1965 Plymouth Valiant 200: Regular Car Reviews

when are you gonna film the new dodge dart fine here's a 65 valiant preventing the website um for venting the website um for venting the website on a route sukhov the falcon was ford's cheap entry-level car in the 1960s the chevy 2 was chevy's and the valiant was chrysler's radio optional self-canceling turn signals optional no brake booster no shrouded fan no radiator overflow tank no overdrive gear and no diagram to tell you where the gears are driving a three on the tree is like driving a fraternity handshake it makes sense as long as you don't think about it if you have to just think about how a manual column shift is the same as a floor shift pattern turned sideways and when you shift correctly it feels like there's nothing there the gear lever just falls in with no resistance and when you fail to shift correctly the transmission feels like it's a broken lions club gumball machine three forward gears that's all you have to work with first gear is unsynchronized that means you use first for pulling away from a stop sign and that's it if you try to downshift from second into first even if you're going one mile an hour the gearbox goes so in driving a valiant it's really just a two-speed manual in practicality second gear for in town and third gear for back roads and thirds upper limit for the highway which means third gear takes you from 35 miles an hour all the way on up even though this valiant's rear gearing is something generous like 280 or 290. the mopar slant 6 still howls above 60 miles an hour and top speed is about 70. 65 valiant don't think car think front end loader you trundle along at whatever the vehicle feels like going which is either 25 miles an hour if you're in second gear or 50 miles an hour if you're in third that's where the engine is happy and that's how it feels like people drove in in the 60s you just find out at whatever speed the car likes going and you just stick to that and you accelerate at this incredibly lethargic pace up to 25 and then you just look look through town and then oh you have to go a little bit faster and oh there we go that feels like as high as it wants to go yeah i think it's around 5500 does that sound right and if you try to go faster than 50 because you're going to have to like driving this thing in modern traffic it's going to go whoa the 170 cubic inch slant 6 makes 101 horsepower at 4400 rpm and 155 pound-feet of torque at 2400 rpm most of your time will be spent around 2 400. that is about those 25 miles an hour and 50 miles an hour happy spot i was talking about but the times you're at those speeds and at those rpms you're gonna find that you're in a calm interlude between a disappointing first gear and a shameful third changing gears on a valiant is like coming home with a bad report card but no one is home yet and no one knows so you go get an after-school snack sit with it and think this is nice no point thinking about what's going to happen but just this moment right here with my pop tarts this second gear moment this is okay right now i'm okay ballpark fuel economy is around 20 miles per gallon in town although chris gets about um 28 on the highway the typical rating we found back in the day was between 12 and 20 miles per gallon chris's mods are relatively sparse well the whole car is relatively sparse he added a 10-inch barracuda clutch and a two-inch exhaust instead of the one and a half and a road sign for a floor pan the rest of it is exactly how mopar made it which is a hell of a flex it's like cos playing as chun li when you want to show off your thighs cars have a narrative value this isn't new information especially because you're watching rcr but but the question is whether the value weighs heavier on the seller or the buyer in a general sense a seller will let the narrative set the price because of an overwhelming sense that they know what they have whereas the buyer will take a larger financial hit because they know the potential of what could be theirs we imbue some cars with significance that perhaps they don't deserve and a narrative gives a justification for why we stick our necks out for cars that give us more trouble than they're worth because when you fall in love with something it stops making sense and in the endless haystack search for meaning we cling to the stories of vehicles we love because the layperson may not understand function but everybody loves a good yarn you see this has been chris's daily for the past 15 years yes he has an old subaru kind of like mine but this valiant is a tale of automotive destiny if you believe in that sort of thing chris saw this car as a kid and was intrigued by it and by the time he grew up he wanted a car with manual everything he wanted it small american and from the 1960s so he randomly sees this car available in his town with 83 000 original miles and an asking price of 1 400 which chris was able to talk down to 1003. he paid cash and then drove it from long island to new orleans never mind that the z-bar broke almost immediately after purchasing it it was chris's first chance to develop mechanic skills but sometimes a car is like a wild horse and it's going to fight you on every trip until it's tamed in this case the exhaust fell off and then the temperature gauge stopped working and then the car kept overheating it overheated more times than you could count on every digit of the human body including the dick oh and this was the summer of 2005 so hurricane katrina hit and chris lost his house and he had to live in this valiant for a short time yet when it was all said and done chris stuck with this old plymouth he treated it as a learning experience about not pushing a classic car beyond its capabilities and getting ahead of any problems the car might end up having chris has since rebuilt the cooling system i mean what is a cooling system on a classic car it's two hoses and a heat exchanger but still you keep needing to fix those things he's learned to perform preventative maintenance by replacing things