It’s been a while since we’ve featured anything with a landau top and I’m sure some of you are suffering from serious withdrawal symptoms. Well, suffer no more, as looking at this fine example of a 1984 Dodge 600 will take that pain and turn it into joy for you. The rest of us will cram into the back seat and ride along.
The 600 Coupe was basically the old 400, but with an extra 200 ladled onto the name to make it seem better than it was. It worked for the Europeans, but in that case the bigger number actually meant something. Here, not so much. First launched in 1983 as a four-door sedan, the 2-door coupe and convertible were added for 1984.
The front was meant to evoke the larger Mirada (and the same as the 400), but as with the Mirada that ended production in 1983, it really just looked sort of generic. That slatted grille has little personality. Still, with the body color all over it, I suppose it looks more pseudo-european, or at least what passed for that around Detroit in those days. The over the top helpings of chrome highlight trim kind of dashed that part of the appeal though.
Power was provided by the carbureted Chrysler 2.2l I-4, a capable if perhaps a bit overmatched unit in this size of car, producing 96hp and 115lb-ft of torque (published figures vary depending on the source but it’s close), although at under 2500 pounds it was likely adequate and comparable to other vehicles. Power would increase slightly once fuel injection was added later in the model’s life. (UPDATE 9/3/2019: Rich C commented that this car has Fuel Injection and on a subsequent visit I was able to confirm that, see the comments below. This car was built late enough in the model year to have made the transition.)
K-cars were pretty small, I suppose, which is evident by how tightly packaged the engine looks here. In fact it has all kinds of breathing room now as someone has removed the transmission in this particular one, otherwise it’s still remarkably complete.
Jeez, that “600” font could be right off the back of a Grosser Benz, couldn’t it? Complete with underline and everything.
Here’s a random ’80’s 380SL badge for comparison. The letterspacing even looks correct/the same.
As I often do with these cars, I wonder what killed this one. Hopefully not the tranny or some poor fool will be bringing it back in short order to do all the work all over again.
If the maroon paint with the maroon top wasn’t enough, here we complete the trifecta with a maroon interior. Admittedly it looks extremely durably and actually fairly comfortable. I don’t know if I could look at that super shiny “wood” for too long and it has the 70’s style of “cliff of doom” dashboard where the top is closer to you than the bottom, especially evident on the passenger side.
I was astounded to see that this was a manual transmission car, I had no idea this was a possibility in these. But sure enough, these were offered with a 5-speed transmission as standard. I cannot decide if the idea was to make it sportier, more european feeling, or just cheaper, but it seems antithetical to the whole idea of a downsized semi-budget Personal Luxury Coupe (with a landau top) that it appears at first glance to be going for. Someone took the shift knob too, I see, perhaps the same person that took the gearbox itself?
I’m figuring the 72,922 mile count is accurate and not missing a leading “1” by dint of the interior condition. It’s barely past the 5/50 warranty. Well, the 50,000 mile part of the warranty I suppose, it probably hit that about 15 years after the warranty actually expired.
But what is up with the text above the column that says “Front Wheel Drive”? What is the point of that? Or were they so proud of it that they actually just had to display it front and center? I don’t get it. The only way that could be cheesier is if it had a Kraft Single draped across the top of the column as well.
The 600 Coupes and Convertibles were built in St. Louis, MO, as opposed to the sedans, which hailed from, no, make that imported from, Detroit. A 1984 Coupe like this one started at $8,206 before options. And before the check that Lee Iacocca would presumably send you post-purchase, although by 1984 Chrysler seemed to be on much more solid footing with a slew of new products beginning to arrive in showrooms.
The 600 (and 400 before it) was way out in front of the more recent and now again passe trend of fender vents on everything.
