The Chrysler Corporation’s founding car brand received a complete makeover for 1965 with a new chassis and a crisp exterior design directed by Elwood Engel.

Newport Hardtop Sedan and Convertible 

While Elwood Engel became vice president of design at Chrysler in November of 1961, moving over from Ford to replace Virgil Exner, he didn’t get a full swing at the corporation’s full-sized cars until the 1965 model year. With $16.2 million dedicated to a full makeover of the Chrysler division’s ’65 exterior, full-sized mockups were ready by early 1963, and they were a clear departure from the Exner era. Reportedly, Chrysler president Lynn Townsend wanted to bring the carmaker’s styling “back into the mainstream,” and Engel was willing to oblige,

300 Four-Door Hardtop 

While the 1965 Chrysler doesn’t resemble Engel’s 1961 Lincoln Continental in a serious way, it does share some Engel features, including the slab sides, flat hood and deck surfaces, and sharply creased fenders and quarters, further defined by thin strips of bright metal trim. It’s not clear who devised the tempered glass headlamp covers, but they’re an elegant touch that was no doubt less costly than conventional hidden headlamps. Unfortunately, they trapped condensation and made aiming more difficult, so they lasted only a single year.

Newport Two-Door Hardtop

There was a new Unibody platform under the ’65 Chryslers as well—the previous chassis was a unit-construction adaptation of the 1957 ladder-frame setup. This new C-body, built on a two-inch longer 124-in wheelbase, followed the pattern set by the 1960 compact A-body and 1962 B-body, but with a bolt-in subframe to isolate engine and front suspension noise from the passenger cabin. Suspension was standard Chrysler practice: longitudinal torsion bars in front and parallel leaf springs at the rear. One more big change for ’65 on all Chrysler products was the elimination of the push-button gear selector for the automatic transmission, a signature feature since 1956, replaced by a conventional column-mounted shift lever.

Newport Four-Door Sedan

The four trim levels for ’65 included the base Newport, the midrange 300, the New Yorker, and the letter-series 300L. Standard in the 300L was a 413 cubic-inch RB-series V8 with 360 hp, but by now, performance had taken a back seat to luxury and this proved to be the final year for the letter cars. On the plus side, this same engine was available in all Chryslers for ’65. while a 383 CID V8 with 270 hp was the base engine in the Newport.

The complete makeover for ’65 certainly had the desired effect, as production and sales for the model year rose to more than 206,000 cars, a solid 35 percent increase. Thanks to its low list price down near $3,000 and special promotions for even less, the Newport was the biggest seller, claiming 60 percent of the volume. This same basic package would remain in production through 1968, when Chrysler’s fuselage era began.

New Yorker Hardtop Sedan