FULL REVIEW - Syd Mead’s 12k mile, 1972 Imperial Lebaron 4 door hardtop

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Hi , my name is Adam .

Welcome to my rare classic car channel today .

What a number of you have been waiting for Mopar luxury for 1972 .

The 1972 Imperial Le Baron four door hardtop Imperial was a make that became standalone make actually in 1955 and continued as a standalone until 1975 .

And then Chrysler revived it again as a standalone make from 81 to 83 very briefly .

But this is really the last of the I'll say super sized Imperials .

So the 1973 Imperial is actually the longest non limousine production car made by an American automaker at 235 inches long .

And this 72 the only thing that's different really , aside from a few minor things like the engine horsepower went down by 10 from a 72 versus 73 is the 73 has some pretty big bumper guards in the front and the rear that extend the length a little bit .

But aside from that , the exterior of the 72 3 are quite similar and this car is consequently huge .

It's longer than a modern day suburban and it takes a full tank of gas if you want to drive around it .

But as I was mentioning , Imperial was its own separate make for Chrysler from 55 until 75 .

But this was really the last of I'll say kind of the unique Imperials if you will .

In 74 Chrysler moved from this vehicle's 127 inch wheel base to 124 inch wheel base .

The car shrunk a bit and it shared a lot more components with the New Yorker .

This in the New Yorker have some similar components , but they also have a lot of different components and the Imperial is quite unique .

So after 73 this really just 73 was the last year where the Imperial remained kind of its unique and a lot of the chassis features as well as the styling before getting consolidated with the New Yorker in 74 .

And before that , the Imperials before 1967 so up until 1966 were even more unique .

They had a full frame chassis , whereas the rest of the Chrysler lineup had migrated to a unibody structure and this car that you're seeing here , the 72 is also unibody , it preserved that underlying chassis philosophy .

So has the torsion bar , front suspension leaf spring , rear unibody construction , although there really are some quite rigid , I'll call them semi frame cross members for the engine cradle and up front as well as the suspension mounting out back .

So it's really a beefy car in spite of it being a unibody car .

And for those who don't know , a lot of the vehicles of this era were separate body on frame vehicles .

In other words , there was a separate chassis that the engine and the wheels transmission and the rear end more or less made into and then the body , all the sheet metal would essentially drop down onto the chassis and bolt in a number of locations to it with rubber mounting .

That's how pick ups .

A lot of pickups are still made today , not the Ford Maverick , it just came out but the full size pickups and the mid size pickups like the F 1 50 Silverado Rams , those are still body on frame today .

But the last kind of dinosaur body un frame car was the Ford Crown , Victoria Mercury marquee Lincoln Town car .

Since then , there hasn't been a body on frame car that's been made or sold in in the states .

So unique chassis designs super long .

I mean , it's tough to do unibodies in this length just because of the potential flex that exists in something that has this big of a wheel base and is this lengthy and this is actually the longest unibody production car that's made at least the 73 version .

The 58 to 60 Lincolns come close .

The 58 9 , 60 Lincoln are about 227 inches long .

And as I mentioned , this car is 230 inches long and the 73 is 235 inches long .

So this is not only the longest production car made , but it's unique in that .

It's a unibody vehicle and of all the vehicles in my collection , I have to say that this one is , this one may be my favorite .

It's so unique .

It's such a great color combination .

It's black with a gold interior and it also has a quite famous history and ownership .

So I bought the car from a gentleman who is a relatively famous Hollywood individual and super famous in the art community .

His name is Sid Mead .

He recently passed away , but Sid was a friend of a friend and I got introduced to him by one of my friends and he was selling his Imperial looking for a good home for it .

And I always wanted one of these .

I just thought that the styling was so futuristic , so cool that this was a perfect vehicle to own and Sid was looking to place it .

He was nearing the end of his life .

Unfortunately , and he passed away , I think four months after I bought the car .

