Plymouth came to market in 1959 with an advertising slogan that, considering the over-the-top styling, might cause many to scratch their heads today.
Sport Fury Hardtop
“Certain people have it. Certain things as well—that sense of rightness we call good taste. You recognize it at once when it is there. It is there in the ’59 Plymouth, the look, the lines deliberately designed with flair, with restraint. For a car neither stodgy nor bizarre. It is not conspicuous, nor is it anonymous. It does stand out—but handsomely. This year, many people of good taste are responding… particularly for them—the ’59 Plymouth.” Or that’s how the magazine ads read, anyway, with the header, “Good taste is never extreme.”
Restraint is not a word that normally comes to mind with the Forward Look cars of Virgil Exner, vice president of design at the Chrysler Corporation. Exuberance is more like it. The ’59 Plymouth was in the third year of a design cycle that began in ’57 with cars that shook the Motor City to its core. And for ’59, Exner and his team, including Plymouth studio chief Hal Pilkey, gave the towering tailfins a twist, adding a reverse camber at the trailing edge and flaring them outward. Certainly, you could call the result extreme without encountering too much objection. We leave it to others to define just what is good taste, but the look was exciting, and exciting brings buyers to the showrooms.
Sport Fury Hardtop
The model lineup was given an overhaul for ’59, too. The base model Plaza was discontinued, dropping the Savoy to the bottom trim level, while the Fury line was expanded to include a four-door sedan and a four-door hardtop. At the top of the line was the jazzy new Sport Fury, offered only as a two-door hardtop or a convertible. Standard in the Sport Fury were Swivel Seats, a Chrysler Corporation innovation for ’59, and the Sport Deck with its bolt-on, stylized continental spare tire. Nicknamed the “washing machine lid” or “toilet seat” by the styling crew, the gimmick was borrowed from the Imperial and a some earlier Exner idea cars. While it was standard on the Sport Fury, the Sport Deck was a $103 option on the rest of the Plymouth line.
In 1959, Plymouth was still using a traditional ladder frame, with the addition of 14-inch wheels and torsion-bar front suspension in 1957. The Chrysler Corporation’s Unibody construction would be introduced one year later. Drivetrain choices included the two-speed Powerflite and three-speed Torqueflite automatics, the familiar 230 CID L-head six, and two 318 CID poly-head V8s. But the ultimate V8 was the B-series 361 CID V8 with a Carter AFB four-barrel carb, a 10:1 compression ratio, and 305 hp. Called the “Golden Commando 395,” the biggest V8 sported gold-painted rocker covers and a torque rating of 395 lb-ft.
Sport Suburban
While the mid-range Belvedere four-door sedan was the best seller in ’59, the new Sport Fury turned in respectable numbers as well—nearly 24,000 cars with list prices right at $3,000. Nearly two-thirds of Plymouth buyers chose automatic transmissions, while around 39 percent opted for the familiar flathead six. The Plymouth division produced almost 460,000 cars in the ’59 model year, a slight improvement over the previous year, but still far behind its competition in the low-priced three, Ford and Chevrolet.
Lynch Road plant 
“Good taste is never extreme”–but each year since the 1957 models first appeared, Plymouth seemed to backslide. I prefer the 1958 models, but planned obsolescence and Virgil Exner turned this generation into an unintentional preview of the 1960 models, which, to me, seemed like “Suddenly it’s 1957!”
Seldom does a wagon look better then a coupe – but here I’d say it does.
Good looking wagons with a flaw: The spare tire carrier was outside in the lower right rear quarter panel. Here in the salt belt the entire carrier would rot out and a big piece of the body would be missing.
Our ’59 PLYMOUTH has the final year of the flathead six designed in 1931, “suddenly” replaced by the leaning tower of power for 1960. At least the sexy ’59s are marginally better built than the disastrous ’57 and ’58s.
That awesome pic taken at Lynch Road shows legions of freshly minted ’59 PLYMOUTH’s always waiting in “Car Conditioning” AFTER final assembly, inspection and water-test daily. These dapper fellas with their foreman looking over their shoulders are Chrysler’s most important employees of the era, adjusting panel gaps, fixing water leaks and latches, drying interiors, taping up shorted electrical wires, installing missing parts and fasteners, proofing IBM punchcards, topping fluids, paint touch ups, and aligning chrome- maybe, then perhaps a nap in a box upstairs after lunch; the usual ’50s era Chrysler Corporation QC rituals and exorcisms.
After production of some 10 million cars from 1928 to 1981, and the most critical hardware of World War II and Korea including countless Sherman tank transmissions, 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns, B-29 bomber parts, not to mention solving uranium isotope gaseous diffusion for Oakridge rescuing the Manhatten Project single-handedly, Chrysler sold the Lynch Road Assembly Plant to the City of Detroit for one dollar in 1983…
To clarify, out of the estimated 75 million cars and trucks Chrysler Corp built between 1928 and 1981, 10 million of those cars were built at Lynch Road…
My dads business partner had a DeSoto(59?) with those swivel out seats. As kids, we thought the epitome of luxury. Coming from Wis., all I remember about these is how horribly they rusted. Headlights falling out, panels missing, spare tires on wagons. I read these had some of the worst build quality, simply because demand was so great, they were coming down the line too fast( see photo) the line workers couldn’t complete their tasks. My uncle had a ’59 Plymouth 4 door, before he went Pontiac, and we were told not to sit by the doors, as they would pop open on big bumps. Trunk too. That aside, probably the best mechanically, as the motors and transmissions were built somewhere else. Sure was a crazy time in automotive history, never to be repeated. I’m glad I was part of it!!!