Before Its Fallout Cameo, This Midcentury Concept Car Hit 150 MPH and Survived a 15-Year War

“War. War never changes.” So runs the tagline of the new Fallout series currently running on Amazon, a live-action reimagining of a video game set in post-apocalyptic America. But don’t worry: you don’t need to know anything about fictional power armor or radiation cures to understand the fascination of the very real machine—the 1960 Plymouth XNR concept—that appears in a brief cameo. Blink and you’ll miss it: It only appears for a fraction of the first ten minutes of the opening scene, but some sharp eyes over at Autoblog caught it. Another footnote in the strange tale of the 1960 Plymouth XNR concept, the vehicle is a real-world war survivor and video game character all by itself.

Those of you who prefer word puzzles to pixelated sprites have no doubt realized that “XNR” is comprised of the consonants in the last name of mid-century design genius Virgil Exner. The car was styled during Exner’s golden era, after he’d left Studebaker for Chrysler, and during his friendship with Carrozzeria Ghia’s Luigi Segre. The latter relationship would result in the Segre-designed Karmann Ghia, a pretty little coupe with no sporting aspirations whatsoever. Exner though? He wanted to go fast.

Exner wanted to put the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Thunderbird in Mopar’s crosshairs. The likes of the 1954 Firearrow IV showed his early ambition to bring performance to Chrysler (it never entered production, sadly), but by 1960 there were even more radical ideas afoot.

Inspiration came from the racetrack. First, there was Exner’s personal Studebaker Indy car, a racer he’d owned back in the days when he worked for the company in Indiana. Next, there was his appreciation for the Jaguar D-Type, three-time winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans (1955, ’56, and 57). With straight-six power and a signature asymmetric fin, the D-Type was clearly on Exner’s mind as he drew those first initial sketches in 1958.

The last piece of the puzzle was NASCAR. In 1960 Plymouth entered seven Valiants powered not by thundering V-8s but by 170-cubic-inch inline-sixes in a new compact car NASCAR race, and all seven cars finished ahead of the rest of the field. The success of the slant-six caught Exner’s attention.

Originally called the Asymmetrica, Exner’s concept would be built on a shortened Valiant chassis, with that 2.8-liter inline-six under its hood. Chrysler’s performance division went to work, adding a four-barrel carburetor with a ram-air intake, upgraded camshaft with higher compression, and tuning for the left-hand side-exit exhausts. Power was rated at just under 250 hp at 7000 rpm, with a redline of 7500 rpm, and a peak torque figure of 200 lb-ft. For comparison, the most powerful Corvette engine, in 1960, was a 283-cubic-inch V-8 that made 315 hp. With Exner at the wheel, the Asymmetrica went 142 mph. Some aerodynamic tweaks, and it managed over 150 mph. With a three-speed manual gearbox!

The body was sheet steel, shaped by the craftsmen at Ghia to fit Exner’s drawings. Chrysler later renamed the Asymmetrica the XNR, right around the time the company allowed Ford the rights to the Falcon name. Five years before, Exner had designed the Chrysler Falcon, another they-should-have-built-it stunner.

The completed concept was stunning: Le Mans racer meets The Jetsons. But, like so many of Exner’s forward-looking designs, the XNR would never see series production. Ghia built several examples of a modified, less-radical version, but these also weren’t financially successful. Chrysler sent the XNR back to Italy, as it could not be registered in the United States.

That extradition might have been the end of things, but Ghia turned around and sold the car to an unnamed German national, who then passed it on to noted car collector Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the Shah of Iran. It was not the only Ghia-built, Exner-designed Mopar owned by the Shah; to this day, you can find the 1956 Chrysler K300 Special sitting in the National Car Museum of Iran in Tehran.

Shah Pahlevi didn’t keep the XNR long, and by 1969, the car was in Kuwait. We know this because anyone reading the May issue of National Geographic magazine would have flipped the page to see a car dealer called Anwar al Mulla driving the XNR around on the street like it was a Dodge Dart or something. Away from the car show circuit, the XNR looked even more outlandishly futuristic.

From here, the concept was sold into Lebanon, right before civil war ignited the country. It was tucked away in an underground garage while the world above it burned.

Nearly one million people left Lebanon during the conflict, especially those who could afford to escape. Many cars were left behind or tucked away in garages. Lebanese-born Karim Ebbe was a teenager when the war began, and he possessed a knack for ferreting out these hidden treasures. By the 1980s, he had teams of scooter-riding scouts to alert him of anything interesting, like a vintage Ferrari under a tarp. One day, those scouts told Ebbe they’d found something really weird.

He recognized the XNR from pictures in a Swiss book, and purchased it on sight. Then followed several nerve-wracking years as the civil war intensified close to its end, forcing him to move the car several times. When peace came, fifteen years later, the XNR badly needed restoration, but it had endured.

Ebbe held on to the car for several more years, until he entrusted Ontario’s well-respected RM Restorations with the task of bringing it back to life. The work required replacing several missing parts, and while there was plenty of documentation to pore through, getting the details right took time. After two full years of restoration, the XNR debuted at the 2011 Amelia Island Concours D’Elegance. Later that same year, it appeared on the lawn at the Pebble Beach concours.

On the 18th green of the famed course, XNR was awarded the Gran Turismo Award, given out each year since 2008 by Polyphony CEO Kazunori Yamauchi as an honorary judge. The prize for the award is digital immortality, as the winner is scanned and put into the Gran Turismo video game as a driveable car. If you have Gran Turismo 6 or 7, the two latest versions, you can buy your own XNR.

Thanks to sometime Hagerty contributor Jamie Kitman, we were able to confirm that the car shown in Fallout is the actual original XNR. (A very faithful reproduction done by Gotham Garage is owned by The Petersen Museum in Los Angeles.) The original is part of the Paul and Linda Gould collection, which also includes historic Alfa-Romeo and Bugatti models.

Exner was forced out at Chrysler in 1962, but the impact of his work still lasts today. As an onscreen embodiment of mid-century hope for the future, the XNR is a perfect piece of car-casting. And there’s something fitting about a show based on a video game featuring a car that’s playable in pretty much the most famous automotive game ever. You have to think Virgil Exner would have liked to see the car he put his name on still around after all these years, still taking part in popular culture, a past idea of an optimistic future.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.