But um if you've seen aliens or Blade Runner or I would say that overall super industrial sci fi look with all the pipes and the steam and everything , that's really his creation .

So a really famous individual in the art world .

If you google his artwork , just look up Sid S Y D mead M E ad online and you'll find some amazing artwork .

He started Ford Motor Company and then did some work for us steel and really went out on his own and got into Hollywood doing set design as I mentioned for movies like Blade Runner , Tron Aliens and other things .

But Sid was the previous owner of this car and you can almost see why somebody who is a visual futurist is he and others called himself would drive something that looks like this .

It just has that overly futuristic look , even though this car is quite dated by today's standards , it looks like nothing on the road and it appears like it came out of a sci fi movie .

Some at GM have told me that in the seventies , Bill Mitchell , the styling VP of GM didn't really care for this front end and thought it looked like the rear end of a car .

So he put it at the G M tech center driving backwards and uh was poking fun at it .

But I don't think there's anything to poke fun at .

I think it's a brilliant design .

The car overall is quite a simple design too .

It has this really nice curvature to it .

And I think the most surprising thing about it is many cars from this era in automotive history .

At least the US cars are big .

This one feels and looks even bigger and more imposing .

And part of that is not only the sheer length of it , but it actually is two inches taller in overall height than the Cadillac of the same year .

So as you walk up to it , like I am right now , it feels more visually imposing because it's harder to peer over the roof and these doors come up pretty tall .

You actually kind of step up into the car as opposed to a GM or four of the era where this roof line was lower and you step down into the car .

So it just adds to the imposing nature of it overall , but it has such subtle and amazing detailing this barn script here , the French in rear window which interestingly is just padded here and not anywhere else .

This is a fiberglass cap that's underneath here to make this rear window .

And then my favorite is this Imperial midcentury modern black lettering and then the side marker light with the Imperial logo here , much less the super cool back end with the vertical tail lights and this bumper with nice curvature and the nicely integrated reverse light right in the middle there .

I do like how they presented this .

It's Imperial by Chrysler , not the Chrysler Imperial .

Again , this was a separate make until 1975 .

And while simple , these wheel covers are just a phenomenal piece of art detailing with kind of the turban vein look .

If you will wonderfully integrated cornering lights here you have .

This is actually the only turn signal on the car .

The dash does not have any turn signal indicators .

The only turn signal indicators of the car are on the tops of the fenders .

So these illuminate when you have engaged the turn signal , the New Yorker also had that but the New Yorker had a flashing light on the dash too to indicate the turn signals were operating .

And of course , the hidden headlights which are powered by one central electric motor and those headlight doors are extremely heavy when you turn them off , they kind of slam humorously with a lot of weight .

I remember I did that for the first time .

I thought I broke something when I was turning the headlights off , but it turns out it was just the headlight motor , closing the doors by this time period , the Imperial I believe was the only car that was still road tested from the factory .

And I think they put something like 30 or 40 miles on the vehicles before they were delivered .

They were the last car to tout that .

And in general , I would say the quality of this car is not horrible , not great , you know , for Mopar standards of the era , it's pretty good .

The door fit and finish is I would say quite good .

There are some areas particularly on the hood where there's a bit of orange peel in the paint and this is an all original paint car and an original interior as well .

This car actually only has 2600 miles on it .

So it's just getting broken in and complete with the black exterior .

You have this very , very rich and luxurious gold button tufted interior , which very much resembles the MS Van Der Barcelona chairs for those of you who have seen those in the doctor's office or somewhere else and the back seat is just an overwhelmingly luxurious place to be aside from the seat and the center fold down armrest , you have a head pillow in the sea pillar that's soft , that you can rest your head against and you can see a reading light that's integrated into the back there .

There's a switch right here , it says dome , you can just push it and then there's the reading light that's illuminated and you have this Chrysler called the little Laval ear strap that rotates to help you exit .

Other nice feature in these is in the doors .

There's a little pocket here that you can put things in .

