Continuing on with my stack of Road and Tracks, were now into May 1976, and a review of the new Plymouth Volare wagon. This was usually about as big as an American car that R&T tested, as the Volare represented their idea of what a proper-sized car should be. And the Volare was essentially that; unfortunately it didn’t live p to its potential both because of its early reliability/rusting issues and the fact that it wasn’t quite as good a handling, steering or braking car as it might have been. In the end, it was just another American car, which is of course predictable. Road and Track would have to keep waiting…
A sensibly sized car, with more interior space than one would think.
Properly optioned (318/360 V8 engine, Torqueflite automatic transmission, factory A/C, power steering and power disc brakes, the optional, upscale interior group), this was a MUCH better driver than a Ford Fairmont station wagon. It still drives “current” today.
GM abandoned the small station wagon market about a decade before.
I would have no problem adding a Volare/Aspen station wagon, optioned as I described above, to my driveway today.
Fender rust was not the issue here in the south that it was up there in the Rust Belt states.
The 1978-82 GM midsize A-body wagons were better than the Volare and Fairmont.
I think the Fairmont was a better car. Certainly a lot lighter (so perhaps not as ‘stout’), so perhaps Volare 6-cyl was a better wagon.
I know the V8s Volares were very thirsty… A Fairmont V8 wagon was quicker than a 318, and used less gas.
But the slant six version was better than the Fairmont’s weak 200 6.
The car magazines tended to test the V8 variants (Car & Driver, Sept 1977, V8 Fairmont). This Volare getting 12 mpg is truly bad–with that kind of mileage, might as well get a mid-size or full-size wagon.
Each manufacturer seemed to have perfected their mid-sized car….except for 1 area. I agree that the Fairmont drove better than the Volare and the GM mid-sized cars beat both of them. However, the Volare sure looked more expensive standing still than the Fairmont. The Fairmont interior looked too cheap, almost taxicab cheap next to the other 2. While the GM cars had smaller V8s than the Volare, and were more fuel efficient as a consequence.
Buy the GM cars for assembly quality, the Volare for it’s looks, it’s bigger V8s, and it’s appeal to the gearhead in you, but buy the Fairmont for the way it splits the difference between the GM and the Chrysler cars.
It appears that a few of the respondents on this thread are comparing “apples and oranges” here.
IIRC: The Volare/Aspens were “compact” cars, not “mid sized” cars; replacements for the compact car class Valiant/Dart.
Mopar’s Satellite/Coronet cars (or whatever the revolving door names game changes called them from year to year) represented their mid sized cars.
That the compact Volare station wagon was as roomy inside as the GM “mid sized” station wagons is a knock against GM’s (lack of) space efficiency…..and a testament to the Volare/Aspen’s interior design and space efficiency.
The rear windows on the Volare and Fairmont could be rolled down. They did not roll down on the GM competition. That was one of the most absolute stupid decisions in the history of automobile design.
Keep in mind that the 1978 GM midsize A-body wagons were typically priced $7,000-$8,000 (in today’s dollars) more than the Aspen/Volare wagons.
Back in 78 these wagons were fairly close in price, the difference being down mostly to standard engine and other standard features. Sure, if you compare the 6 cylinder Volare to the V8 Malibu the Malibu is more expensive. The Fairmont had a standard 4 cylinder engine. The Plymouth and Ford probably had more lower end buyers than even Chevrolet.
But saying this car or that is a (fairly) higher priced car in today’s dollars is, IMHO, pointless.
I’ve told this story here at CC before. My dad went wagon shopping in June ’78. Best price from three Chrysler/Plymouth Dodge dealers in Ottawa, Canada (Southbank, Metro(?), and Cyrville) for the Volare/Aspen he wanted was $6300 Canadian with the Super Six and Torqueflite. Best price for the Fairmont wagon with the 200 six and auto was $7,300. While the lowest priced Malibu wagon with the base six and auto was $8,300 at two Chev dealers. $2,000 bucks more than a similar Aspen wagon.
He bought an Aspen wagon, and it served him well into the 1990s.
Years later, he still had the written quotations in the maintenance records he kept.