With the benefit of 35 years of hindsight, this actually seems like a fairly decent effort on Chrysler’s part in the early years of the K-car era. Usually if one of these is seen nowadays it’s a total wreck and it’s hard to see what attracted someone to it in the first place. But with this one in the junkyard surprisingly being the best condition K-car that I have seen in years if not decades, I suppose I can understand what the appeal was back then. However I still would have picked the Accord we saw last week though.
Related Reading:
Jason Shafer’s K-Kar Kompendium
Dave Skinner found a 1982 Dodge 400 Coupe
Perry Shoar’s take on the 1986 Dodge 600 Convertible
A disabled neighbor of mine had one of these, with hand controls. Kept it from new until she died in ‘99 or so. It was immaculate and actually quite nice to drive.
And yes, I’ve been going through the worst vinyl top withdrawal…
Ok, brougham fixation sated (certainly not mine). Maybe we can do this again in . . . say . . . fifteen years? By then there’s a chance I’ll be dead, and won’t have to see it.
Guess they had to put something where the A/T gear indicator would go…
Came here to say this. It was also present if you got the buckets and floor-shifted automatic. I guess the designers thought the blanking plate deserved some decoration.
It’s a real mixed message, most of the time blanking plates remind you of features you missed out on, but in the case you sprung for the top of the line floor shifted automatic, but you still get the blanking plate reserved for cheapskate standard transmission buyers.
As I noted in the Probe post a few days ago, FWD was regarded (or at least hyped) as modern, desirable technology in the late ’70s to mid-’80s, and if your car had front drive you wanted the world to know. Old Toronados, Eldorados, and pre-AWD Subarus had “front drive” badges too, on the outside even. The advantages of FWD were heavily trumpeted in this era: better winter traction! More room inside! Better fuel economy!! There seemed to be a nearly industry-wide shift to FWD; rear drive had been declared obsolete.
Next year, BMW will finally start selling some FWD sedans in the USA. I bet there won’t be a peep about it anywhere on the car, or even in the advertising.
It’s not a dispute on the content of the plate, if it said “707 horsepower Hellcat Hemi” it would still look like a cheap blanking plate
I honestly didn’t know that about BMW, R.I.P.
A cynic might say it’s there to remind you what to tell the tow truck driver.
The outline of the car on the message center seems significantly more sleek and attractive than the actual car.
I have a hard time understanding the segments K cars were occupying when they became the sole lineup(minus the M body and minivans), as volare/aspen successors made sense, but upmarket with very little changes from a skinflint aries are real confusing, did the 600 effectively replace the Mirada in their PLC segment? In 1983 you could get an Aero Thunderbird!
The 600- Mercedes badge knockoff is really blatant, I’m not sure I ever noticed that before. American car designers picked the weirdest touches to emulate from the Germans in this time, nothing of substance or what would clash with their neoclassical brougham details, just a badges and grilles.
Yes, I think the Dodge 400 and Chrysler LeBaron of, what, 1982? had things like the Monte Carlo and Cutlass in their sights. And when the car was being developed we were running out of fuel and gasoline was going to cost a million bucks a gallon. Or something.
As I recall the LeBaron sold decently early on but the Dodge 400 was a rarity. Changing the name to 600 didn’t help. I think the 2 door remained the same while the 4 door got a new stretched body (the Chrysler E-Class was its body buddy), hence the name change. Maybe I would have seen more Dodges if the Dodge dealer had been as successful locally as the ChryPly dealer in my area.
The Dodge 400 and 600 four-doors were offered alongside one another for a year or so, ’83 iirc. People who wanted a landau-topped luxury K car four-door on the standard wheelbase existed but they wanted the Chrysler name too, so the LeBaron sedan continued until it was replaced by the AA-body LeBaron while the 400 sedan was a one-year-only car.
To further muddy the waters the Chrysler E-class was moved downmarket and rebranded Plymouth Caravelle after a couple years; the New Yorker used the same lwb body with more Brougham trim on it and there wasn’t room between that and the LeBaron GTS so it was put into Chevy Celebrity-fighter duty.
