1964 Plymouth Barracuda: The Glass Fastback That Beat the Mustang to Showrooms by 16 Days

Plymouth introduced the Barracuda on April 1, 1964, April Fool's Day, and the date has followed the car ever since. Ate Up With Motor's history puts the debut 16 days ahead of Ford's Mustang; Over-Drive's fact sheet calls it two weeks. Either way, Plymouth reached showrooms first with a sporty compact, and then watched Ford sell roughly five cars for every one of its own in the same short season. The 1964 Barracuda is the story of a clever answer delivered on time and on a tight budget, into a market that turned out to belong to the other company's car.^1,2

The idea came out of the compact wars. According to Ate Up With Motor, compact buyers were drifting toward sportier cars such as Chevrolet's Corvair Monza, and even before the 1963 Valiant launched, Chrysler-Plymouth product planner Joe Strum wondered whether it was too conservative. The design work that followed was collective. Stylist Milt Antonick refined the final shape, designers Dave Cummins and Irv Ritchie developed the fastback roof, and designer John Samsen suggested the Barracuda name. No single figure invented the car in these accounts, and the history keeps each contribution attached to the person it credits.¹

Money set the shape of the program. Ate Up With Motor says funds were still tight and that extensive changes to the Valiant's unitized body would have been prohibitively expensive, which is why the car was first called the Plymouth Valiant Barracuda. Over-Drive lists what it borrowed: the Valiant's 106-inch wheelbase, hood, headlamp bezels, windshield, vent windows, quarter panels, doors, A-pillar, bumpers and trunk. The production table files it in the Valiant line as series VV1-P, body 149, a two-door sports hardtop. Below the beltline, in other words, a Barracuda was a Valiant wearing a new roof and a new name.^1,2

That roof was the whole point. Pittsburgh Plate Glass, the supplier, worked jointly with Chrysler's own designers on a wraparound backlight that Over-Drive describes as the largest single glass window installed on a standard production car up to that time. Ate Up With Motor gives its area as 2,070 square inches and says it was tinted to cut solar heat. The glass and the other body and equipment changes, by the same account, made the Barracuda about 100 pounds heavier than the car it came from. The production table gives a shipping weight of 2,740 pounds for the sports hardtop, a factory figure rather than a scale reading.^2,1

Behind the glass sat the feature that made the shape useful. Ate Up With Motor says the Barracuda came standard with a fold-down rear seat and a removable package shelf, producing a flat load floor about seven feet long from the front seatbacks into the trunk. The same history notes an awkward reminder of the budget: an exposed fuel filler that complicated the cargo area. The case for the car was a sporting roofline with something close to station-wagon usefulness, on the same 106-inch wheelbase as the Valiant it came from.¹

Under the hood, the order form was modest by later standards. The 170-cubic-inch Slant Six, rated 101 horsepower, was standard. The 225 six at 145 horsepower was listed at $47, and the new lightweight LA-series 273 V8, rated 180 horsepower at 4,200 rpm with 260 lb-ft at 1,600, at $131. Ate Up With Motor labels those ratings gross; Over-Drive's table does not state the standard. A three-speed manual was standard, a Warner T-10 four-speed was listed at $180, and the TorqueFlite automatic was optional, 1964 being the last year it was controlled by push buttons.^2,1

The price was the sharpest part of the pitch. The Barracuda sports hardtop listed at $2,365, and Ate Up With Motor notes that this was $3 below a six-cylinder Mustang. The option list stayed short: a Sure-Grip axle at about $39, power steering at about $82, and the engine and transmission upgrades. Over-Drive's color chart runs to sixteen paints, from Ebony and Signet Royal Red to a Barracuda Gold that carried the car's own name, with Sandalwood, Chestnut, Ruby and three shades each of blue and turquoise in between. For a buyer who wanted a sporty compact with a real trunk, Plymouth had put the offer on the lot a little earlier and a few dollars cheaper.^2,1

Being first did not make it the winner. Reference books agree that Plymouth built 23,443 Barracudas in the abbreviated 1964 season; Peter Sessler's production table and Charles Hyde's Chrysler history both print that figure. Sessler's table also prints a six-and-V8 split of 2,647 and 20,796, but the snippet does not show which number belongs to which engine, so the split stays unrecorded. For scale, Over-Drive sets the Barracuda total against 126,538 Mustangs sold in the same short season, and Ate Up With Motor puts the Barracuda at about one-fifth of Mustang sales.^3,4,2,1

The numbers explain the Barracuda's later arc better than any design argument. Plymouth had built a sporty car by rearranging a Valiant, and the Barracuda's later answers came in stages. For 1965 Plymouth added the Formula S, which Ate Up With Motor describes as carrying a hotter 273 rated 235 gross horsepower, the first step toward the performance Barracudas that followed. The first-year car, with its six-cylinder base engine and 180-horsepower V8, was never meant to be a muscle car, and its records never pretend otherwise. Its appeal in 1964 was shape, space and price rather than power: the V8 added $131 to the bill and 180 advertised horsepower to the car.^1,2

What the 1964 car left behind is a set of firsts that still hold up without exaggeration. It reached showrooms ahead of the Mustang, it carried a backlight that Over-Drive calls the largest on a standard production car of its time, and it gave a compact coupe a seven-foot load floor. It also left an honest ledger: 23,443 cars, one body style, three engines, one price of $2,365, and a six-and-V8 split that nobody can yet read cleanly off the page. The Barracuda was the right idea delivered at the right moment, and it took later model years to find its full voice.^2,1,3