(Jeff Hwang thought this might be of interest to you all. I’ll let the ad copy speak for itself.) This is a 1979 Dodge St. Regis. One of the more rare Chrysler cars to this day, as they were mostly used for cop cars back in the early 80s and most all of them were crushed.
Has the trusty Chrysler 318 V8. Bought from the original owner, an old veteran, who purchased it right out of the showroom in the local Chrysler/AMC dealership. All repairs are documented. It was maintained meticulously throughout the years, and everything from changing the oil to simply replacing a spark plug has been professionally done and documented by the local Midas. (includes original 1979 License plate that came with the car when I purchased it)
The rear tires are 80% Winter tires. Driven one winter since new. There are some quirks like any car of this age.
The leather interior door handles need to be re-attached.
The idle needs to be re-adjusted (I’ll do that myself more than likely, before it’s purchased) and the suspension bar that holds up the rear trunk needs to be replaced. I’d do it myself, it’s simple.
There is a small piece of trim missing near the driver’s door, unnoticed until close to car.
The last thing, the original owner disconnected the headlight flip-covers, and I’m unsure how to re-connect them. Nor have I tried. I’m sure it’s simpler than I think.
The rims are all Chrysler snowflake rims, but the back two are from a 79 Lebaron and the front ones are for this car specifically. (very similar, nonetheless.)
Has Power driver’s seat (a little of the leather separated from the seam as shown), All power windows (back right is stuck shut) all leather seats, Cruise control (works perfectly) Power steering and Brakes, stock radio – turns on but only tunes into one station. Original owner’s manual and all 1979 Chrysler emissions documentation, and repair slips. Rear defrost. (never used personally, I only drove in summer).
The last photo is of the featured car (and me before I drove it to prom, sorry about that)
—-WILL TRADE FOR—- preferably 70s sedan, compact, truck, anything 70s.
May consider other trades of equal value as well. Something that drives everyday.
My favorite kind of Craigslist car ad: by someone who knows what the heck he’s writing about.
Saw one of these, white over white, on my drive home the other day. It was 5 degrees outside or I would have followed it and photographed it when it came to rest.
I wonder if the AC works
I’d totally jump on it if it were a Newport. Besides that, that’s pretty sweet ride.
My grandpa had one as a police car. St Louis County Police dept. My job as a little kid was to jump out and “Fix the headlights” as my grandpa would say, the covers would always jam.
I made the mistake of buying one of these that was used by the Georgia State Patrol for six years. Never buy a used cop car.
My son has one sitting behind my shop that he got from an estate a couple years back. It’s not in as good of shape as this one is. He pulled the engine to put in a 53 Willys and sold the car before he finished it.
I was about to take issue with your comment then remembered the low idle vibration my 1975, Custom 500 had.
Even a highly reputable repair shop in my city could not rectify the problem. My mechanical skills at the time were far from what they are now so the issue was never solved and the car remained in my possession for a couple more years. The risks you take when buying a used fleet vehicle.
the GSP not only puts over 100,000 miles on their cars but they also bounce them across medium strips and accelerate as fast as they can to speeds well over 100 MPH. All this wears the cars slap out before they finally get rid of them.
I had front end problems that no one could fix, the transmission slipped, and the car used a quart of oil every 500 miles.
It’s no wonder you don’t see these cars around. Only 34,434 St. Regis sedans were produced in 1979.
The RCMP used only a few of them for highway patrol duties back in the day. And I’m sure that’s the last time I ever saw one. Like a lot of old Chrysler products they were driven for years and then simply became scrap.
I’m from Saskatoon originally. Back then I saw the RCMP use ’79 Newports & ’80 Gran Furies in service on the prairies. No St. Regis, but the Sask Highway Traffic used them, the guys who enforce truck& commercial vehicle stuff, weigh scales etc.The cars were a kind of dark brass color,
& AFIR the headlight covers were in place and working. I thought they looked great, and kind of reminded me of certain TV shows set in the US Southwest, where this color of patrol car was often seen.
WRT to the RCMP, being Federal, they were very careful to spread the business around. As a result, you were apt to see anything, LTDs and Royal Monacos in the mid 70s, & later on, Panthers, B-bodies, M-bodies, pickups sometimes. In The ’60s and ’70s you even saw the odd Pontiac or Meteor. But word did get out that the officers positively loathed these things!