The Encyclopedia of American Cars shows a base price for each of the cars in your story as being around $4,500 American( it would be helpful to know the American versus Canadian dollar value during that time period). If the Chevy dealer charged nearly 30% more for his cheapest/base 6 cylinder wagon he either had few takers or folks really wanted that bowtie on their cars.
Your story would seem to support one or both reasons why your father bought the cheapest car of the three.
Even when the Canadian dollar was worth more than the US, we still paid higher prices.
In the late 1970’s very few American cars got what we would consider today “good gas mileage”.
A mid sized, V8 Detroit car would get between 10 & 13 in normal city driving, with the air conditioner running. Straight highway mileage was better.
IIRC: A V8 Granada (about the same size & weight car as a Volare) got even worse gas mileage than a V8 Volare.
My brother’s 350 V8 Olds Cutlass never did better than 12 mpg around town….if he tried. 10 and 11 was more normal for this car.
A full sized American car could be hard pressed to get double digit gas mileage numbers when driven in city traffic situations.
My Super Six Volare wagon got about 18 MPG in mixed driving. I could nurse it up to about 23 on the highway.
I was a big fan of this car as a kid.
It was a very logical car, a compact wagon with a lot of room (the Hornet was not nearly as roomy), and get this:
It was EPA rated 18/30, vs 19/27 for the sedan and coupe, with the standard engine (225-1bbl) and transmission (3 speed manual, that no one bought, but I didn’t know then). AND, you could get a 3 speed + overdrive, ie 4 on the floor.
So, in 1977, I think the car of choice for my family would have been a Plymouth Volare, with “Custom” trim (I like the Premier interior, but not the woody look), PS, PB, and the four on the floor.
We didn’t get one, but these wagons were everywhere…they might have been the best selling body style
“…the car would occasionally die while in motion.” I’ve harped on this before, but it’s infuriating that Chrysler – or any company – would put out a product that unreliable. This goes beyond annoying and into the “your customers may die” category. Grr.
And the scary thing is, if you believe websites like Carcomplaints. Com, manufacturers are STILL producing cars that do this and STILL claiming they can’t duplicate the problem.
My 2015 VW Golf TDI was asking them. Occasionally the engine would shut off when shifted into 2nd gear at lower speeds. Sometimes embarrassing, sometimes dangerous. The dealer said there was nothing wrong. VW bought it back as part of dieselgate. Were it not for that serious flaw, I probably would have kept it. I really liked that car aside from that one issue.
There’s a sturdy case to be made that the US auto industry deliberately treated vehicle regulation as a passing fad to be snuffed out by whatever means necessary. One of their oftenest-used tools in that war was to comply with the regulations in the cheapest, nastiest possible ways. Oh, your brand-new car is hard to start, stalls, knocks, hesitates, gets lousy gas mileage, buzzes at you if you don’t fasten the complicated and uncomfortable seat belt, has ugly bumpers? Gee, »tsk« what an awful shame. Not our fault; the government made us do it. Guess you should write to your congressman or something.
That wasn’t their only tool; American automakers also spent mountains of money, effort, and time fighting the regulations in congress and in the courts of law and public opinion. Which is a pity, because they had massive engineering talent in their employ. If they had put even a fraction of those resources into meeting the goddamn regs instead of making war on them, it would have been to everyone’s benefit.
And don’t let’s forget that time Honda built a set of CVCC cylinder heads for a 350 in a ’73 Chev Impala. Tables III and V tell just about the whole story.)
Of course, the malfeasance and idiocy was not unilateral; the government really did do some dumb things. Such as preventing (“anti-trust”) the formation of consortiums to devise good strategies for compliance with the new regs and spread the cost around. I don’t know specifics, but I understand such cooperative efforts were undertaken in Europe and Japan.
Yup. Durable and reliable are different qualities. Chrysler products in the ’60s and ’70s were durable but NOT reliable. Any time the air got dampish the car would stall. On a cool rainy day you were lucky to get started at all.
Typical early emissions era, before the whole computer control thing was figured out. It plagued other countries too. My uncle had a ’78 Datsun Skyline that did the same thing. Very embarrassing in a new car, and annoying to drive. IIRC he didn’t keep it long.