Now , that's a wonderful feature , but this snap is kind of cheap looking and looks out of place , kind of like a boat cover , I guess , maybe that's appropriate to resemble a boat cover on something this long .

But the overall interior of the car , it's extremely spacious , comfortable , did share a similar dash as the New Yorker , but the padding here is much thicker I do have a 72 New Yorker , which I'll feature in another video and you'll see that this padding here is different .

Of course , the obviously faux wood grain was also unique to the bear and the New Yorker did not have that .

In fact , on the New Yorker , this glove box door is metal , it's textured and you can see this car has a number of options .

It's actually not that well equipped for an imperial , but it does have the power driver seat , not power passenger seat .

It does have the auto temp control , which you can watch my videos on what I've had to do to make that operational AM F M radio .

These little toggles here are for the map light .

If I close the door , you can see I can toggle this , the map light goes on and then the antenna , you just push the antenna up or down .

That's with that other toggle right there .

And there's a few vent poles .

Interesting Chrysler had these manually operated still the Kwell vents in this high end of a luxury car .

But I suppose they thought that you're only using those as a last resort .

You're going to be using your auto most of the time .

And in spite of this air conditioner only having four outlet vents , the only upper outlet vents are these two right here .

That's it .

There's no outlet vent there on the driver's side , there's no additional outlet vent at least at eye level or , you know , it's called chest level on the passenger side .

The only other ones are these , I call them knee coolers down here at the bottom .

So it's four outlet vents in total .

But in spite of just having four outlet vents , this car actually cools really well in the summer time and you have , you know , heater vents that ducked out along the bottom here .

But in the next generation Chrysler , the one that was introduced in 74 they touted how many outlet vents the car had because I think that there were at least six outlet vents in the subsequent car , maybe even eight if I'm recalling correctly .

So it is strange to me that this is all that you have in terms of the upper registers , the outlet events , but it actually works just fine .

I rotate one , you know , to me , I rotate another toward the passenger and the fans decently powerful too .

So even on a hot day , it cools .

Well , I still have this running on our 12 .

So the outlet temperature is very , very cold below freezing .

These old evaporators have pretty big fins so they don't freeze over and clog up .

Whereas the new ones have pretty thin fins and the evaporators can only run at temperatures slightly above freezing .

So one reason why a lot of people say , oh , the refrigerant is different , it's not as good .

Well , the fan speeds are more powerful now but the outlet temperature is not as cold .

And part of the reason for that is the evaporator fin distance as I was mentioning is not as great as it is on these cars .

But this car does have power door locks can hear them activate there .

And it has not only power windows but power vent windows .

So this is a G M power vent window mechanism that Chrysler borrowed along with the tilt steering column .

The tilt telescope wheel here is actually a GM Saginaw column .

So while Chrysler was not doing the A MC thing of robbing everybody for components , they did share some components with others other interesting features .

This does have , as I mentioned , a stereo radio .

If you want to fade the speaker outlet front or back , you rotate the dial to have the sound coming out more or less from the front to the back speakers .

And as you can see here that the key on this car is a full compliment of gauges , which was very unique for the time period .

Even the New Yorker didn't have this full compliment .

It basically had an alternator gauge , did not have an oil pressure gauge , three speed wiper switch .

And also let me just turn the key off when you open the door .

Aside from the buzzer , the fastened belt and locked doors light come on and they're on a timer and they go off after about 10 seconds .

So a gentle reminder to fasten the belts and lock the doors before you take off .

Pretty rich carpet here , not as rich as on the Fords that had almost a shag carpet , but nonetheless , a nice carpet and the seats , just the overall richness of the interior is quite amazing .

There are some minor details like I would say this wood grain trim mill everybody was using for wood grain trim during that era .

This looks overly fake to me , especially on these door handles and the casket handle here .

But and the a pillar trim is hard plastic , whereas others have this padded .

But aside from that , this car just reads like a rich rich luxury car .

