The Dodge Diplomat Was The Most Boring Car That Got Destroyed In The Most Exciting Ways (In Movies)

If there ever was a car that can best be summed up as “a car” and that’s it, then I think the Dodge Diplomat might just be that car. Well, at least in its era of the late ’70s into the late ’80s. Today, a surviving Diplomat might be able to generate a bit of interest because of its rarity and for nostalgic reasons, but back in the day  these things were pretty common and slightly less exciting than a tour of a long-term records storage facility.

I grew up in that time when these cars were plentiful and deeply forgettable. The only one I really remember was a light blue Diplomat that my friend Marian had as her first car, which, in hindsight, is a little surprising because it couldn’t have been all that old for a hand-me-down car. It was one of the second-generation Diplomats which appeared in 1980, so it couldn’t have been more than, what, seven years old or so? At most? I think we tend to forget how much faster cars aged back in the day.

The Diplomat was kind of a vestigial part of Chrysler at the time, a rear-wheel drive platform (the M-Platform, if you’re curious, which was a barely-changed successor the the F-Platform used on cars like the Plymouth Volaré) when Chrysler was very committed to moving to K-Car-centered front-wheel drive platforms. As a result, older designs like the Diplomat were treated like an old branch everyone was just waiting to watch fall off.

There wasn’t a lot to work with when advertising the car. It didn’t look bad, as such, but it didn’t look especially good either. It just sort of looked. It had a kind of waterfall-ish grille that spilled below the headlamps and enveloped the turn indicators, and I kind of like how the B-pillar wraps over the roof, but it’s all stuff that cars like the Ford Fairmont did about as well.

As a result, brochures had to goose things up by really making those antique store lights look like you had a severe astigmatism to get some excitement.

Getting the background to look like it’s in the middle of a massive fire helps keep things exciting, too.

The copywriting can also go a long way to getting people worked up and dizzy with desire for the Diplomat by using such wild and evocative phrasing like “sensible family friend.” Is it hot in here? Damn.

The copy also notes “smooth flanks” and “squared-off fenders” and “quiet responsiveness.” Easy, fellas! Plus those “isolated leaf springs in back” are the kind of technical wizardry that would be sure to impress anyone who hadn’t looked under the rear of a car since 1906.

I’m being pretty harsh. It does look pretty fly in this red-and-white-and-black getup with those wheels, though:

Okay, so the Diplomat was a pretty boring car. Fine. But you know how it made up for all that ennui? By being the unsung star of so many 1980s-era car chase scenes!

A lot of Diplomats were sold to be police vehicles, usually with a 5.2-liter V8 that made between 120 and 150-ish horsepower, depending on the type of carb it had. These didn’t accelerate particularly well, the top speed was only around 110 mph, but considering the cars that they were expected to chase, that was probably fine.

They really shone in movies, though, where they seemed to specialize in getting the everadoring crap beaten out of them, and usually in pretty significant numbers. Here’s a great example from the 1989 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor buddy-something movie See No Evil, Hear No Evil, where they play a deaf guy and a blind guy, respectively (and probably not respectfully, given the era) who team up to either solve a crime or are accused of a crime or something like that.

Anyway, they steal a Diplomat cop car and co-drive it with predictable disaster:

That Diplomat takes a hell of a beating there. If your automotive fetishes tend towards the masochistic, then the Diplomat makes a fantastic gimp. Also, did you see a very young Kevin Spacey there? And that guy who played the captain on Police Squad, what’s his name, Alan North? Star-studded!

Here’s another good beat-the-shit-out-of-Diplomats movie: Short Time, which was a 1990 movie where Dabney Coleman is a cop who thinks he’s dying, so he is trying desperately to get killed on the job for the insurance payout.

In this scene, he only succeeds in beating the absolute crap out of the Diplomat he’s driving:

It’s a pretty amazing car chase, really, full of wanton destruction and some great Malaise-era cars. And if you’re wondering, yes, this is just what daily life was like in the ’80s. A Beetle does take some collateral damage at the end, but I guess I can forgive that.

I know there’s lots more movies that revel in Diplomat destruction out there, so I encourage you to fill the comments with links to clips! If done right, you can spend your whole workday watching Dodge Diplomats get crunched into scrap metal!