These days, it’s rather hard to imagine a time when Chrysler’s future looked bright and optimistic. It’s even more difficult to imagine a time when Chrysler had a competitive entry in a crucial vehicle segment. I say this all because just take a quick look at Chrysler’s current lineup.
In case Chrysler hasn’t been high on your radar the past few years (for it surely hasn’t been on mine) the once-premium full-line brand’s product portfolio has been reduced to just two vehicles: the Pacifica minivan and the 300 full-size sedan — both of which occupy shrinking segments. To put things into perspective, 2018 Chrysler brand sales in the U.S. were their lowest in over 20 years at 165,964 units, a figure nearly half that of the 324,846 units Chrysler sold in 2015, that number nearly half of the 649,293 vehicles that Chrysler sold in 2005.
Chrysler, for much of recent history, has been an automotive brand that’s struggled to find its place more than most brands, frequently faced with an ever-questionable prestige image, badge-engineered Dodge (and once Plymouth) vehicles cannibalizing its sales, and a starved product range. This was of course still the case in the 1990s, but even so, the future looked brighter and more optimistic for Chrysler as a brand in the mid-1990s when our subject car was released.
The same could be said about the Chrysler Corporation as a whole, as for most of the 1990s, particularly 1992-1998, the automaker was on a roll with one hit after another as it rebuilt its entire brand lineups from the ground up. After the departure of chairman Lee Iacocca and over a decade of similar looking and similar feeling boxy, staid K-car based vehicles that accounted for mostly everything besides Dodge pickups and Jeeps, Chrysler put a heavy emphasis on production vehicles with concept car-inspired design and style, above other improvements.
Among the most important of them was the midsize JA platform cars, sold as the Chrysler Cirrus, Dodge Stratus, and Plymouth Breeze. Replacing the final well-past-their-freshness-date final K-based AA-bodies, the JA were nothing short of a revolutionary change in showrooms and the midsize sedan segment.
It’s an understatement to say the Cirrus was “all-new” versus its predecessor, as apart from transmissions and likely a few nuts and bolts, it shared nothing with the LeBaron, which looked like the box it came in.
The JA platform upon which it rode was all-new, created specifically for the Cirrus and its Stratus, and later, Breeze siblings. A lengthy 108-inch wheelbase (4.5 inches longer than the AA-body), increased torsional rigidity by a whopping 65-percent, and an advanced double-wishbone front/multilink rear suspension with short/long arm suspension members instead of MacPherson front/solid axle rear with struts all made for a more composed and comfortable ride, better handling, and decreased NVH over its predecessor.
Between its longer wheelbase, wider body, and cab-forward styling the Cirrus also offered enhanced interior volume, increased cargo capacity, and more overall glass area for greater visibility and an airier cabin.
Inside, the Cirrus’ interior design was consistent with that of the exterior, projecting a far greater sense of modernity and style in the expressive yet efficient ’90s aura. Cirrus interior also greeted passengers with more supportive front buckets, a more ergonomic single-piece dashboard, a full-length front floor console, and greater amount of available features.
From a mechanical standpoint, the Cirrus boasted an aforementioned suspension system that was far more advance than its archaic predecessor’s and among one of the most advanced in its class as a midsize family sedan. Engine-wise, the Chrysler initially came standard with Mitsubishi-sourced 2.5-liter SOHC V6 making 164 horsepower and 163 lb-ft torque with 4 valves per cylinder yielding slightly better acceleration and fuel economy versus the LeBaron’s Mitsubishi 3.0-liter V6 with 141 horsepower and 172 lb-ft torque and 2 valves per cylinder. A 2.0-liter inline-4 was available in 1997 and 2000.
Naturally, the Cirrus wasn’t perfect by any means. Interior plastics were still on the cheaper side, seating position was still low on the floor, performance wasn’t anything notable, and reliability and build quality were well… Chrysler. Needless to say, the Chrysler Cirrus couldn’t match class leaders like the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry in refinement. Nonetheless, the Cirrus was for its time an appealing midsize sedan offering a lot of value and style for the money, and most importantly, genuine hope for Chrysler.