It does have the rim blow wheel that was popular in those days .

So they pinched it , tilt telescope wheel .

So this is the telescoping lever .

You can extend the wheel forward and back in addition to tilting it just an overall neat place .

Let's take a look under hood and the trunk .

So turning around back , we'll check the trunk and on Chrysler's , you put the key in upside down from how you would a GM vehicle Ford had double cut keys .

But a Chrysler engineer told me and family friend that they did that to better prevent the lock cylinder from freezing in the winter .

But you have the proverbial six body trunk in here with about 20 cubic feet of storage .

So no shortage of storage in here just with the basic loop pile carpet mat that you'd see in the New Yorker as well and kind of that tinny hollow sound when you close the trunk .

But nonetheless , very large , no problem putting luggage in that .

And if we pop the hood , we'll see the 4 40 that was so famous as an engine for Chrysler for many years .

440 was standard in the imperial 225 horsepower .

73 went down to 215 then it perked back up a little bit in 74 again in 72 they went to net horsepower rating .

So if you look at the 71 imperial , this motor was rated at 335 gross horsepower .

Take that number and multiply it by about 70% .

You have the net horsepower rating and the net horsepower rating is with all the accessories and the exhaust and the air cleaner on the gross horsepower rating is not , but you can see this is a 12,000 mile car .

It still has some witness marks in different places there and here and here and even there , which is pretty cool .

So I haven't detailed the engine bay .

I've said in other videos , I just prefer it to look original in stock that way .

You know , it hasn't been messed with .

The only thing I've really changed under hood is this auto temp box .

This is the box for the automatic climate control that wasn't working when I got it .

I had to put a new box on and then fix another vacuum leak under hood , which was caused by the P CV valve .

Unfortunately , a lot of these cars met their demise in Demo Derbies for one big reason .

Look at the distance between the grill and the radiator .

So they could take a pretty big impact without having the radiator and that cradle pushed back .

So they were a big favorite in the Demo Derbies .

And actually the Imperials from 66 earlier were even bigger favorites because those were full frame .

If you ever see the underside of a 66 Imperial , you'll see the frame has basically splits in three pieces up front here ahead of the bumper and it's the beefiest frame I think I've ever seen on a car .

So those were outlawed from Demo Derbies for a long time because they were so strong .

But you have the basic 440 here again , 225 horsepower .

This came with a highly 41 60 car raider that Corvettes used for a while as well .

They were kind of troublesome .

This car , I have the stock car ra came with an El Brock , which I'm actually quite pleased with how it runs and how easy it is to tune .

So I've kept it on there for now and I can always go back to stock if I want later .

Chrysler had this two piston V compressor as opposed to the York two piston horizontal compressor that Ford used in the six piston GM compressor .

This actually works quite well , very cold air conditioning and then you have all these kind of coffee cans and other stuff like this .

This is a vacuum reservoir for the H VAC system .

So that even if you're accelerating , you don't lose vacuum , you can't operate the doors , the blower switch doesn't work , etcetera .

Other unique feature for this year Chrysler had electronic ignition .

So they were quite an early introducer of electronic ignition as standard on this car .

Now , other makes did have it earlier .

Ponti even had it as an option in the mid 60 si believe , but Chrysler was probably the most progressive in implementing it more broadly across the line up .

And I would say Ford was the Laggard .

You had to really wait until 73 74 for Ford and actually more or less 74 for Ford to make it standard across their line up .

And GM was about similar Chrysler .

If you got an upper end car in 72 or in some cases , 71 you would get that electronic ignition .

And there's still some , another reason why I don't like to detail these too much .

There's still witness marks on the valve covers and if I took them off and repainted them , I lose all that originality , the stamping on the air conditioning , compressor and all that .

So just personal preference , huge hood though .

Absolutely huge .

Hood .

All right .

Let's take it for a drive .

All right , let's go for a drive and hear the wonderful music that every Mopar fan wants to hear .