before they have the chance to go bad like water pumps and drum brakes but is it all worth it to what extent was chris the right owner for a 65 valiant much less one that needed this much work the previous owner was a woman named edna and edna as it turns out was the aunt to his sister's boyfriend the kicker she used to drive this car around their hometown so there was a non-zero chance that this was the same car chris saw in his youth the car that made him want a plymouth valiant in the first place cars have their worth increased by the stories behind them like a doll at a yard sale well worn by loneliness and time a million different stories embedded in its imperfect stitching but but in good enough condition to tell you it was loved and maintained just well enough to be loved again except this is a hunk of junk this car is running just plymouth valiant sponsored by that point in a marriage where it's just two people faking orgasms oohing and awning just so they can go to sleep faster they love one another enough to go through the motions but in their head they're just going through tomorrow's itinerary plymouth valiant you're giving me a raging hard off i'm sorry i really wanted to like this car i love the way it looks i love how chris painted it with a roller not only that but he started with one shade of black and then ran out of paint and just started rolling the roller into the into a different shade of black and you can see kind of where the shades change i mean chris looks like a guy who dailies a 65 valiant that's painted primer black but as a car this is disappointing it's like going to the laundromat setting the dryer for 20 minutes and realizing all you did was take cold and damp clothes and turn them into warm and damp clothes hey honey you got any extra quarters for the dryer i'm heading down to the warm damp this car is a box but a contextual box in the 1970s if you were rolling around in a valiant you were poor you were just getting by this car is like a chevy hhr in 2021 or a cavalier or a ford escape the type of car whose resale value changes based on how much fuel is in the tank i gotta poop so bad i just gotta let it run i'll be back i literally have to stop this and take a dump [Music] you ever take a dump so big you have abs again back in 1957 the president of chrysler wanted to explore the compact car market but without giving up the roominess that typically went hand-in-hand with full-size cars the concept was called the falcon until they let henry ford ii have the name so they renamed it the valiant and debuted at the british international motor show in 1959 as a 1960 model in its first year this car was its own brand they tried to say it wasn't a plymouth it's a valiant but then by 1961 it just said plymouth valiant anyway so whatever but then in 1962 it dropped the plymouth name again it was just called the valiant but then it was right back to be calling the plymouth valiant in 1964 onward which brings us to this model which is called the v200 even in its own time it wasn't exactly a world beater unless we're talking about its brief success it had on the racing circuit but to domestic consumers this was a hand-me-down cardigan in its own time it was the definition of economy but without the futuristic styling that the falcon had it's for a divorced man who goes back to his hometown diner because he misses being called han come for the pancakes and coffee stay for the gum chewing the altoona sass back of a waitress named ethel come down to smoking joke diner are our employees condescending or just doing a bit we'll never tell i don't think this is the type of car that gets to go back in time it has to continue forward into the present in 2021 looking at this a real patina this isn't fake patina it's the real stuff the whole car is functional but visually weathered it projects a ginsburgian ancient heavily connection to the starry dynamo in the night car bros will spend half a year's wages to project a dgaf attitude with their fiesta sts and wrxs they'll do fake patina they'll do toe loops they'll change the wheels they'll add wings splitters springs taped x's on the headlights they will razor cut their bumper cover drill in 1 8 inch holes and then stitch it all back together with multi-colored zip ties to make it look like they just came off of a track but none of that is as legit as an oily swaying primer black bent chrome bumper road sign for a floor pan plymouth valiant when driving this car i felt cooler than acing a test i didn't study for i had that feeling of walking out of chem class with a 100 percent and all right all right all right by mungo jerry plays in my head and i think it's that hard luck approach the idea that it's sheer luck and owner ingenuity and quick thinking on the fly that keeps this car running and it's that uniqueness that gets chris pummeled by the same three questions at every gas pump is that a pontiac what year is it when are you restoring it and then they get the and then he gets the bonus question there are people who try to identify this car and pretend they're car people by merging all the brands together is that a farge dartura and all that tells us is that in lieu of a narrative to explain it people bystanders will invent their own but that's part of the appeal of classic cars not just what they do but what they can mean to the right person loving an unloved car is like a bottle that never empties you can't put the bottle away you can only put it the thing down valleys people ask what year it is will you please restore it soon who cares why i will not move i'll drive i'll drive i'll try i'll drive i'll drive i'll try i'll drive i'll drive i'll drive i'll drive i'll drive i'll drive

Channel: Regular Car Reviews

Views: 307,426

Keywords: Regular, Car, Reviews, Regular Car Reveiws, Car Review, Car Satire, Mr Regular, RCR, Plymoth valliant, Valiant 200, Valiant review, three on the tree, hipster car, the bagt is not a hat, Primber black

Id: Az0LkDv4_v8

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021