Whatever the next step is for
Chrysler, over the next few days the world will be inundated with retrospectives
of the
great products the company produced.
You know, the original ‘55 Chrysler
300, the lightweight drag racers from the early ’60s and the muscle-era Super
Bees,
Road Runners, Charger Daytonas and Hemi ‘Cudas.
But that was never what Chrysler
was about. Chrysler has always been at its best when it made cars for buyers
who
appreciate a good plastic pocket protector.
The Chrysler Corporation was
the smallest of the Big Three throughout virtually all of its existence, and
it could never
afford to match General Motors or Ford engineering-dollar-for-engineering-dollar
and marketing-buck-for-marketing-buck.
Chryslers, DeSotos, Dodges and Plymouths were, most of the time, the plain
brown wrappers of the American auto industry,
stripped-down transportation for the value conscious and fleet buyers.
Forget the Imperials the company
made; the heart of the market for Chrysler was always vehicles like the Plymouth
Savoy,
Dodge Dart and Chrysler Windsor. They were ordinary cars that few people
bothered to save and collect, but that did
yeoman duty as family haulers, taxicabs and police cars.
Even when Virgil Exner was the
head of Chrysler design during the late 1950s, pumping finned flamboyance
into the cars,
Chrysler was selling a lot of basic, no-option sedans painted white that
would spend their lives with municipal seals on their
front doors.
Chrysler probably had its share
of near-death experiences throughout its history. But the company would always
save itself
by returning to its high-value roots. Forget the Hemi V-8. In the 1960s,
the engine that sold Dodges and Plymouths was the
rugged, simple slant-6 in cars like the successful Valiant and Lancer compacts.
In the early 1970s, unable to afford the
engineering required to produce its own subcompact to compete with the new
Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto, it smartly
hooked up with Mitsubishi to import the Dodge Colt from Japan.
And, not-so-smartly, it swiped
the crummy Hillman Avenger from its British subsidiary to produce the misbegotten
Plymouth Cricket.
Mustering all its resources,
Chrysler was able to bring the 1978 Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon to market.
Near clones of the Volkswagen Rabbit using the VW engine, only with less
personality, the “Omnirizon” twins were the
first front-drive small cars built by an American automaker. And they were
solid hits. Despite a scathing review from
Consumer Reports that said the pair’s emergency handling was dangerous,
the cars stayed in production into 1990.
But while the Omni and Horizon
were hits, the rest of Chrysler’s products in the 1970s were uncompetitive.
Nearing bankruptcy but fortified with federal loan guarantees, Chrysler
once again returned to its roots by developing
and producing the front-drive 1981 Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant, known
to everyone as the “K-cars.”
Styled with a T-square and built just about as simply as a car could be,
the K-cars were a hit with exactly the sort of
value-obsessed buyers who had always been Chrysler’s most loyal customers.
Three years later, the company raided the K-car parts bin and created the
wildly popular Dodge Caravan and
Plymouth Voyager minivans. Suddenly, Chrysler was the go-to company for
family transportation.
