I spotted this Chrysler LeBaron sedan Friday during lunch hour. While most LeBarons seemed to have the Button-Tufted Brougham package, this one stood out by its lack of wire wheel covers and Fifth Avenue-style landau top.
Walking around the car, nothing seemed amiss, until I got to the front…
where I was greeted with a Plymouth Acclaim grille below the “crystal” Chrysler-specific hood ornament. My guess is that this car got bumped in the nose at some point, and it was easier to find a Plymouth grille than the Chrysler waterfall version. And as much as I am a Brougham fan, even I think these LeBarons look better without the Landau roof, though I can appreciate all the extra chrome!
These cars used to be common around here but have long given up to the tinworm or tranny woes.
My ’94 Dodge Spirit went through 2 transmissions before giving up the ghost. Slushbox. Bleh. At least it was a V6 and had A/C and power everything.
Now that’s some serious familiarity with the K-car descendants. I’m not sure I would have recognized that this was the wrong grille for this car.
I wish that they had grafted the LeBaron coupe’s grille onto the LeBaron sedan’s beak, and then gave it that great dashboard/IP introduced in 1990. What a great looking car that would have been. But then I guess it would have looked too much like the then K-car based New Yorker/Fifth Avenue/Imperials.
For a second, it actually looked as if this were originally a Plymouth Acclaim and had certain body parts strategically replaced with those from a Chrysler LeBaron. The wheel covers, brown/burgundy paint, and pinstriping scream Acclaim LE. These cars, like so many from the era, are completely interchangable.
If the Plymouth grille hadn’t been pointed out, I doubt I would’ve noticed.
I had a 1990 Plymouth Acclaim LX, which was identical to this car. I think in ’92 or so Chrysler rebadged the Acclaim LX as a LeBaron. It was actually one of my favorite cars–very comfortable, handled well, plenty of power with the V6, and decent fuel economy. I even largely escaped the dreaded Mitsubishi 3.0 V6 oil consumption issue and had remarkably good luck with the early generation A604 Ultradrive. I sold it in 1998 with 128K+- miles when it was just starting to use a little oil and the transmission was starting to just slip a bit. By then the horror stories were well known and I decided to get rid of it while it was still running reasonably well.
Where’s Zackman? ;^)
These cars were a fine follow up to the H-Body Mopars that came before them. While the styling was a little, uh, conservative, the cars worked well for most folks I believe. I still see the later series of these cars floating around SWMI, looking a lot like this one, sometimes a little more shabby, but still intact and doing their jobs.
I meant to add: Dodge Spirit R/T FTW!
Here I am, Geo! Busy all day…
Loved our 1990 Acclaim. I’ve been looking for pictures of our car but haven’t located them yet.
Bought ours new for $10,874. Dark Ivory (gray), 4 cyl, auto, tilt, cruise, A/C, AM/FM cassette, crank windows.
We traded it in 2000 with 138K miles – our daughter wrecked it once too often, so we bought her a 1997 Cavalier – a true “Cockroach of the Road” (copyright Geozinger) !
She took good care of that car…
At the time, our Acclaim – in spite of some minor issues – was the easily the finest and most reliable car we have ever owned. I really hated to see it go.
One of these things plowed into my ’85 Honda Accord out of clear blue nowhere on a snowy winter night many years back. It was driven by a Chinese lady who fit the common Asian driver and height stereotypes all too well. It was just a bump, really – but the Honda lost. Dented fender and broken turn signal lens… not a scratch on the Chrysler. The accident didn’t directly cause the downfall of that particular Accord, but it was an omen. Everything was downhill from there and within a few months it was turned into an aluminum can.
I loved that car, and it was replaced by something not quite as good (I don’t actually remember what). I cursed and shook my fist every time a Chrysler LeBaron passed me by for the longest time. “Curse you, Mrs. Chang!” I said – because I actually knew the lady and that was her name. In fact, I went to school with her daughter, and let me tell you – her daughter was the polar opposite of certain nasty Asian stereotypes. So in the course of silently venting my anger at passing Chryslers all those years, Mrs. Chang’s daughter would inevitably pop into my mind. Now when I see a LeBaron roll past, there’s no anger at all and my brain automatically fast forwards past the ruined Honda and that snowy night with some ridiculous woman and her husband yelling at each other in a foreign language. The only thought that enters my mind is “Judy Chang’s enormous breasts” and it makes me happy… memory is funny like that.
Throw in some photos and you’ve got a Kevin Martin COAL right here. 🙂
Whats funny is that, even though this is a base version, the upline LeBaron sedan was still rocking the “baby brougham” theme deep into the 90’s.
As strange as it may seem, I still find myself pining for one of these. If it was in good condition and had the correct grille, it would have me written all over it 🙂
A friend of my mother still has one, in pretty good shape for a daily driver in Mexico City, everything still works.
And yet I loathe it. The awful suspension noises, squeaks and rattles. The fading paint was common for these cars early on in their lifetime. But the worst part is the turning radius, it takes this car 3 or 4 maneuvers to turn where a typical car took 1or 2 at the most.