Will there be a part two tomorrow, reporting on Iaccoca’s full career?
During the bulk of Iacocca’s tenure at Chrysler, their reputation for quality improved significantly over their ’70’s reputation. From the early ’80’s until the early ’90’s, Chrysler products earned an improved reputation for reliability, rust-resistence, longevity, and affordable service and parts. If their products weren’t the most refined, or primarily based upon the K-Car platform.
They introduced the high profile 5 year, 50,000 mile, no rust through warranty. They were early adopters of widespread space efficient front wheel drive through their lineup. They regularly refined, and improved their products, as manual transmissions became more precise, and turbos supplemented their small engines. They were early adopters of standard air bags. As the K-cars, L-Bodies (Omni/Horizon), P-Bodies (Shadow/Sundance) and Minivans, all maintained solid sales, through their production runs.
To maintain interest in products later in their lifecycles, Chrysler introduced ‘America’ editions of popular car lines. Which re-stimulated interest, and provided good value. Their high profile association with Carroll Shelby, brought some of the best known domestic performance cars of the ’80’s. Chrysler consistently competed on price, offering excellent value, if not class-leading refinement.
For over a decade under Iacocca, Chrysler was a model of stability. Highly unique for them.
Whether you consider him a shill or not, he presented himself as the face of Chrysler’s comeback. Early ’80’s Chrysler came across vastly better than any period of ’70’s Chrysler. Even if key products were developed before him.
It was brilliant marketing, putting a familiar face on that comeback. Like a smooth politician, his early commercial positive pep talks touting the K-Cars, and minivans were highly effective. As the products were solidly built, and made to last. Unlike the Maverick and Pinto.
Imagine Roger Smith doing patriotic commercials for GM. lol
I’m sure he would ooze sincerity.
Whether one considers him a salesman or not. His frontman spokesperson status all through the ’80’s, was a powerful tool and aid, for Chrysler marketing.
When I was in my early 20’s and a starving grad student, I resided in a small trailer park, behind the Safeway, in a probably early 1960’s 10X50 trailer which rented for $150 per month. The unoffical matron of our little neighborhood was a woman in her 70’s, named Stella. Stella was quite a colorful character, short, stout, and no sufferer of fools. Stella, a former carnival worker, loved trailer living. One time she told me, “If you get sick of your g-d neighbors, all you gotta do is hook on to your trailer, pick up and move someplace else.” There have been a few times since when that kind of nomad mobility has had a certain appeal
Here’s a street view of the park now. That’s Stella’s actual 1964 trailer on the left, next to the Dodge Caliber. My trailer would’ve have been close to the street, about where the utility box is.
“Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is a very old-school style of sales, and Lido was embedded in it, and the world passed him by. Even in his tenure at Chrysler, a lot of what he did was putting lipstick on a pig. Recall that the K-cars were already in development by the time he got the job, and he spent a whole lot of effort in making “new” models by adding gingerbread to K-cars. Aside from the T-body minivans, everything was derivative, but not in a good way. The 1980s were a new world, but Iacocca was stuck in the old world.
I still mow with mowers from the 70’s weekly, in fact that’s all I mow with and the ads for them are definitely a lot more unique than anything you’d see today. I had to laugh though at the vertical pull starter jab. My dad bought a Lawn chief 20″ with a vertical pull 3.5HP Briggs in 1977 and I’m still using that engine today as my main mower. The starter mechanism has never failed, rope has never broke, that’s 48 years of trouble-free use with the factory rope still. I have repaired lots of pull starters on lawnmowers and other small engine equipment and never seen one last that long, rope, spring or the pulley it winds up on. I now have 4 of those same engines with the vertical pull starter and only ever put a rope in one of them because it was rotten after 50 years but still worked. The vertical pull starters have always been my favorite, possibly because it was the first starter I ever used on a lawn mower or because I’m left-handed, I don’t know. Either way, these old mowers are so much nicer to mow with than the cheap recycled steel junk they sell nowadays. Also have never seen a float bowl carburetor go 32 years without ever being touched like the pulsa jet automatic choke carburetor on that lawn chief either. That thing was so incredibly filthy inside when the diaphragm finally failed yet it started first pull on a whim every time and worked perfectly for – 32 years and has been trouble free since that rebuild again. Actually, all of my mowers have that same carb and behave the same.