Yes, Gran Furies were more numerous back then for RCMP highway patrol. Just like this restored 80 model now residing in Edmonton.
Looks great! I think they should put it back in limited service, maybe nice summer days, and mess with some people’s minds.
Good Lord! Looking at that last photo, he wore what appears to be a denim-like leisure suit to prom. Based on the photo and the ad copy, I’d say that young man is CC material.
This was a new car the year I graduated from high school (and, although I didn’t wear it to prom, my otherwise similar leisure suit was a lovely brown polyester double knit with contrasting stitching. But, I digress.) Although I was then and am still a total car nut, I don’t recall these big Chryslers making any kind of a splash at the time. By comparison, the downsizing of the GM A, B, and C-bodies in the preceding years were seismic events and the Volare/Aspen and LTD downsizing debuts were also rather big deals. Of course, my perception may be influenced by the fact that my parents were having a rather disastrous experience with my mom’s 1978 LeBaron and I may have just tuned out Chrysler news at that time.
I only got to ride in one of these once, in the mid-1980s when I was in graduate school. One of my fellow students, who was not known for his good judgment, had a rather battered one and six of us crammed into it to go somewhere local. Even then, these were unusual to see, but I remember thinking it was much nicer than I expected. The back seat was surprisingly roomy and compared well to Dad’s oh-so-broughamy 1980 Buick Limited, which was a beloved family vehicle.
I have since occasionally wondered how these models would have done if they had been kept in production and the bugs worked out. Although this model, like the Aspen/Volare and Omni/Horizon models, was conceptually fine and could have been competitive, new Chryslers launched at that time weren’t even half-baked when foisted on the public. I’m not even sure the oven was allowed to pre-heat.
But, my aunt drove her late-1980s Omni for 289,000 miles and would have bought another one if they had still been in production. By many accounts, the Diplomat that Mom’s LeBaron matured into became a very sturdy ride. But my dad, who passed away in 2007, actively avoided Chrysler products for the rest of his life. I bought my first Chrysler product, a 2014 Durango, about a year ago and it has been a delightful and flawless vehicle for 25,000 miles. But, I am still haunted by the specter of that old LeBaron and have this nagging fear that things will start going wrong at any moment. So, old perceptions die hard especially when large sums of money are involved.
Your parents experience with a ’78 LeBaron mirrored mine.
My dad eased one in 1978 and it was junk with a capital J. In Canada, we only got the Medallion version, the top trim. The Diplomats, conversely, were only available in base trim. It was a silver 2 door with red leather guts and stayed nice for about 2 weeks.
It was delivered with missing emblems, loose bolts, etc and it got worse from there. It was a 318 with a 2.45 gear and it was beyond sluggish, it struggled to move because the Lean Burn wasn’t functioning properly. Said Lean Burn also failed repeatedly, leaving you stalled out without warning at random times. Sometimes it would fire up again again sitting, sometimes not. It went back to the dealer numerous times for things I can’t even remember. After 2 tears, a 50 cent piece sized flake of paint departed the quarter panel, leaving scabbly rust. The wiring in the tilt wheel shorted out, leaving us with no cruise or horn. The pin that held the shift lever departed, causing it come off in my dads hand. In the fall of ’80, a wheel bearing failed, causing the front wheel to part company with the rest of the heap. The skimpy 7 1/4″ rear end wore out prematurely.
After the lease went up, he ended up buying it and driving it for 2 more years before buying an ’82 Audi 5000, itself a whole ‘nother story. But you know, a funny thing happened. Between the warranty work, the money we put into it after (including paint touch-up and a great deal on an 8 3/4″ Sure Grip off a wrecked ’80 Volare Road Runner with 3000 miles on it, it actually became a decently running reliable car. My brother took it over, and when he sold it in the fall of ’83 it was in better shape at 5 years old than when it was brand new!.
