1958 Plymouth Plaza! Flathead 6 MoPar! Forward Look! Obsolete Automotive Car Review! 

I had a very early production '57 Plaza 2 door sedan with the 6cyl/ automatic, and factory power steering and brakes. It was very unique.

58' Plymouth Plaza was very popular for taxi drivers in Greece from late 50s till late 60s. In general American cars were very popular for Greek taxi drivers and Greek public services until 1965.

Love the colour scheme and the extra options on this model. Wish this was sitting in my garage I'd be a very happy guy.

Great video. Power steering was a huge revelation back then, now it's standard equipment. It made a huge difference in driving ease.

My friend's father was a Baptist minister and they lived across the street from us. He was very strict and they didn't have a tv or allow his children to go to the movies. Their entertainment was going to the library and listening to shows on the radio. Much to our surprise, his father bought a new 1957 Plymouth and a couple years later they got a tv! I don't know what changed, but all of sudden they were in the 20th century.

Blue Bonnet blue- nice name and pretty colour. Nice straight, honest car from another time. I wonder what stories it could tell.

My absolute favourite car. The 57-58 Plymouth is such a good looking car, base spec plaza to top spec Belvedere/fury.

Never knew the "baseline" or backstory of the "Silver Special" cars till today Fun Plymouth to see and rare in 2024

Nice car, the cheapest model in the 1958 Plymouth line, many saw service as taxicabs. The flathead six engine was already obsolete by 1955, but Chrysler did not build a modern 6-cylinder engine until the celebrated Slant Six introduced in 1959 for the 1960 model year. This flathead six engine was designed and first built in 1938, so Chrysler got more than their money's worth by extending their use from 1939 models to 1959 models.

Those were also used as taxi cabs If you watch an old movie It's a mad mad world there's a bunch of them especially toward the end of the movie

Too find one of these on the road is a miracle!!!!😊

Your interest in old mopars is chsrming and I cannot resist. This is yet another fascinating car, with your competent and humble narration. Thank you for the unpretentious, straightforward sharing!

luv this car. Amazing to me that Mopar persisted with the flathead when GM and Ford long had ohv 6's...maybe they were gearing up for the best I6 ever to be released in a couple years. Sorry to see this one go

Unlike the '57s in '58 you could buy a lowly Savoy 2 door with the slick Sport Coupe roof - a perfect base to do a Fury clone. Pops bought a '57 wagon when we lived near Chicago as a boomer kid - and our neighbor across St bought a 2 tone Plaza that maroon/rust color on top with cream white lower spear on bottom and roof. His had a 6 and he hated it, ran like sh*t. As a punk I LOVED our wagon cream with lower custom lavender spear and roof. Our wagon with V8 kicked ass but about one year later the one Chicago winter already had rust bubbles appearing above the front headlights on top fender - woof !!! I still have b/w hi res photos of that Custom Suburban wagon to this day. Best looking cars on the block when all else looked like tubs, lol !!! 👀

Incredible !!!! My parents owned a 1959 Plymouth Savoy !!!!

The best looking cars is definitely the Forward look cars… thanks for the video 👍

White tops were common then, when A/C was rare, to be cooler in the heat. Two tones would become passé in a few years.

Thanks for uploading. I'd heard about the Savoy, Belvedere & Fury but I'd never heard of the Plaza until now!

Neat car! One way to tell that it's a base model is the lack of rear door armrests.

Very much enjoyed your video. What a cool car! The Mopar flatheads are a very underrated engine. They are super reliable. My 51 Dodge has the 230 flathead; what a great mill. Thanks for sharing!

Cool car, and cool that it will be in the movies 👍

What a sweet ride!

Love it , you get to play with some great mopars and enjoy them !

Hey Austin, Was awesome to meet ya at the Charlotte Autofair today and check out the 72 Coronet custom in person. Love this video. My dad had a 57 Savoy in blue bonnet blue and white that he bought brand new in the fall of 56.. Traded in a 56 Savoy on it at the time. The Exner cars were and are the bomb!!

A stunning example of the forward look. In its most understated simplicity. Hang onto this one bubba...engine sound to die for, sweet and smooth.

Great report! Thank you!

I had a 61 Belvedere 4dr, 318 poly engine, for my 1st car. Tough as nails. Amazing how much trim even the low priced cars had. I currently have a 65 Rambler Classic 770 Convertible with factory ac. I'm just north of Charlotte. Maybe I'll see you at a cruise in.