In some book about the rise and fall of the domestic auto industry, there was a story on how there was a mid-seventies Chrysler dealership located right in front of a stoplight intersection. The story goes that after a new car was sold, the salesmen would watch as the new owner drove out of the dealer lot and up to the intersection. They would pray that the light would be green because, if it were red and the Chrysler product had to stop, there was a very good chance the car would stall out and the proud owner wouldn’t be able to get it running again!
I “fixed” the stalling-during-warmup problem on my 1976 Dodge Aspen and my sister’s 1974 Plymouth Valiant and my cousin’s 1977 Plymouth Volare, all with the 318 V8. The automatic choke had a heating coil which “assisted” it to open up more rapidly and run lean…Read that, “lean out” during warmup. I put a 50 ohm, 5 watt resistor in series with the choke heater to slow down the choke opening until the engine got warmer. By using quick disconnects, the resistor could be removed for the annual smog check, for those in areas which had that requirement.
My parents bought a 1977 Aspen wagon new in June of 1977. It only had the “Super 6” Slant 6 (with the 2bb carb), and not a V8. It had basic options (A/C, power steering, power brakes). But that car was our family workhorse for almost two decades, and it was my own car for many years after that. (https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1977-dodge-aspen-wagon-the-party-wagon-for-the-whole-family/)
Some day I want to add another F-body wagon to my fleet.
I left a comment on your post about my parents Aspen being trouble free and a ’78 or ’79, at least I had the color right (brown). Guess the memory banks aren’t what they used to be! Great story, by the way. I found paperwork in my parents archives for the car, transmission was replaced under warranty and stalling, drivability problems were noted on the RO I found. I did drive it a few times and it was really underpowered and thirsty compared to the Duster, but the heavier weight and AC would account for this. It also had California emission equipment, as did the Duster.
I was in high school when my classmate’s mom bought a 76 Volare wagon…stripped…Spitfire orange, blackwall tires with dog dish hub caps, slant six, automatic, AM radio. The interior was stark with beige vinyl and a peg board headliner….A sad car
R&T comments on the lack of mid-level dashboard vents, which surprised me as every Aspen/Volare I’ve seen had dashboard vents to the left and right of the glove compartment. If you look at their dashboard photo, they don’t appear to have them. I’m surprised, if they weren’t there from the start of production.
You had to order the optional “Comfort Vent Heater” to get dash vents. Evidently, by your observations, it was ordered frequently enough to make people think it was standard.
At age 15 I read Motor Trend, not R&T, but I remember being bemused by the loaded but no AC Volare wagon they tested. Quite likely the same car, as they were both LA based publications.
Thanks for that. As I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Aspen/Volare without them. As R&T noted, they should have been considered mandatory.
Here in Hot & Humid New Orleans, where “Summer” lasts for at least 8 months, I cannot recall seeing a Volare/Aspen not equipped with factory air conditioning, Even the “stripper” models had automatic and A/C.
I remember reading this article when the magazine came out and that last sentence stuck in my mind for all these decades. At first I believed it but as time passed I thought what a joke. R&T’s biases shined for all to see just as other judgments they made along the way.
My parents traded in our ’71 Olds Cutlass S coupe for a brand-new ’76 Volare wagon in brown. I was 5 and my younger twin brother and sister were 3. As kids we thought it was the greatest thing in the world with the fold down back seat for going to the drive-ins took our pillows and could lay down with no problem. Alas as kids we had no idea it had a ton of problems – fenders rusted out – twice (Northwest Indiana) and some mechanical issues too. My dad swore off Chrysler after that. He was always a GM guy to begin with – not sure how he was talked into the wagon – maybe my mom. Their car lineup for their marriage
’64 Pontiac Catalina 2 dr – red
’66 Chevy Impala 2 dr – red
’68 Pontiac Firebird – green-gold
’71 Olds Cutlass S 2 dr – light green
’76 Volare SW – brown
’81 Pontiac LeMans 2 dr – white
’83 Pontiac 6000 LE 4 dr – blue-gray
’89 Pontiac 6000 LE 4 dr – black
’95 Pontiac Grand Prix SE 4 dr – red
’01 Buick LeSabre Custom – light bronzemist
’08 Buick Lucerne CX – red
Mom passed away in 2017 and Dad bought a 2017 Toyota Tacoma Xtra Cab in Black.
