As a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I remember the Chrysler K-Cars very well. These were the cars that get the credit for saving Chrysler, and they absolutely deserve that recognition. They were modern, unibody, front-wheel drive designs that significantly updated the Chrysler fleet, and they also formed the basis of the minivans that would soon become a Chrysler icon.
They were also kinda garbage.
I’m not just talking ex recto here; I grew up riding in these cars, in both Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant guises, driving them, seeing firsthand just how half-assed these things were, really putting that sub-par in Mopar. They were fairly rational, even boring designs, but they usually seemed to be built with the level of care and precision that your average hamster uses when crafting their sleeping litter.
One of my best friends in high school drove one of these, very much like the one you see above there, but in navy blue. In the mornings, on the way to school, it was unwilling to go more than 25 mph or so until it was damn good and ready, a 15 minute process at best, and once my friend closed the driver’s door and a four-or-so-inch-long screw clattered to the ground and then the door refused to open again.
(Look at that license plate, by the way: DGE481. Dodge for 1981!)
And keep in mind, the car was only about seven years old at the time.
Chrysler seemed oddly fixated on calling the K-Cars six seaters, too, and while that was technically true, as you can see here:
…I don’t think such an encramming would have made anyone happy, least of all the person in the middle of that front seat. I think we sometimes would stick three in the back seat, but I can’t ever recall being cruel enough to shove someone in that front middle seat in any of the K-Cars that were in my general automotive orbit, which was at least three, including one wagon.
Still, you can hear Dodge/Chrysler’s ad people crowing about being a “six-seater” in their commercials:
And yeah, that was Old Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, letting everyone know that “America’s not going to be pushed around anymore,” and I bet he followed that up by reminding everyone they better knock it off with this lousy car bunk or it’s ring-a-ding-ding for you jokers. And would it kill you to pick up a check every now and then?
Here’s another ad that reminds you that six people can be crammed in these things:
Yeah, take that Tempo and Topaz! Jerks.
Even the coupés were pushed as being six-seaters!
Man, Chrysler was really hyper-focused on moving around six people at once, weren’t they? Damn.
Some pretty sweet synchronized driving, though.
Anyway, for as dull and poorly equipped as the K-Cars were (early ones didn’t even have rear door windows that would roll down; my friend Jeremy’s blue Aries was like that, and being stuck back there in the summer, frying on those vinyl seats, was hell) there was at least one genuinely clever feature that I never knew about, but I saw on this Malaise Motors Facebook post:
Look at that! That may be the most clever vanity mirror light/map light combination and situation I’ve ever encountered! Is there any other car that used a setup like this?
See what’s going on there? The little light that is usually next to the vanity mirror, inset into the sun viso,r is here also able to be used as a map light, whether the visor is up or down, thanks to a clever hinge-and-swivel mechanism.
It’s hard to find images of this in K-Car brochures, but you can see it described and referenced:
“Swivel feature,” is how it’s economically described in one brochure.
Another calls it an “integral map/reading light,” which is I suppose a reasonable basic description, too, though neither captures the cleverness of the design well enough.
The only really good image of this that I’ve seen, other than that Facebook post, was in this very early viral-ish parody video made in, I think, the early 2000s:
The K-Cars were incredibly, even punishingly basic. This simple and clever little light really, um, shines as an example of clever and unexpected design and engineering in this overall unremarkable context, and I think that’s why I find it so fascinating.
None of the K-Cars I grew up around had one. I wonder what the take rate for these was?
I know from experience that six college students can fit in a K-car. We did it on the regular in my girlfriend’s 2-door Aries. Yes, you had to be on familiar terms your seatmates, so for workday carpooling it would have meant getting to know your fellow humans more than you might have wanted. But for three college-age couples there really wasn’t much of a downside…
What was the preferred way to distribute 3 couples across 2 rows? Was only one split up, or all 3?
“Thruples” is what kids call it these days.