Here's the low-down on the year 1958 that everybody wanted to forget. Have you ever wondered why the 1958 line-up of cars from Detroit are not that plentiful? The reason for what happened was the recession of 1958 is occasionally mentioned but frequently glossed over; it was short, but it was nasty, and had a particularly devastating effect on the auto industry. In truth, the recession of 1958 started in the fall of 1957 -- just as the new 1958 model cars were rolling into showrooms nationwide -- and only lasted through April. Still, its effects were strong: GDP fell 4.2 percent in the last quarter of 1957, then plummeted another 10.4 percent in the first quarter of 1958. In the spring of 1958, steel production was at 52.4 percent of capacity, versus 93.5 percent a year earlier; weekly steel production, at 1,415,000 tons in early 1958, was nearly a million tons a week less than 12 months prior. In previous recessions, prices for goods had gone down, but in 1958, for the first time, they went up. Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent year-to-year. Unemployment, always a slightly lagging indicator, reached a 7.1 percent peak in September 1958, although the rate in the Detroit area was something closer to 20 percent. The recession of 1958 hit fast and hard, and selling cars then was tough enough, even with established top-of-the-sales-charts marques. Witness Chevrolet, whose entirely new, bread-and-butter X-framed full-size line, which included the new top-of-the-line Impala, dipped a staggering 300,000 units. Speaking of Pontiac, Pontiac fell from 334,000 to 217,000 units sold, but still retained more than 5 percent of the market; Oldsmobile dropped from 384,000 to 296,000 in sales; and the new "Air Born" Buick was nearly grounded, sales dropped from 404,000 units in 1957 to a shocking 240,000 in 1958. Cadillac fared better than most in GM, down to 121,778 units in 1958 from 146,841 in its restyle year of 1957. Ford had a pair of unit-body models that debuted for 1958: the four-seat Ford Thunderbird, and the entire Lincoln line. Of these, the so-called Squarebird was an absolute bright spot for Ford sales; but in terms of sales and attention, it was the right move -- at nearly 38,000 sold, it topped the previous two-seater's sales numbers by a whopping 16,000 units. As such, it's one of the few cars that benefited in 1958. On the flip side were the Lincoln and Continental lines. Sharing a body for 1958, these were the largest unit-body cars ever built in series production, and the longest wheelbase regular-production cars since World War II. As such, the luxury offerings represented a massive technical achievement. Items like the canted-headlamp nose, the massive bumpers (even by 1958 standards) and the front wheel opening treatment, designed perhaps to invoke the pontoon-fendered elegance of the 1930s, have all been used as examples when someone points to this generation of Lincoln and accuses its style of being "excessive" and "overwrought." While Continentals (called Mk III in 1958) outsold the previous hand-built Mk II considerably, production of the Lincoln series (identical save for roof-line, and meant to compete against Oldsmobile) dropped precipitously. It was a moot point, though, since Continental Division was folded into Lincoln for 1958. Yet the Lincoln Division alone is said to have lost $60 million alone from 1958-'60. This, on top of the hemorrhaging Edsel division, made an already-bad economic situation worse. And all that drama was with the all-new cars. So how did the carryover models fare? Well, even worse. The Ford line, all-new in 1957 and face-lifted to give a passing resemblance to the fabulous new Thunderbird, dropped from 1.5 million cars and beating Chevy in the 1957 sales race to less than one million built a year later, and a quarter-million units down on its erstwhile competition across town. Mercury's numbers dropped precipitously, from 286,000 to 183,000. Chrysler divisions, which had succeeded so spectacularly on the backs of the 1957 Forward Look design that invigorated every model from the lowliest Plymouth to the richest Imperial, tanked even more spectacularly. Dodge more than halved its numbers, from 287,000 in 1957 to 137,000 in 1958. Imperial, similarly, took a dive, from 37,500 units to just 16,000 year-to-year. Plymouth dropped from 762,000 units to less than 444,000; whispers of quality-control issues in an effort to see three quarters of a million cars out the door at Highland Park in 1957 may have come back to bite the division in 1958. Just to underscore how tough a year 1958 was for the sales force, even with a 40-odd-percent drop in cars built, Plymouth still retained third place in sales. De Soto hadn't been healthy for years; dropping from 126,000 to less than 50,000 in a single year only underscored that the division was on the way out. While Chrysler Division's production was nearly halved, to just under 64,000 units. In a lot of ways, the failures of 1958 -- and there were many, both economic and corporate may have been significant for the soul searching it encouraged within Detroit; the steady onslaught of import cars (primarily Renault and Volkswagen, although a number of British marques offered a variety of more overtly sporting cars) combined with a 31 percent year-to-year drop in car sales, surely helped popularize the push for the compacts that were due in 1960. Something else that may have helped justify that decision: the success of the newly face-lifted Rambler, now with twin headlamps and baby fins. Leaping from 91,000 units in 1957 to 162,000 in 1958, the Kenosha company jumped from 12th in the sales charts clear up to seventh in this recession year; this momentum would later see them reach as high as third in the charts. The rest of the industry surely marveled at the notion of smaller cars, bereft of the latest gadgets and styling tricks, capturing the imagination of the American public. Rambler was the closest thing America had to a home-grown import car, in size and intent, and the combination of low price, overall economy and reliability was apparently irresistible during the recession of 1958. As a stopgap measure, some automakers briefly caught import fever; these captive imports were made by the international divisions of the divisions' corporate masters, and were surely meant to compete against Rambler as much as the imports. Buick dealers welcomed the German Opel into the fold while Pontiac briefly flirted with British import Vauxhall Victor. Ford offered its European Consul/Zodiac/Zephyr line in the States as well. Most of these were soon dropped after the American wave of compacts came in for 1960 and 1961.

