Sixty years before Jeep slapped leather seats and $60,000 price tags on Wranglers, the company had a much simpler idea about what “luxury” meant. Chrome bumpers. Chrome hubcaps. Softer springs. A column shifter. Maybe some cushions so your passengers didn’t have to sit on bare wheel housings.
That was the 1964 Jeep CJ-5A Tuxedo Park, and one just surfaced on Bring a Trailer with an auction closing September 2.
The Tuxedo Park name came from the wealthy New York suburb, and the intent was pure aspiration. Jeep wanted buyers who weren’t farmers, linemen, or military surplus hunters. The company wanted suburbanites, weekend adventurers, people who might consider a Jeep if it felt a little less like a piece of equipment and a little more like a vehicle you’d actually choose to drive.
It flopped. Jeep moved roughly 4,300 Tuxedo Parks across the CJ-5A and CJ-6A models in 1964. The trim had been introduced in 1961 as the Mark I and evolved through four iterations, but it never caught fire. Turns out, bolting chrome onto a spartan military-derived 4×4 didn’t convince country club types to trade in their sedans.
The listing shows a small red Jeep that looks almost toylike by modern standards. Under the hood sits a 2.2-liter four-cylinder making 75 horsepower, paired to a three-speed manual with the shifter on the column. The floor lever handles the transfer case, toggling between high and low range.
That four-cylinder punches above its weight in torque, delivering 114 pound-feet, which matters more than horsepower when you’re crawling over rocks at walking speed.
The speedometer optimistically reads to 90 mph. The current tires are two decades old. Do not combine those two facts.
What makes this particular Jeep fascinating is what it represents in the brand’s long, winding path toward becoming a lifestyle marque. The Tuxedo Park was a commercial miss, but the instinct behind it was dead on. Jeep understood, even in the early 1960s, that its vehicles had emotional appeal beyond their utility.
The execution just wasn’t right. Chrome hubcaps on a doorless, roofless box with no seatbelts didn’t exactly scream refinement.
It took decades for the market to catch up to the idea. The Wrangler eventually became a fashion statement, a beach cruiser, a mall crawler, a six-figure luxury truck in Grand Wagoneer form. The trajectory from Tuxedo Park to today’s $115,000 Wagoneer S is a straight line drawn over 60 years.
This CJ-5A is the artifact that proves the impulse was always there. Jeep didn’t stumble into the lifestyle market. It tried to break in with chrome and cushions, got rejected, went back to building tough trucks, and waited for the culture to shift.
The chrome hubcaps, by the way, aren’t even mounted. They come with the truck, separately, as if even the current owner couldn’t quite commit to the Tuxedo Park’s original vision of Jeep elegance. That feels about right.
Bidding is active. The auction runs through Labor Day weekend, which gives prospective buyers just enough time to talk themselves into owning the original luxury Jeep that almost nobody wanted the first time around.
Share this Story