My 1979 Dodge Omni and 1979 Fiat Strada – FWD Compacts To Begin The 1980s

 

In 1975, when I still had my first car, a Datsun 1200 coupe, I found a temporary job unloading a ship. This was no ordinary ship – it was a car carrier that had sailed from Germany with its cargo hull packed with factory-new Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches. Union dockworkers drove the cars from the ship down a ramp onto the dock, and it was my job to drive them a half mile to a parking lot where they’d be collected by car transporters.

 

The crew chief told his team of temps that he’d drive the Porsches himself, so I drove mostly Rabbits and a few Audis. I was very impressed by the new-for-1975 VW Rabbit. It handled well around 90-degree turns between the shipping containers that were piled high in the dockyard, and it was sure-footed over rough pavement, unlike my Datsun. Two years later, when my father was in the market for a new car, I recommended that he buy a Volkswagen Rabbit, which by then had fuel injection. Dad bought one, and he liked his little bunny.

By the time I got married in 1978, I’d sold my Datsun and was driving an 8-year-old Karmann Ghia. My new wife had been sharing an apartment and a car with her sister, so we needed to find her a car of her own. VW had just opened a factory in Westmoreland, PA, as exchange rates were making German Rabbits too expensive to be competitive in the U.S. market. I decided that if I was going to buy an Americanized Rabbit, I might as well get a less-expensive Dodge Omni or Plymouth Horizon. These cars looked like Rabbits to me, and their 1.7L engines were built by Volkswagen so I expected they’d be reliable.

I ordered a base-model Omni from my local Dodge dealer. I chose the color silver – this was long before every other car you see was painted silver or some shade of gray. I worried about a black vinyl interior in a car that had no air conditioning, so I added exactly one option to my order: a sunroof. The dealer said that the factory would build my car, then ship it to a vendor, the American Sunroof Company, who would cut a hole in the roof and install a hinged glass panel. He warned me that this would delay shipment; I would have to be patient.

After our wedding my wife and I settled in our new apartment and shared our one car, my Ghia, while we waited for the Omni to be delivered. A month or two later my employer proposed that I transfer from the northeast to an office in Atlanta. My wife and I had never been that far south; however we’d seen magazine photos of Plains, Georgia, where the President had a peanut farm. We did not want to go there.

My manager said that Atlanta was not at all like Plains. He suggested we fly to Atlanta and spend a weekend there at company expense. A free trip seemed like a good idea to us, so we found a direct flight.

We had dinner in a revolving restaurant on the top floor of an Atlanta hotel. My wife set her purse down on the windowsill, not realizing that while the floor of the restaurant and our table rotated, the windows did not. Exactly 360 degrees later the purse came back to us and my wife put it under her chair. I remember we had cream of peanut soup and liked it. We liked Atlanta, too.

 

Once we decided to move to Georgia, I knew my wife would need a car with air-conditioning, so I cancelled my custom order and bought instead a dark blue Omni with a/c but no sunroof, a car that the dealer had on his lot. We drove that car to Atlanta while my Karmann Ghia went on a moving van.

Our Omni served us well for the three years we owned it. We went on camping trips in the mountains of north Georgia, and added a trailer hitch so we could tow a small sailboat. When our first child was born, we installed a car seat for her. One day my sleep-deprived wife accidentally locked our daughter in the car in the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket. A kindly gentleman was able to unlock the car for her; perhaps he carried with him a coat hanger for that purpose.

The corporation I worked for had a reputation for moving its employees frequently. Three years after we moved to Atlanta I was offered a job in the south of England. I sold my Karmann Ghia, I think for the same price I’d paid for it six years earlier. As for the Omni, I traded cars with a man who was returning to the United States from our office in the UK. He had a Fiat Strada that was similar to my Omni, except it was in England and had right-hand-drive steering.

 

Our ownership experience with the Omni had been good; I can remember only one or two minor problems. When we returned from England after a two-year assignment I asked my co-worker how the little Dodge was running. “It’s long gone,” he said. “The engine blew up.” I said I was sorry to hear that, as I’d performed frequent oil changes myself. He said he wished he’d done the same. Instead he’d taken the car to a place that promised to change the oil in a jiffy, and they’d forgotten to reinstall the drain plug.

 

In my memory the Fiat Strada we had in England was the same size as our Omni; however the Internet tells me that the Strada was ten inches shorter and almost 300 pounds lighter. I’m comparing a European-specification Fiat to an American Omni, and I suspect that federally-mandated bumpers added a few inches and pounds to the Dodge. The Fiat’s 1.5L four produced only one horsepower less than the Omni’s bigger engine, and its manual transmission was a 5-speed, one gear more than the Dodge had.

 

I wish I could provide a comprehensive review of the American car’s acceleration and handling compared to its European counterpart, but I cannot. The Omni was my wife’s car and we were newly married, so I was on my best behavior when we went for a drive, even more so after we became a family of three. The Strada on the other hand was my car for commuting to work, and with no one in the passenger seat I could drive it as enthusiastically as I liked.

I would say that the red Fiat handled very well. (I like to call it “red” but in reality it was painted an unfortunate shade of dark pink.) Once I got used to driving on the left side of the road I could go quite quickly down the narrow B-roads with confidence that I wouldn’t get into trouble if on-coming traffic appeared suddenly around a hedgerow. My only complaint was that the Strada’s stickshift was somewhat balky, compared to our Omni or the Mini I soon bought for my wife.

 

One Christmas we strapped our daughter in the back seat of the Strada and drove to Paris. This was before the Chunnel was built, so the Fiat crossed the English Channel with us on a ferry. Driving in the city of Paris is exciting, especially when your steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car, but the Parisian drivers saw my British number plates and the maniacal gleam in my eye so they gave way more politely than I’d expected.

 

I had to paint the Strada’s headlights with yellow dye before I could drive legally in France. My daughter discovered the little bottle of dye, a dye which does not come out of tan-colored upholstery no matter what you do. I doubt this affected the car’s resale value much, as the Fiat was well-worn when I sold it upon our return to the U.S. The only mechanical problem I can remember is when one of the red-and-green rocker switches on the instrument panel began to smoke. That was easily repaired.

 

Before we leave England I must tell you about my wife’s Mini, which was a real British Leyland Mini, not a BMW facsimile. That story will appear in the next installment of my Cars Of A Lifetime Series.

 

Related CC reading:

1985 Fiat Strada 65CL – Standing Out From The Pack, In More Ways Than Expected