The Dodge 400 existed for the ’82 and ’83 model years. The Dodge 600 ran from ’83 model year through 1988. I believe that the coupe and convertible became 600s in 1984, when the short wheelbase 400 sedan was canceled. The Dodge approach made more sense than the Chrysler lineup, where the SWB Lebaron was supplemented by the 600-clone E-class for ’83 and ’84 before being replaced by the Lebaron GTS which had a Dodge Lancer twin. While Dodge kept the LWB 600 sedan running parallel to the LWB Lancer, Chrysler retained the SWB Lebaron sedan after killing the LWB E-class. Why was the upscale traditionally-styled Dodge sedan from 1985-1988 bigger than the available traditionally-styled Chrysler sedan? Why did only Chrysler get the next mid-sized coupe and convertible while Dodge got the almost-sub-compact Shadow convertible? There were some unusual choices all the way around. I think they actually had more complexity to their model and production lines than the public thought, and that’s pointless.
The Chrysler brand had the broughamy New Yorker on the same body as the 600. C-P dealers also had a Plymouth version of the 600.
It was probably a good thing that Chrysler gave Dodge and C-P dealers distinctive products when they could. Dodge kept the Daytona, and persisted in upgrading it and reinforcing its sporty image for years; C-P dealers had an exclusive in the new Lebaron coupe instead of an obvious copy of a Dodge.
The smaller, cheaper Shadow convertible was a low investment offline conversion by ASC, like the preceding Dakota convertible. Convertibles were hot and there was no reason for Dodge dealers not to have them. Again, it’s probably good for Dodge dealers to have a unique product if the investment makes sense.
Excellent point about the LWB K-based New Yorker. I’d forgotten all about it.
There was a market, as shown by the Pontiac Grand Am, for a small, fancy, reasonably priced FWD coupe. Chrysler didn’t have time or budget to do more than put new end caps and badges on an Aries with fancier interior trim. They sold some to people who wanted a fancier Aries, and they sold some others to people who wanted a fancy car and didn’t want other people to confuse it with a stripped economy car.
Considering the Grand Am’s having outsold its’ Oldsmobuick counterparts combined, I wonder if the 400 coupe wasn’t held back by lack of differentiation as much as the wrong kind of differentiation. Something less traditional and more sporty, to make this one’s stick look like it belongs there might’ve sold better.
Yeah, the 400 was a pretty weak product for its market.
I think that the BOP N body sales difference was basically a brand difference. Stick a split grille insert in any of the other N bodies and put it in a Pontiac store and the sales would have been about the same. The size and price were in the sweet spot for what was left of Pontiac’s audience. Olds and Buick didn’t sell many J bodies, either.
I remember wanting to like these at the time. I thought the styling was pretty decent, but wondered just how hard up Chrysler was for names to call it the 400. And how much worse it was than I thought when they changed it to 600 the year the stretched sedan came out.
What got it there? Eccentric old Uncle Bud died. Anyone who could possibly have wanted a plush old K car had no interest in shifting gears and anyone who wanted to shift gears had no interest in a plush old K car. “Hello, I saw your sign, what are you paying for junk cars?”
I had forgotten that these came with a stick. But now I remember that I never read anything good about the manual shifter from any Mopar K variant back then. Rubbery, sloppy and vague are the words I recall.
And its a good thing this car had the entire nameplate still on the decklid. Because there are few things meaner than a junkyard Dod.
(It helps if you are old enough to remember Jim Croce and Leroy Brown) 🙂
I had a boss briefly, in 1988, who had a C4 Corvette, a stick shift LeBaron Turbo, and a FWD Cadillac (a downsized brougham-y thing , not a big Eldorado, or a Cimarron). So someone bought stick shift high end K Cars. Actually, an unusual fleet for Silicon Valley. Though my next boss had a Chrysler TC by Maserati. Automatic, though.