So they both saw the light.
My brother had a 1978 Volare Premier wagon. It was a nice design but had many mechanical problems. The front seats also featured upholstery with big buttons on the seat backs that would always tear out your belt loops of your pants when you went to get out of the car.
The test car that R&T used must have been an exceptionally bad example.
Acceleration times, gas mileage and braking distances are all out of line with my “Real World” remembrances.
3960 lb curb weight is a lot, had no idea these Volare wagons were so heavy. Parents traded their ’74 3 on tree 225 Duster on a new ’77 Aspen 4 door sedan, loaded but with the 225 slant six. Curb weight on a base Aspen 225 is 3527, so add AC, auto, and PS/windows and locks probably weighed around 3800 lbs. Duster base weight was 2975 so explains why it couldn’t get out of it’s own way, while the Duster was pretty peppy in comparison. The Duster could get mid 20’s MPG on the highway, the Aspen was almost 10 MPG lower, it sucked gas like a V8 but could hardly go uphill.
The Duster was problem free, the Aspen was a problem child and was the last Chrysler product they bought. Was nice looking, though.
I liked these when they came out and thought they were quite nice in the upper level trims. Family friends traded their rock-solid ’73 Valiant 4-dr for what they thought would be a rock-solid ’77 Aspen sedan. It was nothing but a disappointment with lots of mechanical issues and the tops of the front fenders were rusting through within a year of purchase.
The only other compact American wagon on the market then was AMC’s Hornet Sportabout, but it was smaller inside with a lot less cargo capacity. However, it was much more reliable. AMC should have had the Concord in ’76 to be really competitive with Chrysler.
“Much more reliable”??
Didn’t “Consumer Reports” magazine give the AMC cars uniformly poor marks for (un)reliability in the 1970’s?
You could be right about the earlier Hornet models but by the time Aspen/Volare came out they’d been in production for 6 yrs so most bugs were worked out. My Dad had a ’78 Concord wagon in the early ’90s and while it was quite old and rusty by then, it was dead reliable.
These were an honest design in the Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge tradition, and should have served consumers and the the company well.
Instead Chrysler ended up replacing the front fenders on roughly 200,000 of the 77’s and 78’s and if you were wondering how the company went bankrupt despite such a good design, their reputation after that fiasco is a pretty good hint.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1980/04/12/chrysler-will-fix-rusted-fenders-for-45-million/6cd6c832-63d4-4f4f-aa3f-acd356b0337b/?utm_term=.48a71a596ca1
”The FTC said its settlement with Chrysler could affect 200,000 Aspens and Volares, one-fifth of the total produced by Chrysler in 1976 and 1977. To qualify for free replacement, the fender must have rusted on the top near the windshield, where a design defect permitted salt water to accumulate during winter driving, causing severe erosion, the FTC said.
The FTC also charged that Chrysler earlier had been willing to replace the rust-damaged fenders only to customers who complained hard enough.
Thank you again for posting that!
I’m struck with what a truly great car the GM B-Body wagon was at this time, especially when compared to the mid-size offerings. The 350 common in them routinely gave 13-19 mpg, started first twist of the key, never stumbled hot or cold, and was as reliable as death itself. Comfy, safe, reliable, durable, reasonably priced as a Chevy, and thoroughly out of step with the times. Looking back at the time, a Caprice Wagon and a basic Valiant as a second car would have made a terrific family car garage in the late 70’s.
19 mpg? Under what driving conditions? Steady state 55 mph interstate cruising, with the A/C off?
The GM intermediate station wagons of this time period that I drove or rode in were mostly v6 models or the dog valve guide seals crumbling 305 V8 engine. 350 V8 engines were few and far between in this area; usually found in the full sized cars, Camaros or Corvettes.