I was in a bunch of them, but I don’t recall ever seeing that light and that’s something I’d probably have noticed. It’s funny how ubiquitous they were until, suddenly, they seemed to all but disappear. One might think that blowing exhaust the same color as the common light blue paint was a good indicator of what happened, but they had a large repertoire of failures to choose from. Charmless junk.
“They were also kinda garbage.”
I loves me some good understatement.
comment removed! My Dad’s Caravelle was an e-body not a K-car!
Tempo/Topaz didn’t appear until 83 for the 84 model year, so those early K cars were competing with the Fairmont.
I remember, when I was about 19, I’m 1997, my buddy’s dad had a Dodge Aries wagon, maybe an 82. He was a little hard up on cash at that point. It seemed like he spent every weekend in the garage wrenching on that miserable turd to keep it running. We all used to joke that it was now a 98 as he had replaced every part on it by then. He ended up trading it for a lease on a new first gen CRV and never looked back.
A word about 6 passenger seating. Why not? Even if you weren’t going to have 6 people crammed in there all the time, why not have the ability to in a pinch (yes, pun intended). This whole fascination with consoles and selfish seating is ridiculous. My regular cab truck has a fold down console. Most of the time it’s down. Rarely it’s folded up to accomodate a third passenger. It seems like a really easy way to have the best of both worlds.
Back in the 80’s I rented an Reliant K car from Rent-A-Wreck a real company that rented crappy cars for a discount (just googled and they are still in Business) Drove Boston to DC and back and that vanity mirror light/map light combination melted a couple hours in from having it on too long to look at the map. The car smelled like burnt plastic the rest of the trip and that melted plastic light made a mess of the interior.
I remember those lights and never saw one melt before… My guess is that the original bulb burned out from countless rental drivers using it just the same as you. The shop probably grabbed the first 12-volt bulb that would fit, which wound up being higher wattage. Plenty of light, but plenty of heat, too.
I’ve encountered a lot of older vehicles with melted/damaged interior and accessory lights because of this. There’s a relatively small number of typical bulb sockets used by most automakers, even today. And lots of different bulb wattages that all fit them. You do have to know the right bulb type to stick in there.
Was the radio still clear as a bell?
State Trooper: You have no functioning gauges.
Del: No, not a one. (Beat) However, the radio still works. Funny at that may seem, with all this mess, that the radio is the only thing that’s really working good, and it’s clear as a bell, don’t ask me how.
It never fails to amaze me how many forgotten great features can be found on so many cars that were complete dumpster fires.
It’s mind boggling that they would build a car like that, and more mindboggling that people would buy a car like that. Seems to be a deal-killer.
Chrysler weren’t the only ones. The ’78-79 Cutlass, Malibu, and Le Mans also had fixed rear windows. Hell, I don’t think the Fairmont had roll down rear windows for the first three years either. Was there just, like, a thing during that era? Just a thing for hating children in the back seat and wanting them to burn?
Well, now apparently people are buying cars without working door handles or glove boxes you don’t need to log into the computer to open.
I had a 03 Neon at one point, it was actually an excellent car, but it had power windows in front and crank in the back. As a child free person at the time it didn’t bother me and I suppose fixed windows wouldn’t have either. Afterall, I didn’t sit back there.
I’ve always found K cars odd in that Chrysler massively downsized its mainstream family sedan but pretended they didn’t, hence I suppose, the emphasis on traditional 6 passenger seating. As I recall, Chrysler axed a number of its traditional rwd cars at the time and turned its lowly LeBaron/Diplomat into a “luxury” Fifth Avenue.
The proletarian Aspen/Volare that the K-Cars replaced were also 6-passenger cars in base trim as well. Chrysler’s basic car plan was two bench seats holding three passengers across in all their basic trims. It was pretty typical of Detroit offerings in general for decades.
I worked in the parts department of a Dodge dealership when the K-car came out. I am confident in stating that at least 75 percent of the parts delivered were for warranty work on them. No pattern either. I feel like I handled every part used to assemble one.
These apparently use two cables between the column lever and automatic transmission for shifting. One for each direction of shifting, as you would.