Since then, things have become, well… less hopeful. The Daimler-Chrysler abusive marriage didn’t do Chrysler a whole lot of long-term benefit, especially when it came to anything other than full-size cars. Chrysler’ struggle, as an automaker but especially as a brand, has been real. Honestly, as of 2019 its future looks truly bleak.
Hopefully things turn around, but as of 2019 that’s a rather sizable hope. It is doubtful that we will ever see Chrysler’s future so optimistic as it was in the mid-1990s with cars like this Cirrus building a lineup of appealing, attractive, and attention-grabbing vehicles.
Photographed in Hanson, Massachusetts – February 2014
Related Reading: The Cirrus, its predecessor, and successor
At least for the 50k miles the 2.7 would run.
I remember these coming out right alongside the Contour and being pleasantly surprised at how the early tests seemed to consider these so positively.
The basic 4 cylinder versions also seemed to develop a decent reputation, but the early 2.7, well the less said the better.
Correction – I have been set straight that the 2.7 did not appear in these. A 2.5L Mitsubishi unit was the only V6, an engine with which I have zero experience.
It seems Cloud Cars were most commonly compared to the Contour/Mystique when new by automotive publications. The Cloud Cars were somewhat of an odd “tweener” intermediate, sized between most traditional domestic compact and midsize cars. In reality, however, they were nearly identical in most dimensions to the popular Accord and Camry.
I actually liked this 1st generation Cirrus and came close to buying one, though used, as I didn’t want to gamble a lot of money on a new car. And I liked the looks of the last year or two of the Chrysler 200. The cars between them? Not really all that much.
I didn’t know the Cirrus ever had the 2 liter engine but thought that the base/LX model came with the 2.5 liter.
I had a 1997 Cirrus LX with the 2.5L V6 and the rather nice striped tan interior.
We bought it in 1999 to replace our aging 1992 Saturn. It was a major step up for sure.
I liked the car. It was roomy, had lots of power for the time, and was a very comfortable car in general.
Unfortunately, at the time, we lived in an apartment near an industrial area. Every morning, my car was covered in some sort of dust from the nearby paper mill. After about a year of this, the car started badly rusting. The leading edge of the hood was starting to disintegrate.
I’m not sure I can totally blame that on the car, but it was the main reason we traded it in. It’s replacement was a 1999 Caravan, the worst vehicle I have ever owned, and the one that made me swear never to buy a Chrysler again.
Nice car and nice memories too.
Though a niche car here in Italy, those were moderately popular for a US car in the late 90s. The handsome convertible version can still be easily found as a used car.
Badged as Chrysler Stratus 2 litre LX and mostly destined to LPG conversion, these made quite an impact for their styling and space efficiency. I was tempted to buy one and made several test drives but price was way to high for me.
I especially remember the headlights: low beams were so dim that I asked the dealer if the bulbs were burned!
More than ten years after I was surprised to see plenty of them used as patrol cars in Macedonia.
There’s an interesting story about the Cirrus police cars linked below.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonia-replaces-trademark-police-cars
Similar story north of the border here in Austria and I’m fairly certain at some stage we had a diesel option too – those and the 2L had manual boxes also. The Chrysler Corporation was in fact making inroads into the EU market but it all went down the drain when MB took over and killed a goose which could have – with the right approach – laid golden eggs later.
According to the article, those Cirrus police cruisers have an average of 500,000 km/310,000 miles on them. Pretty good for cars not designed for heavy police use!
The disastrous 2.7L V6 did not appear in this platform until its next generation, when the Chrysler Cirrus was renamed “Sebring.”
Yes, its headlights were dim, even worse than those in my 1995 Dodge Intrepid.
My sister bought a new Cirrus in 1998, choosing it over the Dodge Stratus (whose styling was preferred because of a less-intrusive-looking schnozz) because a particular seam sewn into the Stratus driver’s seat was annoying on a test drive. This probably proved wise because if it was annoying on a test drive, how would it have felt over the course of 185,000 miles? She traded the Cirrus when it needed a second water pump and the car still appears on California’s smog check database. It must be at or beyond 200K by now, even as a few-miles-at-a-time third car.