Love these! A cool memory I have of childhood, was having military parents.
Canadian Forces bases like other militaries, provided large storage and parking areas for personnel. A great opportunity to checkout classic trailers, campers, and pickups.
Space was shared between officers and enlisted personnel. As you could see long Airstream trailers, parked near humble tent trailers. With racks for boats, and canoes.
Always loved these small metal trailers, in fashionable two-tone colours.
The 3rd picture trips a very angry trigger in my brain. That is, a widely-spaced grille in front of a body-color radiator core support – especially in cars with light/bright paint colors. To my eye it looks horrible and cheap. Would it have killed them to paint the core support black??
Extremely cool car. I’ve always loved the ’64 and ’65 Falcons and Mercury equivalents. In 2004 I was a college freshman in Tempe, AZ and my ’96 F-150 needed a replacement. Rather naively, in hindsight, I almost bought a ’65 404 from an acquaintance. Probably a good thing I didn’t!
When my wife and I were first married, her mom drove a red ’64 4-dr Comet. We needed a second car, a friend of MIL had a matching 2-dr. Comet for sale, so she bought it for us.
Both were 6-cyl, AT and, honestly, both were driven until the odometer rolled over. But not one of the 100,000 miles were driven in passion. We live just across the river from Portland. Scratch that pink paint; see any red?
Certainly can’t say I’ve seen this combo before… a Comet… in 4 doors… and pink…
It looks a little too well done to be an Earl Scheib or Maaco paint job…
Maybe a big wig in Ford put the custom order in for his wife… although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a factory color… pink for women was still big back in those days… I had a girlfriend who’s mother had all pink appliances in the kitchen… ranch house likely built 1940s – 1960s somewheres… never saw pink appliances in any other house… nowadays it’s white, black, grey, or S.S…. don’t tell anybody but I still have Harvest Gold appliances… Burnt orange woodwork and carpeting…
Even those base level Ford OHV inline 6s had the HP to put 1953 and earlier Ford V8s to shame… My buddy’s ’32 DeSoto 6 wheel long roof has a ’64 1/2 Ford 170 in it with 3 speed Merc-o-Matic. He didn’t realize it had 3 speeds, he thought only 2, because he never pulled it down into low, and it starts off in 2nd. The engine and tranny came from different vehicles in the junk yard. One had a bad tranny, the other a bad engine. The
” 64 1/2 ” can sometimes make parts difficult to find or match up.
Back in 1964 at the MG dealer’s lot I stumbled across a tiny Griffith with the 260 4 bbl. V8… something one doesn’t forget… cute little bugger… don’t remember if I had ever heard of one before seeing one… black as I recall.
From a marketing perspective, the 1986 Riviera was more than a foot shorter than that year’s Buick Regal coupe—whose base price of $10,654 was $9,177 less than the $19,831 that the supposedly senior coupe went for. A persistent rumor stated that Buick dealers were told not to place the Riviera too close to the similar-looking but even less expensive Somerset Regal coupe, which had been on their showroom floors since the beginning of the 1985 model year. As early as September 1985, Popular Mechanics pointedly queried, “why make an expensive car look like a cheaper model?”
As if that wasn’t enough, the Riviera’s size was also quite close to that of the LeSabre—traditionally the largest coupe in the Buick family, and now also front wheel drive. It also probably did not help that 1986 Riviera prices were up almost 16% over the 1985 version, even when accounting for inflation.
Due to these and other contributing factors, Riviera sales collapsed, declining 66% to 22,138—a painful state of affairs for General Motors, which the Riviera shared with its Eldorado (off 72%) and Toronado (down 62%) stablemates. Six years later, GM had now managed to duplicate the carnage that Ford had experienced with its 1980 downsizing. Notably, Ford Thunderbird, Lincoln Mark VII (the Continental name departed that year), and Mercury Cougar sales were all up for 1986, along with those of some of GM’s “junior” personal luxury coupes. The December 1987 issue of Special Interest Autos simply called it “the E-body disaster” and speculated that it was costing GM half a billion dollars a year in lost profits.
