Plymouth Fury Evolution

A Plymouth Fury wasn’t even a real model in 1956 — it was just a gold-trimmed performance trim you checked on a Belvedere order form. By the mid-1960s it was hiding a 365-horsepower “Street Wedge” V8 in a full-size body, and by the mid-1970s it had swapped that muscle for cruise control, a digital clock, and a six-barrel-optioned GT package along the way. Read on to find out how one nameplate lived several completely different automotive lives.

A Plymouth Fury started life in 1956 as a gold-trimmed, high-performance sub-series of the Belvedere — not yet a car in its own right. Eighteen years and one entirely new body style later, that same nameplate was offering buyers an electric sunroof, a tape deck with a built-in microphone, and LED instrument monitors. Somewhere in between, it also quietly packed a 426-cubic-inch “Street Wedge” V8 into a full-size family car, then walked most of that performance back in favor of walnut trim and reclining seats. Few nameplates changed personality this many times in this short a span.

From Option Package to Standalone Model

The Fury name first appeared in 1956 as a special high-performance sub-series layered onto the Belvedere, Plymouth’s mid-line full-size car. By 1959, Plymouth spun it off entirely, launching the Sport Fury as a standalone model and briefly making it the brand’s top-of-the-line offering, available as either a convertible or a two-door hardtop. That top-dog status didn’t last — Plymouth dropped the Sport Fury after just that one year, only to bring it back to showrooms in 1962 with the same two body styles.

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Chrysler Bets Big on Full-Size Cars Again

1965 marked a turning point across the entire Chrysler lineup, which pivoted back toward full-size vehicles with a three-tier Fury structure: Fury I as the entry-level trim, Fury II in the middle, and Fury III at the top. Both the Fury III and the Sport Fury came loaded with equipment that would have seemed excessive a few years earlier — automatic transmission, power steering, whitewall tires with full wheel covers, a stereo radio, a vinyl top, and air conditioning. Styling shed much of the previous generation’s chrome in favor of four stacked headlights, a cleaner, more modern face for the nameplate.

A 365-Horsepower Street Wedge Hiding in a Family Car

For all its comfort features, the 1965 Sport Fury hid a genuine performance option under the hood: a 426-cubic-inch V8 rated at 365 horsepower, nicknamed the “Street Wedge” specifically because — unlike some of Chrysler’s more radical race-only engines — it was fully street legal and ready to drive off the lot. Riding on a 119-inch wheelbase, the Sport Fury paired that engine with an interior that, over the next three model years, would add heavyweight carpet, luxurious upholstery, extra sound insulation, full courtesy lighting, and walnut wood-grain trim across the dash and door panels — a full-size car trying to be both quick and genuinely upscale at once.

The VIP Sport and the Fuselage Redesign

Buyers who wanted to go further upscale could step into the optional VIP Sport package, which added automatic transmission, power windows, power seats, and air conditioning as a bundle. Then, in 1969, the entire Chrysler lineup underwent a dramatic body redesign, adopting what the company called a “fuselage” style — rounder, more sculptural bodywork that replaced the boxier lines of the mid-1960s. The Sport Fury expanded to cover essentially every body style Plymouth offered: convertible, two-door coupe, four-door sedan, four-door hardtop, and station wagon, making it less a single model and more an equipment level spread across the whole Fury range.

Six Barrels of Carburetion for the GT Crowd

The performance-minded Sport Fury GT package added extra chrome trim and, more importantly, a 440-cubic-inch (7.2-liter) V8 under the hood — one that could be ordered with what Plymouth called “six barrel carburetion,” a setup using three two-barrel carburetors instead of one big four-barrel. It was Plymouth’s way of offering serious top-end power within a full-size body that, by this point, was carrying a lot more comfort equipment than a pure performance car typically would.

Luxury Options That Signaled the Fury’s New Direction

By 1971, the Fury Brougham trim introduced a new round of comfort-focused options: split bench seating with a passenger-side recliner, an electric sunroof, and a tape player that included both a recorder and a built-in microphone — genuinely unusual equipment for a full-size American sedan of the era. The following year brought a large twin-loop bumper design, and hidden headlights became standard equipment across the Sport, Fury Grand, and Grand Sedan trims, pushing the lineup’s styling further toward the luxury end of the market.

Federal Bumpers Arrive, and the Big Engines Fade

1973 brought a new grille, new-style headlights, and a bumper engineered to absorb a 5-mph impact without damage, part of the same federal safety mandates reshaping nearly every American car that year. Since 1969, the base engine across the Fury and Sport Fury lines had already settled on a 318-cubic-inch V8, paired with either a three-speed standard transmission or the optional TorqueFlite automatic — a clear step down in displacement ambition from the 426 Street Wedge and 440 six-barrel days less than a decade earlier.

The 1974 Fury: Lower, Longer on Glass, Loaded With Electronics

The final body change covered here arrived in 1974, when the Fury adopted straighter lines, sat noticeably closer to the ground, and gained considerably more glass area around the passenger compartment. Underneath, Chrysler retained its familiar uniframe construction with a lower sub-frame cradling the engine and transmission, along with torsion-bar front suspension and rear multi-leaf springs. The base engine dropped to a 360-cubic-inch two-barrel V8 on sedans and coupes, with a 400-cubic-inch engine — available in either two-barrel or four-barrel form — as the step-up option. Every 1974 Fury came standard with TorqueFlite automatic, power steering, and front power disc brakes, while buyers chasing the latest technology could add cruise control, a digital clock, automatic temperature control, and LED instrument monitors — features that would have been unimaginable on the option sheet of the original 1956 Fury package. That contrast is exactly what makes the Fury an interesting nameplate to trace year by year: it never committed permanently to being either a performance car or a luxury cruiser, and depending on which model year you land on, it could plausibly be sold as either one. For collectors today, that ambiguity is part of the appeal: a well-documented Sport Fury from the Street Wedge years carries genuine muscle car credibility, while a loaded 1974 Fury Brougham represents a completely different, and often underappreciated, slice of the same badge’s history.

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