These still look attractive. Tesla is a reminder that Cab-Forward has never really gone out of style.
I was taking a marketing class in college when these came out and I wrote a paper on the turnaround of Chrysler at the time. It was one of the few projects I got an A on.
Between these, the Ram trucks, the Neons, the LH cars and the new minivans that came out in 1995, It really did look like they were going to over take Ford.
And then Eaton sold them out.
That’s actually really cool! I wrote my senior research paper in high school comparing the turnaround of Chrysler in the 1990s with the decline and crisis of the American auto (Big 3) industry as a whole during the 2008-2009 recession that was taking place at the time.
Didn’t realize Chrysler’s offerings today are such slim pickings.
Chrysler reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live skit at the Olympia Diner. The only thing that they offered was cheeseburgers, chips and Pepsi, no Coke.
In a fit of design brilliance, one had to remove the left front wheel to change the battery in these. That also meant the battery was destroyed in any minor LF collision. But it seemed like a good idea to someone!
“one had to remove the left front wheel to change the battery in these”
A design feature Chrysler/Daimler/Cerberus/FCA retained through at least the last Dodge Avenger/Chrysler Sebring.
Chrysler’s late 90s flash in the pan. It seemed like they got that car-building engine of theirs up and running again in a way that could threaten bigger companies and bring back the glory, only to have it throw a rod.
Excellent find and background story Brendan. Given it was 6 years ago when you took these pics, one must wonder if this example hasn’t been crushed by now.
My then-girlfriend-now-wife had one of these. It had the 2.4 4-banger; maybe that would make it a LX not an LXi?
At any rate, it was a decent car but certainly not a paragon of reliability… and of course the headlights!
Another issue with that 2.4 was the placement of the oil filter, down low at the front and in the collision course for damage when attacking a steep incline. You’d think that the first time she killed an engine by driving with the oil light on, she’d learn…. but that’s a story for another day. (Teaser: oil pickup tube found laying in the bottom of the pan.)
I have sometimes mused about what might have been if Chrysler hadn’t reached a deal with Mercedes. They were really “on a roll”. They were really turning out amazing design after design, peaking with I’d say, the PT Cruiser. We tend to scoff at them now, but they were unlike anything on the market at the time, and were -if you can imagine- a Chrysler product selling above list price for quite a while.
But…Mercedes.
I remember a prediction made at the time – Heaven will be Chrysler styling with Mercedes engineering, and Hell will be Chrysler engineering with Mercedes styling.
We got the Crossfire which was a pretty nice first attempt at Heaven, but then Mercedes just went to Hell with the joke.
Great write up on a falling star.
It seems that Chrysler, and poor Dodge, are on life support, and the organ donor rep is hanging around the hospital room door, clipboard in hand, waiting for the family to sign it away.
Dodge has the Journey, the Charger, and the Challenger. Good sedans loved by law enforcement, a hot rod pony car, and a SUV that defines “meh”.
If you look at what was happening 20 years ago, one would think that Chrysler would be flying high. They really were experts at making a silk purse out of pigs ears, and the cloud cars should have led to more success. But then, Chrysler has an image problem, and always has, compared to Dodge. Nobody thinks of Chrysler as a luxury line. Their whole idea of Imperials being Chrysler, then separate, then Chryslers again only helped confuse the message. Lincoln never had that issue with the Continentals, but then Lincolns were often more stylistically differed from the Ford or Mercury models. The Chrysler cars looked almost identical to the Dodge or even Plymouth model, and since most used the K car base, we know how that worked out. These cloud cars came at a time when Chrysler was finding their own designs, only to have the new owners not care to work with them.
I really wonder if we will see Chrysler (or Dodge) on the dealer lots in five years. If we do, I really think they will just be rebadged versions of older European platforms, but more likely, the dealers will be carrying only Jeep and Ram.