Wow, we really do have some things in common, although I think your LeBaron experience was even worse than ours. Dad bought a 1985 Audi 5000 demonstrator in late 1985 to replace the beloved Buick and that thing made the LeBaron look good. I swear, I do not think that Audi was out of the shop more than six weeks for the five years he owned it and, once out of warranty, it seemed each repair bill was at least $1000. He could probably have bought a new Omni with what he paid to fix the Audi. After the Audi, he bought a Toyota Previa, which functioned beautifully, and never bought another non-Japanese car again.
We live in South Carolina, so rust is not really an issue. The main problem with the LeBaron for us was that it just would not run right. Ever. Once you did manage to get it started, it would stall and stall. Even after it warmed up it would sputter and bog down on tip-in from idle. (I guess that’s the “lean” in Lean Burn.) Generally, it did all these things after lurching just far enough into traffic that people would be bearing down on you. You really wanted the intersection to be very, very clear before you started to make a left turn.
Ours was also a 318 with the super tall gearing. I’m sure you know that was also the first year they had equipped the Torqueflite with a lock-up torque converter. That would kick in around 28-30 mph, causing a massive ping/detonation/lugging event alarming enough to make you let off the throttle. The car was almost impossible to drive at 30 mph unless you dropped the transmission into second and held it until you got to 35 or so. Alternatively (and preferably for my 17 year old self) you could just gun it enough to delay the upshift. Given the glacial maximum acceleration rate, there wasn’t much of a visual cue it was being hooned anyway. Eventually, the linkage got worn enough that you could just press lightly down on the lever to drop into second and then tap it upward to catch third. I always suspected that might have been a feature rather than a bug.
Then, there were the perpetual front end alignment problems. The highly boosted steering had no feel and our particular car had very little sense of straight ahead. So, if you took your eyes off the road for even a moment, you could find yourself halfway in the adjacent lane. It was very fatiguing to herd that thing on the open road for any length of time. I drove a later model Volare a few times for work and it steered much better, so I suspect it may have just been our car’s particular set up. I recall reading a quote from a Chrysler engineer once saying that the transverse torsion bar suspension was mandated for marketing reasons and there really was no way to model what it was doing in the computer or elsewhere. Around the 50k mile mark, our LeBaron had definitely adopted a nose-down attitude and would bottom out against the suspension stops if driven across big dips with any gusto.
The reason Dad ever bought the LeBaron in the first place was that Mom had won a new Plymouth Horizon that was given away as part of the grand opening of a new shopping mall. The Horizon had stick shift and no air conditioning, so he traded it on the LeBaron. I think he paid the difference in the MSRP between the Horizon and LeBaron. When you added in the income taxes he paid on the value of the Horizon (at the time, I recollect he was in the 70% marginal bracket) he said later he wished we had just declined the “prize”.
Volare has feather like steering also makes it less comfortable to drive on interstate at 70, but it’s still possible. Being less comfortable sounds much better than the lebaron though. On Diplomat SE, the heavier steering improves the handling much, with smaller steering wheel.
And stick/no a-c is the setup to have on the Horizon!
My clearest memory of these is the numerous pictures in the paper showing acres and acres of these things sitting unsold in rail yards all over north Michigan and southern Ontario. Primed us for Iacocca’s rescue package. They should change the breather sticker to Lean Burn of Death.
The best cure for Lean Burn is to pull it, replace it with a standard Chrysler electronic ignition and a matching non Lean Burn carburetor. Gets rid of a lot of headaches. I’ve known some people who still have working Lean Burn cars and even as a Mopar guy I consider them miracle cars to have one still working 35 plus years later.
I bought a lean burn 81 imperial as a gag for beer runs at the cottage 20 plus years ago . Various party buddies employed numerous bubble gum and bobby pin repairs before we finally drove it to the wrecker at the direction of the police. The longest fresh water beach in the world couldn’t hide a beater imperial.
“My clearest memory of these is the numerous pictures in the paper showing acres and acres of these things sitting unsold in rail yards all over north Michigan and southern Ontario.”
I’m afraid it went beyond the rail yards…Chrysler’s infamous “sales bank” occupied the Michigan State Fairgrounds, and anywhere else that unsold inventory could be stashed.
And as Brock Yates wrote in The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry, the combination of options on these cars was sometimes a bit odd, to say the least. Since these units weren’t built to dealer orders, it was almost as though the factory workers were being told to simply grab whichever parts were in the bins, and to just slap them on.