It’s also possible, or perhaps likely, it got donated to one of the “Donate your car” places. Those charities for the most part aren’t interested in cars, they just auction them off to fund their operations. There’s always some scrapyard at those auctions that’ll put in a small bid on everything, and whatever doesn’t sell to someone else they’ll get. Sadly that seems to be the end of older, well cared for but not considered collectable cars like this one.
A friend of mine bought an early Daytona new, with a stick. He let me drive it. I said “nice car”. I thought “you poor bastard”
There was a yellow 600 convertible I saw around here for a while which unfortunately seems to have ended up at a local junkyard on row52 with obvious engine fire damage.
The Front Wheel Drive reminder is actually useful in California, and perhaps other states where winter snow chain requirements result in a lot of flatlanders and/or tourists struggling with chain installation. Back when FWD was less common, I’d see early Camries and A Bodies with chains on the rear, and more recently I’ve seen Mustangs, obviously rentals, with these the chains in front.
The styling on these looks like it came out of Rockstar. “Hey, Bob, we need a generic 80s brougham shitbox for the next Grand Theft Auto.”
The featured car is not carbureted. It has Bosch single point fuel injection.(I.E) throttle body. It was available in 84,85 and standard on some models like the non turbo Daytona/Laser and E body New Yorker. The air cleaner is missing in the shot that would boldly proclaim fuel injected. Much the way ABS was on wheel center caps in the early 90s. By 86 Chrysler had developed their own TBI system.
My son had a 85 Daytona as his first car in high school. Damn I suddenly feel old🙄.
This Bosch set up was miles ahead of the carb.engines in terms of starting,cold drivability and emissions compliance. It was also less cluster f…. under the hood .The carb engines had a air pump and related plumbing hanging off the rear of the cylinder head driven by a pulley on the rear of the camshaft.
Hmm, interesting. Allpar says 1985 was the first year for FI on NA 2.2’s when looking at the engine entry. The entry for the 600 states FI was introduced DURING the 1984 year, not clear though if it was ON 1984 model cars although this one is a pretty late build but still early in 1984.. Wikipedia contradicts itself when cross -referencing the 600 and the 2.2 engine entries. I went with the Allpar engine entry…
If I’m not mistaken, it looks like a 1-bbl carburetor here.
I can see how someone could make that assumption because you see a single hole and throttle blade. There is no Venturi or choke. What you see is in fact a Bosch single point fuel injector. When I was a Dodge dealer tech in the early 90s l was quite familiar with these.
Jim is right though,pending on which Wilkes article you read you can get 2 different answers as to the debut of EFI during this era at Chrysler.
I went back and did some reading to recheck my memory.
I found a dealer salesman info packet on EBay for the 1984 600. I had to zoom in to make out “New for 84 standard EFI with optional turbo charged engine available .
Rich, you may be correct on this car but I’m still not 100% convinced about it in general. If you look at this ebay listing https://www.ebay.com/itm/273930385419 go to page 21 of that brochure. On the right is a chart of the engines. It’s hard to see but there are four engine entries. The first and second look identical and are listed as 2.2 liter OHC 4cylinders EXCEPT the second version clearly says EFI on the third line whereas the first entry (base) does not mention EFI.
As far as the dealer sheets that you saw I think you are referring to this https://www.ebay.com/itm/1984-DODGE-600-DEALERSHIP-SALESMANS-DEALER-ALBUM-BROCHURE-SHEETS-SET/361955953899?hash=item5446418ceb:g:2rcAAOSw5UZY8-9f
On that at the top right it says under “New Engines” that the EFI engine is standard FOR THE 4-DOOR. In regard to the 2-door it only says that a turbo engine is now available, interestingly they don’t even mention EFI on the turbo engine when they did on the line above for the 4-door. In any case no mention that EFI is standard on the 2-door with the 2.2NA. It’s quite confusing and I understand why dealer personnel often seem to be clueless about the cars they are selling.