Chrysler as a brand is not what it was, that is true, but FCA as a whole is on a roll right now again. The minivan market may be shrinking but they dominate it selling around 250K per year. Jeep is doing great. Ram appears to be surpassing Chevy in pickup sales. Pretty much everything they’ve done in the past few years has been competitive and often best in class. Probably not enough to save them but it’s been a heck of an effort.
Things change.
FCA is doing great. People want trucks and Jeeps, and FCA is building them as fast as they can. They’re production constrained.
Paul, I was wondering why FCA is not making an offer for the GM Plants that are closing if they are constrained by capacity? Any info you can share?
My guess is that they are awaiting the USMCA to be finalized to see if they can expand south of the border and not have to deal with the unions.
Maybe its too soon and they want to wait for GM to shutter them first before making an offer? But it seems to me like the GM closings can perhaps be a benefit for FCA if they choose to buy and re-tool any of them. I am sure the municipalities are willing to help provide tax breaks etc. to keep the plants open.
You ask a very good question, but I don’t think the answer is as easy as one would hope.
Yes, an idled plant that produced cars would seem to be a good fit, but….
The cost of retooling may be more than razing and rebuilding to modern spec.None of the plants are ancient, but none are ultra-modern either.
The workforce was under union contract specific to the other OEM. The GM contract is different than the FCA one, and while the union would seem to want to keep members employed, they would not be under their old contract rules and seniority. That muddies up the waters greatly.
The last thing is why build more capacity when demand increases the prices for current production levels? Yes, one makes more when one sells more, but the overall market is shrinking, not growing, so the excess capacity may well be in a current FCA factory up for closure sooner than later.
One really has to look at the overall picture to see that this is not a win-win situation for anyone.
My then-wife and I looked at a new Cirrus…pale green, beige perforated leather, pretty little car but I just couldn’t roll the dice on a Chrysler, and wound up with another Accord.
Not an FCA fan by any stretch of the imagination but my wife’s Grand Cherokee has been flawless and the Ram trucks seem to offer compelling value (and they’re not as ugly as the GM twins).
I never understood the hoopla surrounding the cloud cars, they were the most blatant badge engineered cars of the 90s. Breeze, Stratus, Cirrus, pick your grille. I get the fact that their K car predecessors were obviously no better but this cynical practice was rapidly becoming a dead end. I do remember a lot of them on the streets at a time though, they burned red hot and all disappeared within 10 years.
Dare I say it but perhaps Chrysler, the brand, shouldn’t be full line. They only offered full sized cars until the 75 Córdoba and after that the floodgates opened and now on top of Dodge and Plymouth being redundant, now the prestige brand is too. The current lineup is exactly what Chrysler should be, offering distinctive product in a limited lineup. If Chrysler today has any problems it’s not it’s current product dragging it down, but its past products of the 80s and 90s, just like Cadillac.
Does the current lineup seem that much more sparse than this?
http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/chrysler/67chrysler/bilder/19.jpg
It is true they were badge-engineered, but they at least did so in a way that made some kind of sense with their dealer network. The Dodge version spanned a pretty wide area, while over at Chry-Ply dealers the Breeze was pretty basic while the Cirrus tended to come in higher trim levels. So I would argue that through most of the spectrum there were only two models in any one spot.
They were legitimately nice driving, roomy, modern cars that were very much competitive in most measures (perhaps not long term reliability or quality) with the Japanese offerings at the time, more so than anything GM was making anyways. I remember my dad getting a Stratus rental, in red, and that was the one time he got a ticket while driving for work.
I was in love with Chrysler products in the 90’s. I’d had good experiences with my K-based Mopars in the 1980’s and the cars Chrysler was releasing back then seemed to get better with every year. I was a huge fan of the original Neon and badly wanted an ACR. But, I had two growing children back then, so a cloud car made more sense.
Whenever I rented, I requested a Chrysler product of some kind. I can recall taking a Cirrus on a trip home (to Ohio from Atlanta), the V6 performing flawlessly in the mountains with a full load and a tight schedule. That trip really got me thinking about replacing the Lancer with a Cloud Car of some kind.