Surprisingly, a similar glut of inventory occurred approximately 10 years ago, near the end of Daimler-Benz’ ownership of Chrysler: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2006/12/chrysler-bank-on-it/. You’d think someone at Chrysler would have known better than to repeat that past mistake.
I recall reading in a story of the early days of CNN, Ted Turner met Lee Iacocca. Both being wheeler-dealers they made a trade of cars for ad time. CNN got the prestige of a major car company’s commercials running on their then-new channel and company cars for their reporters, Chrysler cleared out some of the sales bank and got a platform to advertise the coming K-cars.
Wow only am fm and no cassette no 8 track player and one station working.
If the radio in this car was anything like my ’79 St. Regis it’s one of two things. Either someone needs to use the antenna trimmer or the plug on the end of the cable is messed up and it’s not making a good connection.
I’m apt to think that he means that the analog dial is stuck & turning the tuning knob has no effect. He’s not real clear on the just what the problem is.
Usually it’s an easy fix for radio shops, and pulling it off isn’t that hard. It’s so fortunate the car is equipped with FM too ( I bought a parts radio from ebay for my volare as I can’t stand the AM radio in remote north Michigan countryside ) and more than one speaker is a big plus on St Regis.
I own this car now, the “lean burn” has been all redone and works properly, it has a brand new alternator, and no the needle is not stuck on the radio, the needle moves with the knob but only 1 AM station comes in
Sweet looking car. I used to see these on police shows on tv when I was a boy. These were usually driven by police chiefs and fire chiefs. At the time I thought it was the best looking car Dodge ever produced. The next up was the Dodge Aspen. Last, but not least, the 1980-83 Dodge Mirada/Chrysler Cordoba.
T.J. Hooker ‘s vehicle of choice after season 2. I thought they looked much better than the 78 Dodge Monacos and Plymouth Furies used in Season 1 and also by Rick Hunter. Of course I later learned that the Monacos performed far better than the St. Regis
I hope the featured car goes to a good home.
I have a ’79 St. Regis. It’s not as heavily optioned as this one, but it currently has 253,000 miles on it. My dad bought it in 1985, rebuilt the engine and the front suspension and drove it for ten years. I bought from him and have owned it 20 years and drove it as recently as yesterday. My car had its original Lean Burn ditched by the original owner, when my dad got it, he found it had been converted to points and he converted it to standard electronic ignition. The original owner found a non Lean Burn Holley 2280 to put on it. We’ve made a few changes to it over the years to make it more comfortable and fun to drive. My dad put a factory rear anti sway bar on it, I replaced the rims with factory 7inch and cop sized tires instead of the smaller tires my dad had on it. Pulled the miserable tired original seats and stored them. It has buckets from a 1985 Omni that were a direct bolt on to the original seat tracks. A console from my deceased ’67 Sport Fury is between the seats. I added dual remote mirrors from a ’79 Newport and salvaged the wiring harness from a ’90 Daytona so I could use a much later factory stereo.
The featured car is in better shape cosmetically than mine and if I had room for it would be all over it, but since my car has been in the family for 30 years will put in the sweat equity it would take to get it back to where we had it looking years ago. It’s been kept up mechanically and give me enough gas money, I’d drive it coast to coast without worry. It’s not a perfect car as I would have done some things differently design wise, especially around the windows, window regulators, wiper linkage attachments and door seals. It’s been one of the most reliable cars I’ve had (thanks to my dad’s rebuild) so far and because we’re down a vehicle in the family fleet it got put back into daily driving service again.
About the headlight doors: either the motor needs lubricating or the brushes are toast. I got a replacement motor last year and I’m happy to see those doors working again. Replacement motors are very thin on the ground.
Man! I can see dumping the lean burn but convert to points?
Takes all kinds, I guess.
Money couldn’t have been an issue, I’m sure it wouldn’t have broken the bank to source a decent Electronic unit. Hell, there was probably a time when a little junkyard combing could have gotten you all the spare ballast resistors & stuff you would need for life. I know the J-yards in Saskatoon circa 1991-ish were just lousy with them.