We had 4 Caprices from ’77 thru the late 80’s. The 4 Dr and Coupe were 350’s, the two wagons had a 305 and a Olds 307, respectively. (The 305 seemed more powerful). The 350’s were always good for 13-19, and I’m not a gentle driver. Oddly, the two smaller motors didn’t do any better on the hwy, but might’ve bumped one or two mpg in town. One of the mysteries of the GM full-sizers was why they got darned near the same mileage as their mid size counterparts, without many of the mechanical and drivability issues.
Funny you should mention Camaros. I owned two of those- one 350, one 305, and neither got close to the mpg the Caprices got. Gearing?
My parents 76 Volare wagon until 1988, it was always breaking down and apparently the fenders rusted through when it was fairly new.
My driver’s Ed car was an early /6 Aspen sedan. It didn’t seem sluggish compared to my mother’s ’75 Buick Regal V6, her parents’ ’78 Buick Century V6, or a ’78 Delta 88 with the 260 V8 that I drove. And friends had a ’79 Malibu V6 wagon that was more sluggish than any of them, possibly because it’s transmission seemed to shift early even when floored (dealer claimed it was normal). And all of the above were much more sluggish than my ’72 Duster 225/automatic. American cars from the mid 70s through the mid 80s were almost universally slow.
I was a fan of the Volaré wagon back then and would like to have one today, preferably with the super six and the four speed o/d. The down-sized mid-size GM cars were a bit roomier but handled little better. I liked those too, and would take one with the big Buick V6. V8s don’t seem worthwhile in any of them, as even those are super than the slowest new cars today. I would want to daily-drive it and would not want to feed one of it isn’t going to perform.
The stalling problem from cold was due to the automatic choke . I had a ’76 aspen slant 6 and you had to pump the gas pedal to set the choke .sometimes it would release too soon causing the car to stall all cars back then had automatic chokes
Imagine having a process to start a car in 2018 ? now you don’t even have to twist a key !
That goes a very long way to explaining the brand-new car stalling problem I spoke about earlier at the intersection in front of the Chrysler dealership.
I remember sitting in a Le Car with a manual choke; imagine how that would baffle today’s younger drivers.
I have a book written in the early Iacocca years about Chrysler (Going For Broke). In it, the authors learned that during points in the Volare’s gestation Chrysler laid off much of the engineering staff due to financial difficulties in the 1974-75 recession. The only engineers steadily employed were those working on safety and emissions compliance. Nobody really understood then what a complete train wreck Chrysler was by the end of Lynn Townsend’s era.
I’ve related here before my story about my folks’ friends who only bought Chrysler products. They got a brand new 76 or 77 Aspen wagon and lined the front fenders with a layer of concrete. Somehow, even that extreme method didn’t keep the front fenders from rusting out (I really don’t know how he got the concrete to stay in there, maybe he was pulling my leg. He was that kind of guy.).
Chrysler really got burned by these early F bodies; later ones were much better built and had much better rust resistance. I had a buddy in college who had a 1980 Volare that he drove well into the six figures (which was something of a feat in the mid-1980’s) and mostly just surface rust.
Had they been able to do that in 1976 instead of 1980…
Concrete would make them rust faster because it holds moisture , that’s why untreated wood gets rotted when in direct contact with cement
The sad story of the Aspen/Volaré F-body is positively GM-like in how, once Chrysler got the bugs worked out, the cars were actually pretty decent. Had they been like that from the beginning, they might have lived up to the status of their predecessor, the legendary A-body Valiant.
If not for those quality problems, the F-body was okay, particularly in station wagon form. It’s worth noting that the F-body lived on as the M-body Fifth Avenue/Diplomat/Fury for many years. Most of the sheetmetal was different, but the doors were the same (someone in another CC mentioned that the M-body sedan used the F-body’s station wagon’s rear doors).
But, by then, the damage to the car’s reputation had been done and it was too late. With the exception of the Omnirizon, all of Chrysler’s late seventies vehicles were quite dismal (very Studebaker-like) and it’s no wonder the company was teetering on the brink of going under by the time Iacocca came on board.