Ready .

Got to love the Highland Park Hummingbird starter .

Put the auto temp on .

There .

We go close the windows and we're off .

So the first feeling you get when you sit behind the wheel is that this speedometer is huge and you certainly don't need glasses to read what speed that you're going .

But again , the full compliment of gauges for that time was very rare and welcome Fords in particular had a lot of idiot lights to the point that in 75 on the Fords , they didn't even have a distinguishing idiot light for engine temperature , oil pressure issues .

It just said engine .

So this is quite nice .

You can tell what's going on .

The other thing that I would say you'd notice when you're driving this car as opposed to other cars of the era is that it's not a soft and pillowy ride at all .

So people when I go to car shows say , oh , that thing is a land yacht .

It must just ooze over bumps .

And I respond actually not , it doesn't , it's not that it's unpleasant but it's noticeably firmer in particular that a Ford and handles much better than a Ford .

The steering has some good road feel to it , which is surprising for the era of normally power overly boosted steering .

You can see there's no left turn indicator there .

The only place is out at the fender tip .

But in spite of this being about a £5200 car , the 440 definitely gets out of its way just fine , no issues .

And I would say it's relatively quiet in here too .

Not quite as quiet as the Lincolns were or even the Mercies of the time , but much quieter than my New Yorker .

So even though the New Yorker was not a cheap car , I would see the sound deadening coupled with the fact that this car is unibody as is the New Yorker made it a bit harder to deaden the noise out .

But this Imperial , they did a really nice job over the New Yorker in making sure that you didn't hear the exterior world nearly as much .

So it's a far more pleasant place to be .

And it's actually quite fun that this big car handles .

So , well , it's pretty shocking that it doesn't lean in the corners .

It's got about an inch diameter stabilizer bar front , but the torsion bar suspension really works wonders in terms of cornering stability .

So it just depends on what you want .

If you want a floaty mushy ride , get a Ford .

If you want a stiff suspension that handles , well , get a Chrysler and if you want something in between , get a GM , that's the best way I can describe it to you , but this car is an absolute joy to drive .

Gets so many looks , it looks like nothing else .

The seats are comfortable .

The other thing I would say is because the ride is stiff for some reason all the way back to early 60 S Chrysler that I've driven .

I don't know if the seat engineers talk to the chassis engineers because you kind of pogo stick a little bit as you go up and down bumps on relatively broken pavement and the resident frequency of the seat seems to just be excited by the suspension sometimes .

So you're kind of sitting here as you go over bumps and you kind of do one of these things as you go over them , not on all roads , but I would say on unnaturally broken roads .

But in spite of that , if I would have purchased this car new in 72 yeah , I would have been happy .

The motor is smooth , quiet , powerful .

The handling is great .

The ride , you know , isn't bad .

I wouldn't call it an excellent ride , but it's not a bad ride and just the quality of the interior , particularly the seats and the unique features .

There's even a lighted , a light here right in front of the keyhole that illuminates the keyhole at night .

So you don't have to search for the place to put in your key .

Ford did that on some of their vehicles where the keyhole was backlit , but I've never seen one where it was backlit where the key was on the column .

So in general , if you want a vintage luxury car , this is tough to beat and the styling is a 10 out of 10 from my perspective , especially the four door , the two door I think looks cartoonish .

I love it because the rear quarter panel is immense , especially in 72 3 where they change the roof styling , it just accentuated the length of the car even more .

But the four door is a beautifully proportioned car .

The only downside to these cars if you want one is that they're rare .

They only made about 12,000 sedans and 504,000 ish coops in 72 not many more in 73 .

And this body style was really only unique to those two years .

If you want this front end , you can get a 69 70 or 71 imperial if you don't mind the different back end actually with sequential turn signals in 69 .

But the 72 is my favorite of the bunch and just as a wonderful car to drive .

Hope you enjoyed this drive and full review of my 72 Imperial .

Thanks for watching .