It seems clear that General Motors had utterly misjudged what the appeal of its new prestige coupe platform was to folks who might actually consider buying it. One can only wonder how many hundreds of thousands of future vehicle sales were lost as the revised E-body offerings for 1986 got buyers permanently out of the habit of buying big personal luxury coupes—what only one year prior had been over 181,000 high-profit sales. To add to the pain, a short but memorable star turn by a Riviera in the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Raw Deal featured a sixth-generation convertible—not a seventh-generation coupe.
Great memories as a kid riding in the back of our station wagon checking out all the COE Petes.
Everybody made ’em. Particularly liked the long sleeper versions. Of course, in the 60’s and 70’s drivers and owner operators had nice engine choices. Cat, Cummins, and a bunch of Detroit options.
In high school and early college, I worked for a tool and equipment rental company. We started with a COE GMC with a 6v53. Then got a Ford LTL 9000 with 8v71. Then a new ’73 Pete 362 with 8v71. Pride of the fleet. I thought driving those around town I’d be a chick magnet. I had a big imagination.
Lots of heavy “stick n tin” trailers, but that black ’58 Fotd Fairlane 500 with the gold anodized graphic sweep still looks GOOD today! A very nice design altho the ’57 Fairlane 500 was a cleaner one!
Curiously while car design has both evolved n now perhaps devolved, RV “design” still largely remains of the back yard, home grown “look”. OTOH, people still purchase the relatively crude RVs………go figure? Of course, now finding any COLOR (unlike the pictured units of yesteryear) in or on a RV is almost impossible: the blaah, achromatic “look” is in: White, Grey, blACK. BTW, motorcycles are just as colorless; as are some recently built dealerships. 🙁 DFO
Will there be a part two tomorrow, reporting on Iaccoca’s full career?
During the bulk of Iacocca’s tenure at Chrysler, their reputation for quality improved significantly over their ’70’s reputation. From the early ’80’s until the early ’90’s, Chrysler products earned an improved reputation for reliability, rust-resistence, longevity, and affordable service and parts. If their products weren’t the most refined, or primarily based upon the K-Car platform.
They introduced the high profile 5 year, 50,000 mile, no rust through warranty. They were early adopters of widespread space efficient front wheel drive through their lineup. They regularly refined, and improved their products, as manual transmissions became more precise, and turbos supplemented their small engines. They were early adopters of standard air bags. As the K-cars, L-Bodies (Omni/Horizon), P-Bodies (Shadow/Sundance) and Minivans, all maintained solid sales, through their production runs.
To maintain interest in products later in their lifecycles, Chrysler introduced ‘America’ editions of popular car lines. Which re-stimulated interest, and provided good value. Their high profile association with Carroll Shelby, brought some of the best known domestic performance cars of the ’80’s. Chrysler consistently competed on price, offering excellent value, if not class-leading refinement.
For over a decade under Iacocca, Chrysler was a model of stability. Highly unique for them.
Whether you consider him a shill or not, he presented himself as the face of Chrysler’s comeback. Early ’80’s Chrysler came across vastly better than any period of ’70’s Chrysler. Even if key products were developed before him.
It was brilliant marketing, putting a familiar face on that comeback. Like a smooth politician, his early commercial positive pep talks touting the K-Cars, and minivans were highly effective. As the products were solidly built, and made to last. Unlike the Maverick and Pinto.
Imagine Roger Smith doing patriotic commercials for GM. lol
I’m sure he would ooze sincerity.
Whether one considers him a salesman or not. His frontman spokesperson status all through the ’80’s, was a powerful tool and aid, for Chrysler marketing.
Speaking of Iacocca and Chrysler, there’s an interesting article on Hemmings although it didn’t mention the introduction of the “lower priced full-size” Dodge Dart and the 1962 “plucked chicken”. https://www.hemmings.com/stories/what-in-the-heck-was-going-on-with-chrysler-in-the-1970s/
Great timely and in-depth article Stéphane, summarizing Chrysler of the ’70’s and ’80’s. Thank you, for posting it.
That 1987 purchase of AMC/Jeep, turned out huge by the early ’90’s.