But….this..Chrysler pioneered breakerless ignition, to convert a Chrysler product to points, that’s like peeing on Walter P’s Chrysler’s Grave! 🙂
My dad agreed with you. He couldn’t believe when he bought the car that someone put points in it. A quick trip to the junkyard and he had everything he needed to convert it to electronic ignition. The box he put on the car in 1985 finally failed about two weeks ago. He was amazed the box when that long and he thought the original owner was crazy for putting points on a car he was still making payments on.
It’s hard to say. The ad remains on CL for over a year with different photos, obviously the kid has such a hard time selling it. ( but I don’t think many people thought of searching for St Regis in cars anyway ) and I regret for not saving the photos one year ago, but it popped up again few days earlier. Maybe it will stay there longer.
One of very few Mopars that I have had zero contact with. Which is why I have always wanted one. However the 2nd space in my garage is zealously guarded by Mrs JPC. She is Catholic, however. So perhaps I might point out that there is no St. Sedona, but there is a St Regis, and she can drive the car named after him. It could work. Or not.
I’ve never actually seen one up close and in person. I’ve only seen them on the road as they drive by or I’ve followed one on I-5 or I-405 freeway.
I haven’t seen this kind of car in years, I always felt they should have sold better than they did, I absolutely love the blue leather seats in this car, I always thought the Dodge St. Regis was the best looking of the R-body cars, how many of these cars were produced in the 1980 and 1981 model years?
No leather seats in the St.Regis, just vinyl…..
Given how much Chrysler was copying Buick styling with these R Bodies, I’m surprised they didn’t offer a version with rear fender skirts. Even the grille pattern looks more Buick than Dodge. 😉
I think a horizontal bar grille, as Dodge was introducing at the time, would have been a nice touch.
I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to fit one on.
Wow, what a rare find, Paul… But where are those cool headlight covers? The St. Regis’ trademark.
I thought, most of the St. Regis were used on T.J. Hooker. Lol
The headlight doors have been manually cranked open. They disappear underneath the headlights.
Thanks, Patrick…
Didn’t know they retracted, since they were clear to begin with. lol
Now, it looks like a Chrysler Newport, without the distinctive covers.
Yes, it’s really confusing to think why there is a transparent headlight cover.
There are only handful of St Regis around, and fewer of them is in heavily salted Michigan.
Those St. Regis very rarely, come up for sale, if ever. I saw one up for sale on CL, I think, don’t quote me, like last year…
It was going for about $2500-3000, in good original condition… I think it was that dove gray color, that they used in the original St. Regis ad, back in 1979… I remember, the ad slogan, “Hey, that’s my Dodge.”
It’s north Michigan afterall, every town has an odd car, sometimes for odd use too. Like a ’47 Chevy, an ’80s LTD for pizza delivery, a Chevrolet Nova from ’80s for delivery too.
The reason I know this is because I’ve got a ’79 St. Regis. 🙂 It took years to find another working headlight door motor. When I turn off the lights, the doors now make a satisfying thunk as they close.
Cool there a Fury that model near me for sale ex Florida police 318 (can come with 440) swaybars the size of your arm handles ok according to the vendor some battle scars but hes had it there for sale for several years so its obviously priced ambitiously.
Wow, what a cool find! I bet that car is rare with leather interior. I don’t recall ever seeing one of them with leather seats. It always seemed to me that most full sized Chrysler products from the 70’s besides the Imperials and New Yorkers were not usually heavily optioned, yet many of the GM full sized cars were.
Overall the look is not bad, but it has a cheap look. Plastic over part of the chrome bumpers, body panels that do not line up right, rust on the body, wrinkles in the vinyl top, missing trim, broken interior door handles, the door panels and dash look very cheaply made, things don’t line up, the dash design looks like a patchwork off pieces from different jigsaw puzzles. It may be rare, but this looks like one of the crappiest built cars from that era. Especially if it was known to have a lot of build quality problems on delivery. And the 318 is not my favorite Mopar engine. I had one in a ’70 Challenger. It’s a decent engine with one fatal flaw. The timing cover in between the block and water pump, with coolant passages cast into it, so coolant actually passes through the timing cover. And worse yet, that cover was made out of aluminum, which quickly corroded through, allowing coolant in the oil and oil in the coolant. My engine met it’s demise when all the teeth sheared off the plastic cam sprocket.