I worked for a lawn service one summer when I was back home from college in 1987. One of my co-workers had one of these with a broken shift cable. To drive home at the end of the day, he would need to start the car, pop the hood, have me get in and hold the brake while he moved the transmission into drive underhood. Then I’d slide over and out the passenger side as he got in and took over the brake.
The cable for shifting back into park was still intact, so he was good once he arrived home.
My high school girlfriend’s family had Dodge Aries (bagel beige). I recall her rather forcefully slamming the passenger door and the window shattering all over the seat (not on me of course)…twice. Don’t think her dad found it as amusing as I did.
The light is for reviewing tow truck bills.
I remember that light. It was cool at the time (still is, now that I think of it!). I have pleasant memories of K-cars, but they weren’t particularly interesting cars. Just basic transportation. We had a large family, so I’m quite familiar with what it’s like fitting EIGHT people into an Aries/Reliant wagon. Yes, Jason, I’ve sat in that front middle seat. A lot. We used to fight over it, because that position had a better view through the front windshield.
I thought it was cool when the Relient K band later borrowed the name from my childhood cars. But the downside is that I’ve been mixing up the spelling ever since! 😛
Man, American car companies were so insecure — insisting they won’t be pushed around anymore.
Incidentally, I was just regaling my son this weekend with a story about how the driving schools in my area used K-cars for the “behind the wheel” training so that’s the first car I drove on real streets. And it was such an unmitigated piece of shit. I remember one of the places I had to drive it during my behind-the-wheel hours was a mechanic because something was wrong.
I’m guessing they were also trying to punny since they just switched their car line up from RWD (cars pushed by their rear wheels) to FWD (cars pulled by their front wheels).
Perhaps, but you have to remember that at the time these cars were introduced, the Japanese makes were taking market share in the mainstream, and it was good marketing to play the victim with a comeback story. A strategy that seems to still work today.
Hence why I said “also” leaving open the possibility that they were trying to accomplish two things with that line of PR slop. 🙂
And still used by victims of their own making to distract from there being nothing but garbage on offer behind the marketing nonsense.
My family had a few of these, my grandma had an early one with an am radio and a single speaker in the dash. My parents had a wagon with crank windows and later had a fancier one that would talk. I don’t think it had the map light though. My uncle had a turbo one that he loved to brag about. My first time riding in an Accord was a revelation.
I can remember being crammed between my dad and grandma in the front seat of her old K car (not sure which model it was). Even at 5 years old, it was an uncomfortable squish.
It’s a sad, sad day when a folding vanity/map light is the “cool” feature…
I’ll defend K-cars to my last breath. They were very much the spiritual successors to the Dart/Valiant (please let’s forget the Aspen/Volare!) They were perfectly cromulent cars for their time, just like the Valiant was.
Remember also that they were the first FWD compact sedans designed fully by an American company, and on a very shoestring budget. (The L-body cars were designed in Europe and modified by Chrysler US.)
Were the K-cars great cars? Absolutely not. But for many folks, they were good enough and cheap enough to make their owners satisfied.
Except the GM X Cars came a year earlier.
Of course the X Cars were designed fully in the US too – which is why they were so crappy they made the K cars look reliable.
Agreed. I think all of these can be true:
K-cars were a great engineering achievement.
They were good cars for their era.
Their era really was that bad.
I had a ’85 chrysler LeBaron convertible, and I have to agree. The quality and attention to detail was not bad. That car was VASTLY better than the ’84 Chevy Citation my sister used to have, which was just horrendous.
Thanks for the reminder of this nifty feature, we had an ’87 Aries K with it. I remember my aunt being seemingly impressed with that little visor-light, but then saying something along the lines of it just really not being necessary. My parents and those particular relatives always had a weird competition going on of who had the nicer “thing”. As far as I was concerned, they won as their “K-car” was one of those blue and silver Shelby chargers.
