end that wants bushings and an alignment every so often and then behaves. Rust is the main enemy and it follows the full-size Mopar script, starting in the lower rear quarters, the trunk floor, the door bottoms and the cowl, so a car that has lived under cover is worth paying up for. Interior trim is the scarce part, because 1965-specific seat material and console pieces are harder to find than mechanical components and correct reproduction is limited. Drum brakes on a heavy car mean planning ahead, and the four-speed cars need their linkage set up properly to shift cleanly. Sorted, it is a comfortable, quick, thoroughly usable car you can drive across a country.