That interior is actually vinyl.
Sure is, just looked at the brochure and vinyl was optional, no mention of leather at all. Surprising there wasn’t a leather option seeing that the mid-sized Cordoba and LeBaron had leather available. You would think the full-sized cars would offer leather. Even the Chrysler Newport had vinyl as an option with no leather available .I often think Chrysler downplayed these models as the more “economical” versions of their larger cars so people would opt for the New Yorker if they wanted more luxury. If you compare them to GM offerings, there was much more flexibility in the GM line in comparison. If GM marketing had their way, using Pontiac in comparison, there was a Catalina, Bonneville, Bonneville Brougham, all sharing the same basic body and dashboard. They could have expanded the line and made several available models, having a base, mid and Brougham. I think their sales would have been much greater.
BTW that is some of the best looking vinyl I have ever seen – it fooled me!
Dude could of at least, got rid of the laundry basket in the front… Hopefully, it wasn’t the ad to sell the car. Lol
Ugh, I can’t stand that archaic looking climate control system and push button stereo… Those buttons always stuck froze in very cold weather in my 77 Newport.
This was all new body style for 1979-81… Pure stinginess to carry that awful climate/stereo from the last body style into this one.
No wonder the Japanese turned the tide around 1982-83 with the Marysville, Ohio made(1st year made in US) Honda Accord and debut year, 1983 Toyota Camry.
I’m not a fan of the power window controls. They look aftermarket or home made.
Hahaaaa…
I was thinking the same thing, jerseyfred … like the universal power window kits you saw in JC Whitney catalogs from the 80’s. lol
The St. Regis was famous in Ca. because the CHP had to petition the CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) to modify the exhaust for patrol duty. The car was so gutless that they removed the mufflers and ran straight pipes out past the bumper. We had only one car that would almost hit one hundred, we had another that would hit eighty five. The rest of the fleet split the difference. Funny the Aspen was actually better. The interior of the St. Regis got beat up pretty easily and the frameless door glass got kind of loose but I don’t remember having the glass fall out. Years later they were running the Dodge Diplomat and they were really pretty good. They could hit one hundred five mph. on average and handled pretty well. I liked the compact size but they were tight on space inside. I’m surprised that any St. Regis’ survived.
I believe ’79 was when Lee Iacocca came in to clean house.
I’m really not feeling the love for this car. Ten years earlier the full size Chrysler cars came out with the cockpit styling and hoods long enough to land a plane on. I thought they looked cool (my best friend’s folks had bought a ’69 Monaco).
This just looks like the car company ran out of good ideas and let the car get junky.
Malaise era to the nth degree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hed87QNchpw
Of course we can’t forget visual proof of why the St. Regis population dwindled rapidly in the Eighties…..
It appears to be in very good condition for an R-body. Good ones are extremely hard to come by. The only St. Regis I can ever recall seeing was this one I took a picture of about 5 years ago. It was in a church parking lot and I took the picture through the fence from the next door Sports Authority.
I forgot the St. Regis had available leather. It looks pretty good for 36 years and 100,000 miles. I guess the heavy chemically-treated leather of that time had its benefits.
It’s very hard to tell the rust problem though, as the thick chrome trims cover up the door seals and rocker panel, where is most suspicious to rust. ( I came across a excellent looking Fox Continental in a Ford-Lincoln dealership in North Michigan last month, and it reveals the problem when I opened the door )
The St Regis hangs around for over a year already, the poor kid has such a hard time selling it, even though it can’t be better for a non-garaged car in North Michigan. Undercoating must have good protection despite its limit. Oh, and the car is luxurious enough to have cruise control, AC ( good chance of working or relatively easy fix ) and FM radio with more than one speaker, non cloth seats not falling apart.
That’s not leather, it’s vinyl. I don’t know of any St. Regis having leather seats. The leather wouldn’t have held up that well. In the winter of 1993, I was hunting for a replacement for my ruined ’67 Sport Fury and looked at a couple of Magnums, both with actual leather. The leather was cracked and looked horrible. The way the seat has the tear in the photo looks like vinyl to me. Seeing how bad they looked in less than fifteen years, given the choice, I’ll take vinyl over whatever Dodge was using for leather.