Other K-cars of note. Our ’82 Reliant wagon which would not accelerate past 48 miles per hour while going up any of the hills out in South Dakota. My friend’s ’82 Reliant sedan which she very carefully drove to school each day as her dad was meticulous about it. Until the block cracked. And my ’85 Duster Turismo that needed just about everything on it replaced before 70,000miles – radiator, fan, voltage regulator, radio, entire exhaust system, windshield-wiper motor, coil, door-handle, AC compressor, several fuse-able links bypassed and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. As a first car, it did teach me a lot of wrenching skills (and not to ever buy another K-car).
Talk to The Old Man though, and he’ll tell you how these were just about the best cars ever made – “they lasted forever!”. I guess he was mostly comparing them to things like the Chevy Citation, so it could be a more valid statement than first appears.
Except your Duster was an L Car – Not a K Car.
And yeah – X cars make K’s look downright reliable – and sent many of those burned buyers right into the arms of Honda, Nissan and Toyota.
Thanks for the correction – I completely forgot about the L-platform. I guess “L-Car” just never had the same ring. After a trip to Wiki, I’m reminded that the Omni was also built on that platform. And those things were like cockroaches around our area when I was growing up. Neighbor had one rotting in his backyard after an engine fire. My boss at the body-shop had one for a parts chaser with a 5-speed that was actually kind of fun to drive. One friend had one that was totaled after a light deer-encounter. Two other friends each had one in college that I was able to help keep going well past their expiration dates with junk-yard parts, coat hangers and copious amounts of carb-cleaner. Probably a few others. I’m starting to think The Old Man could be confusing quantity for quality.
I co-drove an Omni GLH across country with one of the guys in my unit at DLI who owned it – we were going to the east coast for spring break, him onward to his new duty station after the holidays, I returned to Monterey.
Those were the worst seats ever.
A GLH! That was the one Omni I would’ve liked to own – they looked like a blast to thrash around. Sounds like a quite a road trip aside from the general comfort level. I sat in various non-GLH Omnis for thousands of miles and weirdly have no recollection of what the seats were like. I guess is was just something to be endured.
The seats were far too soft and unsupportive. My 20-something back was aching after just reaching Nevada – and we had thousands of miles to go…
It was fine otherwise – it had reasonable handling and 110 hp, so I don’t recall needing to flog it to get over the Sierras and Rockies.
I knew what you were going to call out before I read a single word in the article thanks to the pre-YouTube parody ad which you thankfully included. I pretty much can’t think about K-Cars without my mind immediately thinking of the standard map light.
In my mind, the K-Car was the worst car ever made. During my tenure as a Pep Boys mechanic, I worked on SO many of them.
What I find most entertaining about them is, when the timing belt snaps (not if, when), it doesn’t damage the engine. It i so low performance that there is no piston to valve contact even when timing has gone haywire.
Non-interference engines are pretty common.
They were trash, but non-interference was common for the time and even later.
If I walked into a dealership in 1981 and saw a brand new 4-door car in which the rear windows didn’t roll down at all, I would walk out of that dealership immediately. I probably would have picked up a Honda Accord instead of one of these at the time
You certainly wouldn’t have walked into any GM dealers then. All of the A/G body sedans from this era had rear windows which didn’t roll down either.
Ford Fairmont/Mercury Zephyr enters the chat.
The Fairmont and Zephyr had roll down rear windows. Sure they stopped halfway like many other cars of the era but they did indeed roll down unlike their GM counterparts.
My dad worked for GM for most of his life. The company and the union could agree on only one thing: the poor performance of the US auto industry was due entirely to jerks buying Japanese cars. Hell, we even had local dealer commercials that showed a guy running over foreign cars with a tank (“Tanks, but no tanks, to imports”). So there was no Honda Accord option, not even when they were built in Ohio. You had to pick from what the Big Three offered (plus AMC, up to a point).
Of course, any presumed loyalty on my part went out the window when GM screwed Dad out of his pension in their reorganization. I drive a Toyota now.
oh god; this just brought up some PTSD memories of the map light in my 88 Mustang. It would turn on when you pulled it down, then get scorchingly hot – and burn you when you tried to adjust the angle, or to put it back in place to turn it off. They should have included a FoMoCo oven mitt in the glove compartment.