Did you happen to catch the text on the left side of that same sheet? It was interesting how they specifically positioned the “more formal” styling of the 600 as a potential positive sales point against the Thunderbird, Ciera, and Celebrity.
If I happen to find myself back there before the car is gone I will certainly take another look and update this one way or another.
Confusing indeed. I misread that dealer sheet. 4dr.engines?and 2 dr.engines. When the 84 600 production started coupes or base coupes must of been carbureted. Of 2 different parts sources l checked one does not list a 2.2EFI available in this car. The other did but not in base trim.
However by 3/84 this car was built with a 2.2EFI as denoted by D as the eighth character in the vin. C=2.2 carb. E=turbo . I can only speculate that it was a running production change or later than launch option.
Perhaps they had a contractual agreement with Holley for so many carbs annually. They kept right on using that temperamental pos on Omni through 87 NA.
I doubt those poor salespeople woo’d any Tbird prospects with the 600 formal styling. Hah!
I love these junkyard classics features.
You gotta admire a guy that can decompress strolling through junk yards.😋
Rich, you were correct! It is Bosch FI. The car was still there when I went back so here is a closeup pic from the passenger side….
Hands down all time greatest/ most simplifid CC title.
It’s funny how everyone thinks the “Front Wheel Drive” plaque looks cheesy from today’s perspective, but every other vehicle on the road today has more bold grahics advertising “All Wheel Drive” or “4×4”. Just as cheesy, just more current.
Still got 3/4s of a tank
Whenever I see that Chrysler door tag I think of the scene from the original (and only good) Gone in 60 Seconds and that poor Challenger
K-Car fan or not, this 600 is in extraordinary condition. With minimal work, it could look brand new. It is a serious shame to see it here.
There is a clip at Motorweek’s YT channel, of a concurrent vintage Omni or 024? With a similar looking console, shifter, and shift boot. As the shifter is used, the console moves about, as the rubber shifter boot had a very ‘jello-like’ action. Didn’t look very elegant.
I’m glad it lets you know that it’s front-drive so you can adjust your drifting technique while racing through the streets of LA at night against the chipped-and-turboed Supras and RX7s.
(Whew! Long sentence.)
The stylists played it safe on this one. But on the “systems check” top-view/outline they were allowed to let their freak flag fly. Very sleek picture of a different car.
Also, the underline on the “600” on the trunklid really drives the point home.
It’s not just 600, it’s REALLY 600. 600-somethng. 600cc? 600watts? 600 dollars? 600-mile warranty? 600 seconds to 60?
These were actually quite comfy to ride in. But it’s not as much fun to say that stuff.
Well, that vinyl top has held up well….Landau no less!
There, I said something good.
When these were out, I saw no resemblance to the Mirada. I only see it now that you pointed it out. The resemblance to the Aries was too strong to drown out any other sibling rivalry or ancestry.
Not only does it say Front Wheel Drive, but the Fasten Your Seat belt sign is rather obvious as well.
Eighty two hundred bucks and they don’t even offer power windows on the thing? That window winder would have lots of use on it over the years.
The gas gauge shows at five eights full. Could there still be years old gas in this car?
Another year or two, and they would have run out of model names, after 800, 900, …
All in all a fairly handsome car in its own right, but really not worth the money for a tarted up grocery getter.
Highly unlikely. The fuel tanks are punctured along with the battery being removed and catalytic converter getting cut off before the car would hit the junkyard floor. The car likely came into the facility with 3/4 tank left, the gauge will only read what it last had when running, it’s not active when off, same with the other gauges.
CC effect. Tonight I saw an Aries K still out doing it’s duty. Still in very good condition and occupied by a couple of “Q-tips”. While walking the dog about an hour later I passed a Pontiac “600”, the last zero was missing, looking rather shabby but still being used. Both of these are rare sights in southern Ontario. Obviously the former still loved and cared for by a long ago retired owner while the latter probably owned by someone one payday loan away from living in it. Now I see this article. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a tarted up K-car.