I am surprised that that car runs with that electric fuel pump so close to the motor. Those usually run best closer to the tank

Very nice original car.

So cool. Sits. Very. Nice thanks

That's a cool old rig, Austin. Hope you made a nice profit on her.

Popular UK conversion was to fit a Perkins 4/99 diesel

Basically the same as we had in 🇦🇺we had the 6 plus the poly V8 great cars.

I think you should get one of those Rambler Americans that look like an upside down bathtub. They have many winsome qualities and sold well in the day!

Very nice car!

Excellent content, subscribed.

I have a 58 Plymouth two-door hardtop it was factory red with a white top belvedere

It's a nice looking car

Good basic transportation back in the day !

Looks like the same 6 cylinder engine in my 51 Plymouth. Great video. 5:42 5:44

Nice car 🚗 👌 👍 👏

Thanks for the second video on your Plymouth. It is really a beauty; somebody in California kept after it. As a Chrysler lover what do you think about adding front seat belts in the case of a new owner wanting to take it out on the road say a 200 mile trip? A few years ago I saw a Hudson Jet with added seat belts. The owner had pulled them from a yard and installed them pretty easily.

It's better to not turn the power steering wheel while the car is not moving. It's stressing the power steering pump to turn the wheels when it's just sitting

if you were just going on looks 57-60 chysler cars were attractive but mechanically they had problems stemming from the radical design changes.

Thanks for the memories. Dad had a new 58 Belvedere four door hardtop with about every option dreamed of, including the sport tone side spear. It was the first car I ever drove. I question the variable wipers back in 58. My recollection is that Ford came out with variable speed wipers in 1969 and sued GM and Chrysler when they offered them in 1970, when Ford had the patent. Seems they had to pay a few dollars to Ford for every vehicle they offered them on. Nice car and I think you did a great job presenting it.

My first car was a 1958 Plymouth station wagon I was 15 years old and got money for my birthday, talked the man down to $78. 00 and my mother had to drive it home cause I didn’t have a drivers permit yet, a lot of learning about cars then and my dad got tired of seeing it in pieces and sold it to the junk man and gave me $40 bucks

So there ya go a modern charger starts out more than the loaded fury did in 58 even after adjustment for the dollar. Cars are ridiculously overpriced today.

I believe that duel sun visors , duel arm rests and backup lights may have been part of an option package ???

I don't think they had option "packages" in the 50's. Am I wrong?

Never heard of the Plymouth plaza

I am interested on a bearboned '57 Plaza 4 door sedan. Black would be brilliant. If you got the opportunity, please let me know. 😘

Question: one of my memories from back then is that almost all of these seemed to seriously rust out over the headlights, like the eyebrows just dissolved. Why was that and what made the difference why some did and some (like this Plaza here) did not? Was there an issue with the fit or channels for drainage?

Kind of pricey back in the day if you were bringing home something like $ 40.00 a week.

Pre slant 6 days with the virtually indestructible old flat head 6.

Optional passenger sun visor?? 😂 Ol mopar sure wanted you to be sorry for trying to save 3 bucks . Good god

6 volt electrical system? Or converted to 12?

Seems that I should have kept the car rather than sell it…

You are turk?