Logically, the Stratus ES would have been a direct replacement for my old Lancer, but the pricing left me cold. I considered a Plymouth Breeze instead, but the one that best suited my budget back then had the 2.0L Neon motor in it and the rumors about the head gaskets had already started to circulate. Ultimately, I waited and replaced the Lancer with a Dakota club cab and we got my mother’s Mercury Topaz after she retired. I never got either the Neon ACR or a Stratus ES.
I’m glad to see one of these things still plying the roads; but if I’m honest, they weren’t popular or inexpensive enough to keep on the roads. Here in Rust Country(TM) the number of AA’s on the road far outnumber the Cloud Cars, at least 15 or 20:1. The last Cloud Car I was in was my buddy’s daughter’s car and that was to diagnose a noise that turned out to be a bad main bearing…
I also lived through this period and was very excited to see them with such a modern and innovative product line. I recall there being teams who used Stratuses for road rallying and being impressed by that.
“The Cirrus wasn’t perfect by any means. Interior plastics were still on the cheaper side, seating position was still low on the floor, performance wasn’t anything notable, and reliability and build quality were well… Chrysler.” — this ultimately did them in.
Lack of refinement and a lack of investment in truly high quality, innovative product after the merger made me lose interest in Chrysler for good. Perhaps if I needed a pickup or the true offroad capability of a Jeep things might be different but there’s nothing there I couldn’t get for better quality elsewhere.
Ah, never really noticed these cars all that much. To put it into perspective if I had to choose between a 1966 New Yorker 2 door and a 1972 New Yorker 2 door I’d pick the 66 hands down.
“the once-premium full-line brand’s product portfolio has been reduced to just two vehicles: the Pacifica minivan and the 300 full-size sedan — both of which occupy shrinking segments.”
Sales figures I found for the 300 show that from 2013-2017, they are selling 50-60K of them yearly, but on a slow decline. For 2018 it was 46K. I give the 300 another year or two, before FCA will drop them and the Pacifica altogether. That still leaves them with Fiat, Dodge, Jeep, Ram (am I forgetting any?) which is still a lot of brands.
Well, I don’t think it is the death of FCA, just the end of Chrysler as a brand. Plymouth and DeSoto died, but Mother Mopar’s remaining siblings have soldiered on, for now. I really don’t see the returns from keeping Dodge, and Fiat does not seem to sell in North America (nor does Dodge anywhere else), so while it leaves the company doing well, the individual brands may see a culling.
I always liked these cars. I thought they were very sleek and modern, a far cry from the Lebarons and Acclaims that preceded them which looked like shoeboxes on wheels. One of my aunts had one in the early 2000’s, a dark red one with tan leather interior, chrome wheels, sunroof, V6 engine, the works. I remember it being a very nice vehicle for the time, even nicer than my mom’s Accord. It drove really well too, but I do remember the headlights being very dim as a few others have mentioned. Wish the same could be said for the Sebring Sedan that followed…both generations were crap boxes.
Chrysler was on a roll in the 90’s – my 99 LHS was one of my favorite cars. All as a result of real car guys like Bob Lutz, Tom Gale, and Fracois Castaign.
Today, as has been mentioned, FCA is mostly a truck and SUV company, all of which have huge margins. The Wrangler has certainly been improved, but I couldn’t believe what I saw as a starting price – base bones = $28K, but most going for $38 to $40K. RAM pickups are mostly $45K and above, just like the F150 and Silverado.
But you have to wonder how much longer the Charger, 300, and Challenger will be around.
At least FCA has a couple of cars I would (and do) own now. None of the cars in the article have any interest for me.
These were quite handsome cars for that time, and more attractive than the first “cab forward” cars, in my opinion.
I know people who bought these cars, as well as first-generation Neons. Bob Lutz was at Chrysler when all of these cars were developed, and he once said, “Quality is overrated.”
The experiences of friends and family members who actually bought these cars showed that he wasn’t kidding…
“Quality is overrated.”
Bingo!
I happen to have a contrarian POV on the Chrysler-Daimler “merger”: Eaton knew full well that Chrysler cars were fragile, warranty costs were going up, and their rep was going down, and that sales and profits were headed south. he sold before all of that came to pass.