I have a friend whose entire family drove Mopars and the 600 he had was the thing that finally made him walk away from the Pentastar and never come back. He had a Volare, which wasn’t that bad of a car, apparently, but the 600’s endless electrical issues and weird breakage of suspension parts finally got to be too much, and off it went. A GM product replaced it, and since then, it’s been Toyotas and a very very bad Honda Odyssey that didn’t last until the warranty ran out because it broke down so often. Engine, transaxle, electrical, it had it all. All bad. I feel sorry for whoever ended up with it.
I remember going to the long-defunct La Brea Dodge in Los Angeles with a friend to pick up his new ’86 Dodge Ram D-100 (Slant Six too!). In the showroom they had a black 600 convertible with a sort of silver-gray leather interior. Not a bad looking car.
These were everywhere until about 2000 or so, and then they seem to have vanished. I haven’t seen one on the road in a decade or more.
Excellent find Jim! I’ve always found this one’s high-back bucket seats were something unusual in a more traditional-minded coupe of this era.
I remember these cars when they were new. I’m a bigger fan of the converts than the coupes/sedans, though.
Back in the mid 1980’s I had a neighbor who who ran an iron lot that always had a lot of beaters on it. At that time, many of the original K cars were getting traded in and ended up on his lot. He had a precursor to the 400 coupe, a maxed out (1981?) Dodge Aries coupe, outfitted very much like this car, but with automatic and all of the options you could imagine on a K-car.
Back then, I was always sniffing around for a deal and this car was attractively priced, but I got a look at the mileage: it was well over 100K. At the time, anything much above 100K miles was “no man’s land”. And, these newfangled FWD four-banger Mopars were a little suspect, at least in “common knowledge”, so I passed. I may have had a chance to own a comfortable and loaded car for very little money, but I think I blew it.
My sister’s husband had a string of FWD Dodges back in the early 1980s; one in particular that I remember was the 600 ES. It was silver with the factory alloys, 2.2L atmo with a five speed. It also had that faux-Mercedes lettering on the trunklid, along with the huge Pentastars front and back that I thought was a blatant copycat of the Mercedes design language.
The car itself wasn’t bad (or great for that matter), but the aping of Mercedes styling cues irritated me. No one was going to be fooled into thinking that tiny little FWD Dodge was in any fashion related to a Mercedes Benz, even a 240D!
That situation sparks two memories, though. One being the infamous “Ford Granada mistaken for a Mercedes” ads and commercials. The other, being the even more infamous “Merger of Equals” bullsh!t. I wonder if Lido was courting Mercedes back in the early 80’s for some sort of hook up…
This was an attempt by Iacocca to wring profits out of the otherwise humble K car and gussy it up with high profit items. it sold better than the Volare/Aspen based Cordoba/Mirada in part because Chrysler had a future in 1983/1984 which it didn’t have in 1979/1980, and because people thought Gas would hit $5/gallon and a fairly roomy, economical, plushy K car made sense then.
There were a fair number of FWD ‘adult” cars in 1984, the X skylark and Omega, the A Ciera/Century etc, but the Accord really wasn’t big enough then and Nissan didn’t offer anything similar, the stanza just wasn’t up to it and the maxima was still RWD and not very stylish. . The Camry would debut in 1984 but it was still very small and not as plushy.
These didn’t come across as premium as the G bodies or the Thunderbird but they were significantly less expensive and cheaper to run v. the RWD cars which seemed like dinosaurs then. In 1984, people REALLY wanted FWD, and no wonder; this car was considerably smaller and lighter than the Aspen/Volare but had much better packaging, power, efficiency, comfort, and build. Compared with what was available in 1979, this was a revelation from the future.
I have no idea who wanted a Broughamtastic little sedan with a 5 speed, but someone did, and it’s sad to see an automotive rarity get crushed to make way for endless chinese paper clips and grey cuvs.