Mention ‘Chrysler 300’ today and most people think of the brawny sedan that debuted in 2004 (as the 300-C) and was only discontinued in Australia a couple of years ago. That car wasn’t the first “300” though. It owes its name - and much of its styling - to a Chrysler that had debuted almost 50 years earlier.
The original Chrysler 300, known as the ‘C-300,’ was conceived as a car for driving enthusiasts; those that either owned or aspired to the high-performance sports cars and grand tourers that were coming out of Europe and the UK in the early 1950s. Chrysler themselves hedged their bets when launching the ‘C-300’ in January, 1955, describing it as a “sports touring car”.
By that point, the Chevrolet Corvette and Ford Thunderbird had already made their debuts, but they appealed to a different market sector. Where the Corvette and Thunderbird had a youthful image, the C-300 was more mature, reflected in its mix of Imperial (Chrysler’s luxury line) styling, with elements lifted from the New Yorker and based on a Windsor two-door hardtop body. The C-300 was also a full-sized car for five or six, where the early Corvettes and Thunderbirds were much smaller and strictly for two.
Why Chrysler didn’t offer a direct rival to the Thunderbird or Corvette was mainly due to their precarious financial position at the time. The smallest of the ‘Big Three’ American carmakers simply didn’t have the resources to develop and produce an all-new sportscar model for what was, at