Every one of the cars designed under the Castaing-Lutz era were brittle, and were never going to compete against Toyota and Honda successfully in the long run. The Chrysler boom of the 90s was something of a flash in the pan. It was not a viable long-term strategy.
But my view appears to be in the minority here.
It was like the 1957 model year again – only stretched out over several years, as each new car line was introduced.
The 1990s Chrysler Corporation cars were quite handsome, but too many corners were cut. And Chrysler assembly quality still wasn’t the greatest.
These were kind of the opposite of 1957. The 57s were sloppily assembled and had a lot of problems from the beginning. But once sorted out the cars were quite durable mechanically and would provide transportation for a long time. These were well assembled and showed very well in showrooms, and further were generally pretty good from a service standpoint early on. But durability was extremely compromised and most of these died young.
Paul, that’s an insightful assessment. Not one I’ve seen or heard before; everyone likes to trot out what’s practically a homeric epithet about Chrysler in the ’90s: fastest time-to-market with exciting new models! Sure, fine, but the damn things really were fragile and brittle (apt adjectives), with some shameful basic halfaѕedness and engineering fuсkups (headlamps, transmissions, 2.7 V6s…). I don’t imagine Eaton had any high-minded thoughts that Daimler could inject some sturdiness into the cars; I think he was probably just up for gittin’ while the gittin’ was good.
I hadn’t heard of Lutz saying “quality is overrated”, but it doesn’t surprise me a bit. Lutz has said a lot of boneheaded things, if that book of his I managed to force my way through is any indication.
The only counterpoint I could offer is that full coffers can go a long way towards getting some cars with “fatter” content into showrooms. Empty coffers almost never lead to this. These early cab forward cars were certainly brittle in certain ways, but then you had things like that 3.5 V6 that would run a long time. Eaton came in and immediately started slashing costs which took a not-great situation and made it worse. Remember that the 96 Minivan was a product of this period, and it could be one of the best products to come out of Chrysler since the 60s.
So for quality, Iacocca era > Eaton era > Daimler era – I think this sums it up. And much of Lutz’s work came late in the Iacocca era.
You and I will have to quarrel over the ’96 minivan’s merits (you) and shortcomings (me) over supper one day.
Other than that, I agree.
I wonder what would have been “a viable long term strategy” for Chrysler?
I’ve read (and probably written myself) so much in a negative vein regarding Detroit from the 1970’s through 00’s. . . No, they shouldn’t have done this. No they were wrong to do that. No, the product wasn’t right, the quality wasn’t good enough. The durability lacked. Ok. Fair enough.
What should Chrysler have done then? I know that we have the benefit of hindsight, you can’t turn back time, etc, etc, etc. But if you could have been in charge, if you had been the one to make decisions, to plan strategy. . . what would that have looked like, product wise and so forth? Would that have meant better mergers and partnerships? Higher quality but blander design? After all, it doesn’t seem like any major company has figured out how to do both (Honda and Toyota are the perfect “meh” design, high quality examples).
I’m not asking this question to prepare for a “gotcha” follow-up or to pick apart whatever might be said in response. I’m not one of those people. I just genuinely would like to consider a thoughtful, educated reply from someone who has strong knowledge and strong opinions about Detroit, in this case Chrysler Corp.
To properly answer your question would make for a fine dissertation, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time.
Let’s leave the product choices out of it, mostly. They certainly had a lot of it at the time, and they all looked/were quite competitive in many respects. But the key issue was quality:
I’ll give you just one documented anecdote: Honda was quite concerned when they got wind of the upcoming Neon’s specs, design and price. It appeared Detroit had finally been able to create a competitive small car, one that was directly targeted at the Civic, Corolla and other Japanese cars in this very important category.
Honda bought one on the first day they were available, and quickly took it totally apart. Having done so and inspected every component, they relaxed and knew they had noting serious to worry about: the Neon was built to a price, and there was evidence of extreme cost-cutting throughout. This of course was borne out in the real world, when the Neon soon began to show the results of that. It developed a rep, and its resale value wasn’t anything approaching those of a Civic or Corolla.
