When Chrysler killed the DeSoto brand, the Dodge Custom 880 got the job of filling that mid-price gap almost overnight — and by 1964, a full body redesign and a genuinely unusual dash-mounted push-button shifter helped it post the best sales year the model would ever see. It is an unsung Mopar that saved a lineup nobody remembers needed saving.
The Dodge Custom 880 was in production from 1962 through to 1965 and the ’64 has received a complete body change over previous years. This model did well for the Dodge Division that year, with 31,800 units produced, but fewer convertible versions. A seldom seen feature, unique to Mopar, is the  dash mounted push button  shift mechanism.
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MCF thanks Gateway Classic Cars for the images provided here.
When Chrysler killed off the DeSoto brand in 1961, somebody at Dodge had to figure out how to fill a hole in the lineup practically overnight. Their answer was a car that does not get talked about much today, wearing a name that sounds more like a hotel room number than a proper model — the 880. By 1964 it had already been through a from-the-ground-up reinvention, and that same year turned out to be its best sales year on record by a wide margin. Underneath a fairly ordinary-looking full-size body sat a button that most car buyers today have never even seen, let alone pushed to change gears. So what made 1964 the year this overlooked Dodge finally clicked with buyers?
Built to Cover for a Dead Brand
The Custom 880 existed for one reason: DeSoto was gone, and Chrysler needed something to hold that mid-price full-size ground before Dodge dealers started losing customers to Mercury and Oldsmobile showrooms instead. Dodge even offered a cheaper, de-contented 880 alongside the 64 Custom 880 to cover both ends of that gap. For 1964, the whole lineup got squared-up rear bodywork, new decklids, wraparound rectangular taillights, and fresh quarter panels — the most significant cosmetic overhaul the car would see in its short production run, riding on a 122-inch wheelbase with a 361 cubic inch V8 putting out 265 horsepower at 4,400 rpm.
Push a Button, Pick a Gear
The detail that really sets this era of Mopar apart is that dash-mounted push-button shifter — no column lever, no floor shifter, just a row of buttons that felt like something out of a spaceship compared to what GM and Ford were building. Buyers responded to the whole package: Dodge moved 31,800 units in 1964, a record for the model, even though convertibles stayed rare on the order sheet. It is a car that quietly did its job saving Dodges mid-price lineup, and it deserves a lot more credit for that than it usually gets.
Nine Body Styles for Every Kind of Buyer
Dodge did not just redesign the sheetmetal for 64 — the Custom 880 lineup stretched to cover sedans, hardtop coupes, hardtop sedans, convertibles, and even a nine-passenger station wagon, giving the brand a genuinely complete answer to the mid-price full-size market it was built to fill. That kind of range is part of why the model posted a record year even while wearing a name most people have never heard of at a modern car show.
Cream Paint and a Red Interior, Top Down
This particular Custom 880 wears cream-toned exterior paint over a rich red interior, photographed with its convertible top folded away, a combination that suited the model’s role as Dodge’s answer to Chrysler’s more upscale full-size offerings following DeSoto’s exit. Convertibles made up a genuinely small share of Custom 880 production for 1964, which makes an example like this one, wearing what appears to be its factory color combination, a considerably rarer find than the sedans and hardtops that made up the bulk of the model’s best-ever sales year.
A Push-Button Shifter With a Learning Curve
For drivers used to a column or floor lever, the Custom 880’s dash-mounted push-button transmission controls took some adjustment, since selecting a gear meant reaching for a labeled button rather than moving a familiar lever through a gate. Chrysler had championed push-button shifting across several of its full-size lines through the early 1960s before industry-wide safety and standardization concerns eventually pushed the format out of favor, making cars like this one a genuine artifact of a very specific stretch of automotive design history.
Filling a Gap DeSoto Left Behind
When Chrysler discontinued DeSoto in 1961, the corporation lost an entire tier of its lineup that had sat between mainstream Dodge and Plymouth models and the more upscale Chrysler brand, leaving dealers without a clear answer for buyers who wanted more prestige than a standard Dodge without stepping all the way up to a Chrysler. The Custom 880 existed specifically to plug that hole, borrowing sheet metal and engineering from Chrysler’s own full-size platform to give Dodge dealers something credible to sell against Mercury and Oldsmobile.
The 361 V8 That Did the Heavy Lifting
Rated at 265 horsepower, the 361-cubic-inch V8 under this car’s hood was tuned more for smooth, confident cruising than outright acceleration, a deliberate choice that matched the Custom 880’s mission as comfortable transportation for buyers who valued a quiet ride over stoplight performance. That torque-focused tuning philosophy was typical of full-size Mopar V8s of the era, prioritizing effortless highway passing power over the kind of high-revving output that would define the muscle cars arriving just a few years later.
Squared-Off Styling for a New Decade
The 1964 restyle’s crisp, rectangular rear bodywork and new wraparound taillights moved the Custom 880 away from the more rounded, chrome-heavy look of early-1960s Mopar products and toward the cleaner, more geometric styling language that would define much of the industry through the rest of the decade. That visual shift helped the 880 look meaningfully newer than its two-year-old underlying platform actually was, part of why 1964 turned into the model’s best sales year despite the car never becoming a genuine sales leader against Mercury or Oldsmobile.
A Forgotten Nameplate Worth a Second Look
Because the Custom 880 never achieved the sales volume or lasting brand recognition of Chrysler’s more famous full-size nameplates, surviving examples, especially well-optioned convertibles like this one, tend to fly under the radar at shows dominated by more recognizable muscle cars and traditional Impalas. That obscurity is exactly what makes a clean, complete Custom 880 appealing to collectors who want something genuinely uncommon rather than another car that looks like every other one parked next to it.
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