Chrysler Imperial Buyer's Guide

Sarah Whitfield here. The Imperial's history is a study in the challenge of creating a prestige marque from scratch. From 1955 to 1975, Imperial was officially a separate brand — not a Chrysler model, but Imperial, with its own dealers, its own marketing, and its own identity. The effort was genuine: the cars were more carefully built than standard Chrysler products, the interior materials were more lavish, and the styling in the 1957–1963 period was among the most dramatic of any American luxury car.

The failure was that Imperial could never fully escape Chrysler's shadow in the public perception, while Cadillac's century of identity and Lincoln's Ford connection gave both competitors institutional credibility that Imperial could not replicate in two decades. What Imperial left behind is a series of extraordinary automobiles that trade at fractions of their Cadillac equivalents — a pricing anomaly that serious collectors understand and exploit.

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