Plymouth’s Corvette Fighter Looked Like Nothing Else
The 1960 Plymouth XNR was supposed to make people look at Plymouth differently. At the end of the 1950s, Plymouth was known mostly for practical family cars, while Chevrolet had the Corvette and Ford had the Thunderbird. Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner wanted Plymouth to have something more exciting: a low, fast, two-seat sports roadster that showed the brand could be bold, modern, and a little dangerous.
The XNR was built on a modified Plymouth Valiant chassis and named after Exner himself. Its styling was deliberately asymmetrical, with most of the visual drama concentrated around the driver. A large offset hood scoop flowed into a driver-side headrest and a single vertical tailfin, while the passenger side sat lower and cleaner beneath a removable steel tonneau. RM Sotheby’s describes the body as hand-formed entirely in steel by Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin, Italy, making it a real running dream car rather than a fiberglass auto-show shell.
Under the hood was Chrysler’s 170-cubic-inch Slant Six, modified with high-performance parts and reportedly making about 250 horsepower. Chrysler testing saw the car reach 146 mph, and with an added streamlined nose cone, it eventually topped 152 mph. That made the XNR more than a styling exercise. It was a serious attempt to imagine a Plymouth sports car that could embarrass the early Corvette.
The One-Off Plymouth That Vanished Overseas
Like many concept cars of its era, Chrysler did not intend to keep the XNR forever. After the show circuit, the car was sent back to Ghia in Italy. According to RM Sotheby’s, Virgil Exner Jr. later said his father wanted to buy it, but if the car had stayed in the United States, it likely would have been destroyed. Instead, Ghia sold it, and the Plymouth began a strange international life.
Its ownership trail reads more like an adventure novel than a concept-car history. The XNR reportedly passed first to a Swiss owner, then to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Later it went to Anwar al Mulla of Kuwait, who was photographed with the car in a 1969 National Geographic article. From there, the car eventually made its way to Lebanon in the early 1970s, just before the Lebanese Civil War.
That is where the story becomes incredible. Lebanese collector Karim Edde discovered the XNR during the war after paying teenagers to search underground garages for interesting cars. He recognized the strange red roadster from a book called Dream Cars and bought it. As the conflict worsened, Edde moved the car repeatedly between hiding places to keep it from being destroyed. Somehow, the one-of-one Plymouth survived years of war in underground storage.
Where Is the Plymouth XNR Today?
After the war, Karim Edde eventually sent the XNR to RM Restoration in Canada, where work began in 2009 and was completed in 2011. The restoration required careful reconstruction of missing pieces, including complex hubcaps made from dozens of individual parts. RM Restoration general manager Mario Van Raay later said the body shell was intact and, considering what the car had survived, in surprisingly good condition. The restored XNR appeared at Amelia Island and Pebble Beach in 2011, where it received the Gran Turismo Trophy.
The car then crossed the auction block at RM Sotheby’s Monterey in 2012, selling for $935,000. That result may seem modest today for a one-off, Ghia-bodied, running Chrysler dream car, but it also reflected how unusual the XNR is. It is not a Ferrari, a Duesenberg, or a Shelby with racing victories. It is something stranger: a factory-backed Plymouth sports car that never became a production model, escaped destruction, passed through royal and international ownership, and survived a civil war.
The original XNR is now understood to survive in a private collection in the United States, while the Petersen Automotive Museum displays a replica and describes the car as one of the Chrysler/Plymouth design studies meant to explore a rival for the Corvette and Thunderbird. The real car’s story is exactly why these one-off machines matter. The Plymouth XNR was not just a strange-looking concept. It was a wild idea that should have been destroyed, vanished overseas, survived history, and somehow came back.