To Chrysler’s (and Iacocca’s) credit, they didn’t try to pull a rabbit out of the hat by dumping what was left of their meager resources into a pie-in-the-sky halo car like the Avanti. The closest Iacocca came was the Cordoba/Mirada-based Chrysler Imperial with its half-baked electronics. Another typical Chrysler shame since the last RWD Imperial was actually a good-looking car that would have otherwise sold well to the traditional PLC crowd if the engine control system hadn’t been such a steaming pile.
And, yeah, to the commenters saying that the Fairmont and Malibu wagons were better, they were in a different class (the more expensive intermediates). The compact-class Ford and GM competitors to the Aspen/Volaré were the Maverick/Granada and Nova, neither of which came as a station wagon.
The only true competitor to the Aspen/Volaré station wagon was the AMC Hornet Sportabout. If the Mopar had been built better, it would have crushed the better-looking (but more cramped) AMC product.
The automakers downsized hurriedly and inconsistently, and tended to offer only three sizes of wagon at most so that made for some strange cross-shopping.
At Ford, the Fairmont sedans and coupes directly replaced the Maverick in ’78; the wagon appeared at the same time replacing the much larger LTD II (Torino). The Granada stayed on the Falcon platform until 1980, competing directly against the new Malibu as much as anything from Dearborn did, but was consistently upmarket of the Maverick-turned-Fairmont.
For 1981, Ford recalibrated its’ wagon offerings to GM’s by migrating the Foxbody wagon to the Granada line, instantly moving from “compact” to “midsize”. That turned out to be one-year-only as the ’82 facelift was rebranded as the (Fox-based or “small”) LTD, something Mopar had been doing (albeit simultaneously) since 1978 and actually gave up in ’81 with their “compact” wagon moving to the FWD K-car.
GM went straight from the “midsize” Colonnade A-body wagons to the “midsize” A/Gs without a hitch, but spent 1980 and part of 1981 without a “small” wagon after the Monza/Sunbird wagons (the old Vega body shell) went away and before the J-cars arrived. The J wagon was half a size smaller than the Chrysler K-car and half a size bigger than the Ford Escort.
The Fairmont was a replacement for the Maverick. The base price of a 1978 Fairmont was about $730 cheaper than that of an equivalent Chevrolet Malibu.
Adjusted for inflation, that is about $2,900 today. The Fairmont thus would have been a direct competitor to this Volare.
I never understood the Volare. The Dart still sold well through 1975 and Chrysler had bigger issues. Chrysler’s midsize and full size offerings were the ones that were struggling so they needed to be redesigned. A redesign would bring in some new customers but not an entire segment’s worth.
In another CC about the Volaré, someone else explained it well. Simply put, Chrysler had no choice. For 1975, both Ford and GM had come out with brand-new compacts (Granada and Nova) that were killing the segment with big-profit, luxury versions which, ironically, was a trend Chrysler had started with the Valiant Brougham and Dart SE. Having been largely unchanged except for federal requirements since 1967 (and the popular Duster coupe in 1970), the Chrysler A-bodies were just too archaic by the mid-seventies and they could ill-afford losing the one market segment where they had actually been consistently successful. GM owned big cars, it was kind of a toss-up between GM and Ford for the intermediates, and Chrysler brought up the rear with the least-profitable compacts.
If Chrysler made a mistake, it was renaming the cars. There was tremendous brand-equity in Valiant and Dart. In hindsight, maybe using new names was all for the best as the F-body turned out to be such a lemon (at least initially).
Then, too, Chrysler actually played the compact game pretty well in the seventies. While it’s true that it would have been better if they’d skipped the E-body fiasco and, instead, brought the F-body to market a couple of years sooner (thereby beating Ford and GM), they still bought some time with the Valiant Brougham and Dart SE versions which sold quite well. The Duster had scored big for the performance market (albeit at the cost of other, higher-profit Chrysler products). But when performance shifted to luxury, Chrysler made a very astute and shrewd move to brougham the A-body until the F-body was ready for market.
Really, for once, Chrysler’s timing wasn’t the problem with the F-body; quality was. For all intents and purposes, it was about the same as what happened a couple of decades prior with the 1957 Forward Look cars. The F-body didn’t kill Chrysler, but it sure hastened the death-spiral.