1964 Plymouth Valiant V8 Performance vs Chevrolet Chevy II and Ford Falcon 

The 225 slant 6 was the best of all the Valiants .I had Australian AP5 and AP6 sedans and Safari wagons and they were tough as nails.

I didn't care for the a904 automatics, I had 2 that lost the 2nd to 3rd shift and 2 that lost reverse. On the other hand I've had 6 727's and never had a problem with any of them including one that was abused often to nearly 300k miles.

The 273 got new heads and intake, as well as a smaller bore, but most of the rest was straight from the poly 318, including rods, crank, distributor, alternator bracket, timing cover, harmonic balancer, and all pulleys. There's an extra bolt hole in the 273 timing cover that isn't used on the 273; it's there because the poly 318 block had a bolt in that location. There are two sets of bolt holes in the early 273 alternator bracket - one set for the 273 head, and the other for the poly 318 head. Bracket itself is the same. And the 273/318-poly timing cover, pulleys, harmonic balancer and alternator brackets bolt right up to a 340, and all are on the 340 that's been in my 65 Barracuda since 1973. Even further back, a distributor from a 340 will work in a 1956 Plymouth 277 poly, which is basically a poly 318 with a smaller bore and shorter stroke. My 277 has a Mallory Unilite distributor for an LA small block, and I'm also using a harmonic balancer and crank pulley from a 65 Poly 318. If you trace the history of the Mopar small block from its inception in 1956 as a 277 poly, to the 318 poly, to the 273 wedge and the larger wedges, to the Magnum truck motors and then to the V10 Viper (whose motor was essentially an LA with two added cylinders), the basic structure of the motor was used for sixty years. And the Gen III Hemi still shares its 4.46 bore spacing (bore center to center distance) with the old A and LA engines (albeit not much if anything else).

I had owned chevys and fords in the 1950s and 60s. I thought they were OK but when I got a 1963 Dodge with 318 motor and torguefleight tranmission I could tell it was in another world. It was the Honda of the 1960s. You could drag race it and it never broke. It was 17 year old proof!

Fun to watch little film strip. Here are a few comments regarding other comments that have been made here...This is a long comment so SKIP if you desire. The hp ratings back then in 1964 were "gross hp", not the later utilized "net hp" engine ratings (that started showing up in the the 1972 models), Thus the engine would appear produce more hp. The reason for this is that gross hp ratings were typically for engines without emission controls, power steering pumps, air conditioning compressors, and typically no water pump or even a cooling fan as the engine was attached to a separate cooling system. Thus the hp rating would not be reduced from the parasitic drag from these items. Regarding emission controls: There was basically only one emission control nationwide back in 1964, the PCV (positive crankcase ventilation system) system which was mandated in 1961 to eliminate the road tube emissions which leaked out drips of oil from blow-by gasses (clouds of unburned fuel and engine oil vapor), that got past the piston rings and into the crankcase. By 1968 of course there were more emission controls such as the preheat tubes (to increase the rapidity of the engine warm-up since warm engines create less emissions), and in the early 1970s a slew of them such as the carbon canisters onboard cars (charcoal that absorbs fuel vapors from the fuel tank and then recycles it back to the engine) and later on the catalytic converters in 1974 model years and later (except for Honda sold in the US because they could still meet the emission numbers without it for a while). On a typical vehicle that had a cooling fan, water pump, (all of them that had a water cooled engine) and any emission systems, you could often expect more and more vehicles to add power steering systems and air conditioning compressors, meaning that in a crude manner a net hp engine would produce a reduction of 15-20% of the gross hp levels. So think of the hp levels of 144-153. of course these hp levels could also be fudged downward in the 1960s so that a manufacturer could be placed in a more competitive position vs other manufactures (for example in racing if you had an engine that was rated at a lower hp than in reality you could be at a competitive advantage). Regarding the Slant 6 introduced in the 1960 Valiant (sold through Plymouth Dealerships but called just a Valiant until the next model year when it became the Plymouth Valiant). Yes this was an impressive 6 cylinder engine, but no engine is perfect. For about 10 model years for example the slant 6 came with a rather weak iron exhaust manifold. These manifolds were not terrible but did typically break well before 100,000 miles. The Chrysler Corporation deemed it unnecessary to resolve this issue until the 1970 model year. It is not a major hit to its reputation but nothing is ever perfect. Every a manufacturer should go all out to designs a product properly from the start and engine proper final assembly and of course parts product quality to be sufficient to fully do the job required. If they try to do this and a quality issue is observed it is not unusual for manufacturers to determine if it will be observed within the warranty period or beyond it and proceed to either fix it or live with it until the vehicle part or assembly process is redesigned (sometimes poor assembly techniques can cause quality issues). That's what Toyota and Honda tried hard to do during the 1950s when quality was quite poor. They brought in and actually listened to William Edwards Deming (although he was misunderstood & somewhat ignored at first). Thus the idea of building in the quality from the start rapidly took hold. Within a few years the quality issues at Toyota had been solved & it was only a matter of time & engineering development to address concerns with poor handling or ergonomic issues. By the early 1970s the Detroit Big Three still could not understand this & vowed to drive the competition from Japan (particularly Toyota & Honda but also others) back, but essentially failed & only began to make real quality headway in the mid 1980s after Chrysler & Ford & GM were getting hammered…. Regarding the 0-60 times as a way to measure acceleration performance of a vehicle, as many of you know Tom McCahill pushed these performance parameters back in the 1950s and they stuck and are still used to this day. Although the times recorded by the Valiant and Falcon and Chevy II are slow by today's standards they were decent times especially when compared to many foreign autos available at this time. According to Motor Trend the 0-60 times of a 1964 Beetle (with a 4 speed manual transmission) was nearly 30 seconds! In fact it took so long to reach 60 mph that it would reach the 1/4 mile mark BEFORE reaching 60 mph! (ET: 23.3 sec @ 56.5 mph). So the Valiant, Falcon, and Chevy II were rockets in comparison. Regarding the Torqueflite automatic transmission yes it was truly a fine automatic, & Chrysler did produce a heavy duty version of this transmission for the 1961 model year which really helped in muscle-car or performance or heavy duty applications like towing, etc, while Ford produced their HD version for 1965 & GM for 1967. It is interesting to note that when the push button automatic transmission was replaced with the column shift as on most other automatics at the time, it was missed by I think it was 18% of respondents (according to one magazine reporting on 1965 model Chrysler vehicles) yet most were familiar with the column type shift & welcomed this change. The push-button transmissions were well engineered & perhaps a little safer once parked, as long as you engaged the parking brake after putting the vehicle in neutral. As most of you know the vehicles had a bypass that would move the trans to neutral if you mistakenly pushed the Reverse button while driving. If anyone has any additions or corrections to my comments please feel free to suggest them! I am just going mostly by memory...