When I was in my early 20’s and a starving grad student, I resided in a small trailer park, behind the Safeway, in a probably early 1960’s 10X50 trailer which rented for $150 per month. The unoffical matron of our little neighborhood was a woman in her 70’s, named Stella. Stella was quite a colorful character, short, stout, and no sufferer of fools. Stella, a former carnival worker, loved trailer living. One time she told me, “If you get sick of your g-d neighbors, all you gotta do is hook on to your trailer, pick up and move someplace else.” There have been a few times since when that kind of nomad mobility has had a certain appeal
Here’s a street view of the park now. That’s Stella’s actual 1964 trailer on the left, next to the Dodge Caliber. My trailer would’ve have been close to the street, about where the utility box is.
“Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is a very old-school style of sales, and Lido was embedded in it, and the world passed him by. Even in his tenure at Chrysler, a lot of what he did was putting lipstick on a pig. Recall that the K-cars were already in development by the time he got the job, and he spent a whole lot of effort in making “new” models by adding gingerbread to K-cars. Aside from the T-body minivans, everything was derivative, but not in a good way. The 1980s were a new world, but Iacocca was stuck in the old world.
I still mow with mowers from the 70’s weekly, in fact that’s all I mow with and the ads for them are definitely a lot more unique than anything you’d see today. I had to laugh though at the vertical pull starter jab. My dad bought a Lawn chief 20″ with a vertical pull 3.5HP Briggs in 1977 and I’m still using that engine today as my main mower. The starter mechanism has never failed, rope has never broke, that’s 48 years of trouble-free use with the factory rope still. I have repaired lots of pull starters on lawnmowers and other small engine equipment and never seen one last that long, rope, spring or the pulley it winds up on. I now have 4 of those same engines with the vertical pull starter and only ever put a rope in one of them because it was rotten after 50 years but still worked. The vertical pull starters have always been my favorite, possibly because it was the first starter I ever used on a lawn mower or because I’m left-handed, I don’t know. Either way, these old mowers are so much nicer to mow with than the cheap recycled steel junk they sell nowadays. Also have never seen a float bowl carburetor go 32 years without ever being touched like the pulsa jet automatic choke carburetor on that lawn chief either. That thing was so incredibly filthy inside when the diaphragm finally failed yet it started first pull on a whim every time and worked perfectly for – 32 years and has been trouble free since that rebuild again. Actually, all of my mowers have that same carb and behave the same.
Love these! A cool memory I have of childhood, was having military parents.
Canadian Forces bases like other militaries, provided large storage and parking areas for personnel. A great opportunity to checkout classic trailers, campers, and pickups.
Space was shared between officers and enlisted personnel. As you could see long Airstream trailers, parked near humble tent trailers. With racks for boats, and canoes.
Always loved these small metal trailers, in fashionable two-tone colours.
The 3rd picture trips a very angry trigger in my brain. That is, a widely-spaced grille in front of a body-color radiator core support – especially in cars with light/bright paint colors. To my eye it looks horrible and cheap. Would it have killed them to paint the core support black??
Extremely cool car. I’ve always loved the ’64 and ’65 Falcons and Mercury equivalents. In 2004 I was a college freshman in Tempe, AZ and my ’96 F-150 needed a replacement. Rather naively, in hindsight, I almost bought a ’65 404 from an acquaintance. Probably a good thing I didn’t!
When my wife and I were first married, her mom drove a red ’64 4-dr Comet. We needed a second car, a friend of MIL had a matching 2-dr. Comet for sale, so she bought it for us.
Both were 6-cyl, AT and, honestly, both were driven until the odometer rolled over. But not one of the 100,000 miles were driven in passion. We live just across the river from Portland. Scratch that pink paint; see any red?
