Bestselling Postwar Mopars

Have you ever wondered what Chrysler Corporation’s bestselling postwar model lines were? Wonder no more. None of the models listed here sold fewer than 330,000 copies in a single season. That’s a thousand cars a day built and sold across the country, give or take a state with blue laws that mandate no car-buying business on Sunday (we’re looking at you, New Jersey). Among the multiple body styles available within each model name, four-door sedans were generally the overwhelming sales winners; outliers will be called out. Our sales numbers have come from J. Kelly Flory Jr.’s comprehensive trio of reference tomes: American Cars, 1946 to 1959; American Cars, 1960 to 1972; and American Cars, 1973 to 1980.

The ebb and flow of product planning and marketing and the magic of the marketplace conspired to make a couple of eras of postwar Plymouth shine particularly brightly. Plymouth, you say? ’Tis true: All of the top-10 bestselling Mopars are Plymouths. Little wonder, since Plymouth was Chrysler’s entry-level high-volume value brand designed to compete with Ford and Chevrolet.

We suspected that, when compiling a list of the