Essentially the same applied to the LH and “Cloud” cars; they looked very stylish, and their specs were sometimes impressive, and of course they had dramatic styling. And they sold fairly well, as there’s always a segment of the market that responds to that.
But eventually the reputation for all these cars (and other Chrysler products, especially the Jeeps) being brittle and not for the long haul (and with some notable weak spots) caught up with them, especially in the category of basic sedans, where many buyers needed very reliable basic transportation to get to their jobs every day.
There’s a really good reason why the Corolla is so very popular with the Latino population in Southern California: if you’re driving an hour or two twice a day to get to job that generally doesn’t pay all that well but is essential to supporting your family, you absolutely want the most reliable (and economical overall) car possible. Nobody in their right minds would pick a flashy all-new car from Chrysler (or GM or Ford) for that. And it’s not just the reliable service these Corollas and Civics gave; it’s also the vastly higher resale value when t’s time to get a new one or such.
Chrysler in the 1990s was all about flash. It turned out to be flash-in-the-pan. An increasing number of buyers began to see the downside of that, and increasingly bought Japanese brand cars as a consequence.
What killed GM and Chrysler, and almost killed Ford was the inability to make products that had the same level of long term reliability, quality and durability as the Japanese brands. It started a long time ago, and it it increasingly got worse in relation to the Japanese.
There were also iffy product, pricing and marketing decisions, but these would take way too much time to enumerate. If the Big Three had been able to consistently match Toyota and Honda with quality, reliability and durability, their reputations would not have gone down the tubes as it did, leading to their bankruptcies.
They eventually improved those qualities, to the point where although they don’t generally rank as high as Toyota and Honda, it’s considered “good enough”, and of course they learned to specialize on trucks and SUVs, which is what they are making all their money on.
It’s easy to call the headlamps inexcusable, but they were exactly the opposite of that: excusable, i.e., they met the legal requirements. The legal minimum headlight performance (still) hasn’t been raised in the US regs since 1978; halogen sealed beams were the 1979 result, and they were quite a bit higher above the legal floor than the Chrysler Cirrus-Stratus-Breeze cars, both sizes of LH cars, the ’96-’00 minivans, the ’94-’02 Dodge Ram trucks…pretty much everything Chrysler made. This remained the case through two and three revisions of the US-Canada-Mexico headlamps, and it was also the case with the Europe and rest-of-world headlamps. They were all far too small and cheap to do any better than provide the bare legal minimum performance.
As for the rest of the car: great big step up in modernity and driving dynamics versus the predecessor AA-body Spirit-Acclaim-LeBaron cars…and equally great big step down in durability and repairability.
When we were car shopping in ’96 we looked at these but found the Mystique to be a much better driver, so that is what we bought. Since we didn’t have any young’ens at the time the rear seat room was not a consideration. Seems to have been a pretty competitive market with the Cloud cars and Contour/Mystique being the value leaders while Honda and Toyota offered excellent options if one was willing to pay to play.
I had a Stratus 2.0 5-spd and it definitely had some good qualities. At the time I was in my mid-20’s and this was a step up from the crap boxes I had been driving. Very roomy back seat and trunk, and per C&D tests the 2.0/manual combo was the quickest of the cloud cars, though agricultural in NVH qualities. Great MPG- over 40 on trips on more than one occasion, and very good handling. Yes the interior was plasticy, but that was not unexpected then, and the fabrics were quite durable and easy to clean. I always though the controls were perfectly placed and overall ergonomics were excellent. Bought mine used, and tellingly, it was just out of warranty. Head gasket was replaced under warranty. I didn’t keep it for a long time, although I liked it a lot, I did have suspicions that it might be a money pit in the long term.
My current DD is a 1996 Cirrus LXi, with all the options except for the sunroof. It’s Stone White outside, and it’s got the camel leather interior, and, 116,400 miles on it. I bought it almost 2 years ago with 103,000 miles, and it’s been a great car. It still looks nice and drives great.