The driver’s power seat looks different than my standard non power seat. I wonder if they were actually any more comfortable? My original seats are in storage while I’m actually driving around in bucket seats salvaged from a 1985 Dodge Omni that had low back buckets with adjustable headrests. The seats were a direct bolt on to the St. Regis seat tracks and even the headrests swapped over to the seats.
I remember seeing the odd St. Regis around when I was younger; I really liked the clear headlamp covers. Just seemed like a neat feature to my younger self. And I thought the general shape of the car was attractive, even if it seemed to owe a lot to Buick. So they always occupied a small space in my automotive memory banks. Haven’t seen one in many, many years though. 1700 isn’t crazy for this one, though it seems more like maybe a $1200 car to me. If I had the space, and it was local to me, I might be interested even…alas it isn’t and I don’t!
Hope it goes to an owner who keeps it up and keeps it original! Though if it was mine, I’d have to get rid of that radio. Not only is it essentially useless–wow it’s ugly. I don’t know if they could have made a more low-rent industrial looking unit if they’d tried.
The extra $500 must for being in rust belt.
Oh, fancy radio with glass like cover and chrome buttons from M-Body will be a nice swap with all the same connections. Even so, the original unit in the St Regis has FM radio that I really hope for ( AM only in North Michigan doesn’t return many channels… )
Even nicer if you want to stay with a factory radio is to salvage the radio wiring harness from a later 80’s-2000 era Mopar, retrofit it to the St. Regis and use one of the AM-FM cassette/CD players and it still looks good and it just bolts right in. I did this to my St. Regis and ran a early 1990s AM/FM cassette and it blended right in.
It was probably easier to do this in my car because it was originally a single speaker AM radio and I ran the speaker wiring from the back and put in some front speakers in the factory holes and hooked everything up to the later harness. I ran the power wire from the later harness over to the original factory power wire. Worked great for a long time until the display died. I have a Pioneer in it now because it has a USB port and I’m running almost all my music off a thumb drive now.
My BIL had one of these, an ’80 model he bought in fall of 1991. He never even got it on the road, as he didn’t even had a driver’s license yet! The young guy he bought it from drove it home for him, then bummed $5 for a cab home! I could say more about this but I won’t. The car was light blue with a nice blue cloth interior but ran rough and had obvious problems. I told the BIL not to buy it but he didn’t listen. Turns out it could not even be certified for the road without spending a ton of $$$.
We were best friends in high school; hard to believe that 35 years later we are not even on speaking terms. This car brings back a lot of bad memories for me, sadly.
The St.Regis just like a car that was poorly built and designed to fall apart. The Diplomat was a much better car, quality wise. I remember Dabney Coleman driving one in the hilarious car chase in the movie “Short Time”, and wondering just how that thing held together.
I have owned a number of ’70s cars. Poor quality, especially on the interior was common. Door handles coming off, seams tearing loose, dashes cracking in 2 years, the pad and horn switches falling out of the steering wheels, mirrors falling off, mechanical digital clocks failing, dash switches and knobs breaking, especially on the climate control and push button radios, headliners falling down, sunvisors breaking, etc. But most of them had style. If only they could have had both style and quality. The St.Regis looks like one of the worst. It has neither. Both the Chevy Caprice and Ford LTD of the time looked a lot better. I still can’t get past the way Dodge partially wrapped chrome bumpers with plastic, leaving exposed plastic edges. Seems really tacky.
Being in my 20th year of St. Regis ownership, after my dad owning first for 10 years, I don’t think the St. Regis was the worst looking of the 70’s cars or that it was designed to fall apart. It’s hardly perfect, but like anything else that is mechanically kept up, it has been and continues to be a faithful member of the family fleet outlasting much newer cars meant to replace it. I have 253k and still rolling.