Certainly can’t say I’ve seen this combo before… a Comet… in 4 doors… and pink…
It looks a little too well done to be an Earl Scheib or Maaco paint job…
Maybe a big wig in Ford put the custom order in for his wife… although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a factory color… pink for women was still big back in those days… I had a girlfriend who’s mother had all pink appliances in the kitchen… ranch house likely built 1940s – 1960s somewheres… never saw pink appliances in any other house… nowadays it’s white, black, grey, or S.S…. don’t tell anybody but I still have Harvest Gold appliances… Burnt orange woodwork and carpeting…
Even those base level Ford OHV inline 6s had the HP to put 1953 and earlier Ford V8s to shame… My buddy’s ’32 DeSoto 6 wheel long roof has a ’64 1/2 Ford 170 in it with 3 speed Merc-o-Matic. He didn’t realize it had 3 speeds, he thought only 2, because he never pulled it down into low, and it starts off in 2nd. The engine and tranny came from different vehicles in the junk yard. One had a bad tranny, the other a bad engine. The
” 64 1/2 ” can sometimes make parts difficult to find or match up.
Back in 1964 at the MG dealer’s lot I stumbled across a tiny Griffith with the 260 4 bbl. V8… something one doesn’t forget… cute little bugger… don’t remember if I had ever heard of one before seeing one… black as I recall.
From the unfinished Rivera Project:
From a marketing perspective, the 1986 Riviera was more than a foot shorter than that year’s Buick Regal coupe—whose base price of $10,654 was $9,177 less than the $19,831 that the supposedly senior coupe went for. A persistent rumor stated that Buick dealers were told not to place the Riviera too close to the similar-looking but even less expensive Somerset Regal coupe, which had been on their showroom floors since the beginning of the 1985 model year. As early as September 1985, Popular Mechanics pointedly queried, “why make an expensive car look like a cheaper model?”
As if that wasn’t enough, the Riviera’s size was also quite close to that of the LeSabre—traditionally the largest coupe in the Buick family, and now also front wheel drive. It also probably did not help that 1986 Riviera prices were up almost 16% over the 1985 version, even when accounting for inflation.
Due to these and other contributing factors, Riviera sales collapsed, declining 66% to 22,138—a painful state of affairs for General Motors, which the Riviera shared with its Eldorado (off 72%) and Toronado (down 62%) stablemates. Six years later, GM had now managed to duplicate the carnage that Ford had experienced with its 1980 downsizing. Notably, Ford Thunderbird, Lincoln Mark VII (the Continental name departed that year), and Mercury Cougar sales were all up for 1986, along with those of some of GM’s “junior” personal luxury coupes. The December 1987 issue of Special Interest Autos simply called it “the E-body disaster” and speculated that it was costing GM half a billion dollars a year in lost profits.
It seems clear that General Motors had utterly misjudged what the appeal of its new prestige coupe platform was to folks who might actually consider buying it. One can only wonder how many hundreds of thousands of future vehicle sales were lost as the revised E-body offerings for 1986 got buyers permanently out of the habit of buying big personal luxury coupes—what only one year prior had been over 181,000 high-profit sales. To add to the pain, a short but memorable star turn by a Riviera in the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Raw Deal featured a sixth-generation convertible—not a seventh-generation coupe.
Great memories as a kid riding in the back of our station wagon checking out all the COE Petes.
Everybody made ’em. Particularly liked the long sleeper versions. Of course, in the 60’s and 70’s drivers and owner operators had nice engine choices. Cat, Cummins, and a bunch of Detroit options.
In high school and early college, I worked for a tool and equipment rental company. We started with a COE GMC with a 6v53. Then got a Ford LTL 9000 with 8v71. Then a new ’73 Pete 362 with 8v71. Pride of the fleet. I thought driving those around town I’d be a chick magnet. I had a big imagination.
No mention of the rarer 1959-60 Eldorado Brougham done by Pininfarina? 😉
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-cohort/cohort-picks-of-the-day-1960-cadillac-eldorado-brougham-by-pininfarina/
Lots of heavy “stick n tin” trailers, but that black ’58 Fotd Fairlane 500 with the gold anodized graphic sweep still looks GOOD today! A very nice design altho the ’57 Fairlane 500 was a cleaner one!
Curiously while car design has both evolved n now perhaps devolved, RV “design” still largely remains of the back yard, home grown “look”. OTOH, people still purchase the relatively crude RVs………go figure? Of course, now finding any COLOR (unlike the pictured units of yesteryear) in or on a RV is almost impossible: the blaah, achromatic “look” is in: White, Grey, blACK. BTW, motorcycles are just as colorless; as are some recently built dealerships. 🙁 DFO