Growing up in California I didn't fully realize how fortunate I was to see older cars on the streets every day until I left home and joined the Navy. It only took one Midwest winter to open my eyes to the fact of salted roads and how most autos unfortunate enough to be driven in those conditions don't last very long. California roads for the most part tend to be pretty decent as well, at least in my memory, compared to the sinkhole pot holes that could literally swallow a car whole that I've seen.

Even with the advantage of seeing a goodly number of older cars on the road, the Dodge Dart Phoenix was a unicorn. I saw a handful of old Plymouths of similar vintage driven daily, 17 years after they were new. I've seen comparable Imperials, and my second car was a '62 Chrysler New Yorker...essentially the same car as this in Chrysler trim (mine was a 4 door). The dash lit up like a jukebox at night, and the factory stock 413 4 barrel would potentially peel the rubber right off the rims, even from a rolling start. But for some reason the Dodge variants were scarce on the ground, I have only seen one, surprisingly in a color very similar to this model, when I was stationed at Mare Island, outside Vallejo California.

Needless to say, I thought this was a daring model to choose for Auto World, especially considering it was pretty early in their history that this model was released. I'm glad it was made, but only got a handful of releases, probably just as well - like the real car it isn't the most attractive. In my humble opinion, MoPars of this period tended to be about as ugly as homemade soap, but they were tough to beat on the track.

In the interest of full disclosure, my buddy even had a same era De Soto... That one is even harder to find, if memory serves '61 or '62 was the final year for the Big D's.