Out of all the things you listed, I’ve only experienced the mirror falling off the windshield, the hard plastic panel that went over the defroster and radio speakers cracking but only after the car well past 30 years old. The only other thing was the headliner started coming down after the car was 20 years old. I fixed it then and 20 years later it needs it again. As 70’s interiors go, that’s not too bad. 🙂
The thing that has to be remembered about these R-bodies is that they got a very small piece of the development pie compared to the Omnis and the upcoming K cars which result in things like noisy frameless windows, pieces of plastic partially covering the shock absorber front and rear bumpers. For that matter, both the Chevy and Ford both got more development money than the Dodge and got it sooner.
The St. Regis was created during some desperate times for Chrysler. If they had been rolling in cash, the R-bodies would have turned out much differently. A person could probably write a whole book on it. At least this Allpar article gives a good overview: http://www.allpar.com/cars/dodge/R-bodies.html
Don’t know if I’ve previously mentioned that like others, I’ve seen rather few of these going all the way back to when they first came out. I did test drive a used one sometime in the mid-1980s. The owner brought it to my place of business to let me see it and drive it. Not sure if I even drove it around the block, or just in the parking lot. It ran OK, nothing obviously wrong with it, but I realized I liked the looks of it more than I liked driving it. I think the St. Regis would have been rather like the beautiful bright red, with white vinyl top and white leather interior Mirada I got around this time, in that it would have been a comfortable highway cruiser, though not the greatest handling machine around town.
Does anyone know why a car was named after a Saint?
I just read a piece on John Francis Regis. He certainly was worthy of sainthood. I non the less fail to see how his bio could be inspiration for naming a car, I mean he was not a coach builder like LeBaron.
There is a St Regis hotel on Grand Boulevard rather close to the headquarter of Chrysler at that time. It was closer to old headquarter of GM though. That’s the only connection I can think of.
This was 1979 and Chrysler still had dial radio with pushbutton Cadillac had digital soundsytems on all models back then.
To be fair so did most of the others. If you were feeling spacey, you could have sprung for this.
neat radio- never seen this one
Ok thanks for info
I have a 1979 Chrysler Newport, 318 LA small block 2bbl, TF A 904, AC, PS, PB, AM FM, cruise control (works well), base interior. The wipers need a near impossible to find nylon bushing, a c compressor clutch is bad. Needs a L F manual window regulator; and the headliner re glued. It really needs at least a 4 bbl, mild cam, headers, and a 2.5 inch duals. Possibly a change in 9.25 to 3.23 or 3.55. First show I took it to it earned a first in MoPar other (not A, B, C, or E.). I bought it in Pa. and drove back to Mi. with no issues.
Takes me back to my days in uniform. In the future I’ll be equipping it with period correct equipment as a Chiefs Car. Towards this I have a Motorola radio, lights, federal pa 200 siren and speaker, sl-20 flashlight, radar, and other items to come. Perhaps push bumpers and prisoner partion screen (great for grandchildren or wife).
I always thought the St. Regis was a good looking car. I used to own a ’79 St. Regis back in the late ’80s. It had the 360 4 bbl and the rare open road package. The higher rate springs and high effort power steering made for a pleasant driver. The car was very comfy on long distances with its wide pillowy seats that were like a sofa. By the time I sold my St. Regis it had 110k on the clock and still ran great. After the departure of my St. Regis, I made the mistake of purchasing a ’95 VW Jetta GLI (my first new car) which spent more time at my VW dealer for repairs than it did in my driveway. What a nightmare….. My current ride is a 2007 Toyota Avalon with 135K and still humming along.
Is the car still available
Oh my gosh this is my CL post. That is me. I never saw this until just now. I sold that car years ago when I was still a teenager and now I regret it!
I’m 22 now, and that last photo is me when I was 15!
I know the seats weren’t leather too. I made an error, but hey. That’s an operator error on my behalf Haha.
That car is long gone and sold away, but I originally coveted a St. Regis because my favorite show at the time was Sledge Hammer. (ABC Comedic, sarcastic Version of Miami Vice in the same time period)
Nowadays, I have my 2012 Chrysler 300c (Hemi of course), my 1977 AMC Gremlin, and my 1969 Toyota Corona.
Thank you all for the wonderful comments, and this is just so crazy to see my ad all these years later!
Just bought my 1980 dodge st.regis with a 360 v8 engine. I have a line on 5 other cars. Do you remember who you sold the car to?