First car off line @ Belvidere.

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First car from Belvidere ***'y. Never sold, in a local museum some where there. Anyone ever see it?
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I have not seen the car, but in the early 70's when I was in Chrysler's mechanics school we were always taken on a trip to the plant to see how the cars were assembled. It was a cool way to spend the day with the factory instructors.
 
That's cool!

And yet we have members here doing detective work to figure out when the last C Body was made.
 
If I get out that way I'd like to track it down. In Henry Ford/Greenfield Village, (great museum if you've never been), they had the first 49 Ford. Great time capsule.
 
I have no idea where my car was built have yet to find a build sheet
 
These "first off the line" cars are usually kept in the plant for display, rather than being in an outside museum for the public. When a plant is shuttered, not sure what happens to the particular vehicles from that plant, though.

Of more significance is the "Pilot Car" for each new model year, it seems. Many of these Pilot Cars, with documentation, used to appear at the Mopar Nationals some years. Like when the feature car was the '70 E-body cars or some B-body cars.

Pilot cars, which everybody does, are the first 100 or so of each model year's production. Most are driven by plant personnell/management as quality control checks of assembly and such. Some go sacrifice themselves for safety crash tests, and the balance usually end up in the OEM dealer auctions. One identifier would be their super-low VIN, which many might not notice or key upon when they get through the OEM's auction network (and later dealership used car operations).

CBODY67
 
These "first off the line" cars are usually kept in the plant for display, rather than being in an outside museum for the public. When a plant is shuttered, not sure what happens to the particular vehicles from that plant, though.

Of more significance is the "Pilot Car" for each new model year, it seems. Many of these Pilot Cars, with documentation, used to appear at the Mopar Nationals some years. Like when the feature car was the '70 E-body cars or some B-body cars.

Pilot cars, which everybody does, are the first 100 or so of each model year's production. Most are driven by plant personnell/management as quality control checks of assembly and such. Some go sacrifice themselves for safety crash tests, and the balance usually end up in the OEM dealer auctions. One identifier would be their super-low VIN, which many might not notice or key upon when they get through the OEM's auction network (and later dealership used car operations).

CBODY67
I saw it on a FB post and the museum was one of the comments, I'd never heard of it before. I have a freind who still works in Auburn Hills, (he first transferred to Belvidere from NPG), he's into that stuff and may know.
 
I've seen the sequence or VIN numbers which each plant starts with in the front of some Chrysler parts books, I believe. Like when two plants built the same models? The VIN would certainly define the plant the car came from, but the sequence number might refer to the original sales order for the vehicle. Before the order was assigned to a plant? Maybe I saw that in the front of the FSM instead?

CBODY67
 
The "First Built" cars from each plant might be interesting to research what they were and what happened to them. I know that people have researched and "followed" the Chrysler Pilot Cars, especially the B/E cars with performance equipment. But the "first built" cars for each plant are in a different league, usually. As mentioned, if they are kept, it's in the factory "on-site" display (or stored for such special occasions in the plant). But considering how some of these things might get sold-off or whatever, or what happens when the plant is shuttered, that might be something we'll never find out.

Each of the OEMs had their own "collection" of vehicles over the years. There used to be a Chrysler Corp tv ad from the Iacocca era, where a young engineer/designer went into a huge room full of Chrysler products of all years, EACH with an "Engineering First" on it in the "first year used" orientation. As I said 'HUGE" room! Quite an impressive display, to say the least.

The vehicle collections used to be open to the public, typically, but I doubt such is now true. GM started downsizing their fleet years ago, for example. Now that the Chrysler Museum has closed, no telling what happened to all of the displays they took such pains to put together might be.

Just some thoughts,
CBODY67
 
The last six digits of the V.I.N. are the random sequence number, pilot cars start at 0 in the first digit, and production cars have a 1 in the first digit. (Example, 000056, is a pilot model, 100025 would be the 25th production model built. Since each assembly plant has a different V.I.N. reference, the sequence number only matters to that plant.
 
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