Yep, those two speed automatics really killed the Ford and Chevy, but the Falcon got the 289 and C4 three speed auto the next year, changing the whole game. It took GM a few years more to get the TH-350 three speed auto, not a good thing as everyone else had a better trans by then.

Regret selling my 65 273 a/c barracuda.

Hello guys, I am new to V8 Valiant. Always had \6 before. Does the 273 have the same exhaust manifold as the later 318 ones (for example 1968 Valiant)? What are exterior differences?

The LA 273 was a screamer too

I sure love these videos. The 273 seemed to be s little screamer. The 318 had 'grocery getter' written on it but i saw a guy at a private party lot float the valves in a '71 Challenger while parked, which seemed extreme. Thing is, he bought it. 180hp sounds low buy today's standards. Maybe they was downgrading ratings then as they did later.

1964 Valent Barracuda first pony car

YOU CANT KILL A 318... they replaced it with the 4.7 v8... its disposable.. ive rebuilt my motor at 150.000 km .. ..headgasket.. ect.ect

I think I would' ve opted for the larger slant six.

That little 273 run good

All i'd want is a six cyl. with auto. trans., am-fm radio, heater, defroster.

They didn't use that 273 very long.

180 horsepower, the same as the Studebaker 259 without the power kit?

By the middle of 1964 no one cared about the Valiant. Everyone wanted a Mustang.

13in rims? _groooaaannn!_

I wanted to modify my comment on emissions: Of course California has generally had more severe emission controls and often earlier than the rest of the country...

The cars are not moving im the photographs... moving Objects in photographs looks undefined!!

A three speed automatic, helps the performance.

I don't see Daddy Dave or Bodie running a Valiant or Falcon.

You couldn't kill a 283.

Valiant, aka why Chrysler ended up needing a bailout in 1979

273 cubic inches = 4.5 liters.

In the early 60s nascar had a compact car series and plymouth had 7 valiants the first race they finished all one through seven out of the top 10. The second race they finished 1,2,3 only because there was a crash that took out the other valiants and of course nascar shutdown the series cant have Chrysler products dominate they are not part of the good ole boy network still to this day nascar hates mopar. Petty won the oval track race cant remember who won the road corse but 2 races won both by plymouth valiants

Chevy II 283 195 HP w Powerglide zero to sixty was 8.6 sec. What kind of crock o sht is this?

I used to own the ugliest Dodge ever it was the 63 Dodge 880 Custom with the 383 wedge

I don’t care how quickly it can go from 0-60 or 40-60. I only care about how quickly is can go in the 1/4 mile and how much rubber it’ll burn. Right at the end of the video when they start the engine there should be a huge burn out to finish with.

i call bs, sbc is the best engine ever built.

well my 4 cylinder gets more HP than your V8