TORQUEFLITE
Originally a flashy, limited-edition image leader, by 1961, the Plymouth Fury had become a bread-and-butter big car, the mainstay of the Plymouth line. Starting in 1962, it began a bizarre odyssey, going ...
It was born as a glorified Dodge Coronet with a fastback roof; in its later incarnations, it became a facelifted Chrysler Cordoba, a Plymouth Horizon in drag, and even a family sedan. In between, it became ...
We thought we'd take a slightly different approach with this week's subject. We've already talked about the origins of Chrysler 's luxury brand and its lackluster career as a separate marque, and we've ...
If you read some popular automotive histories, you might be misled into thinking that the 1980 Audi Quattro was the world's first all-wheel-drive sports coupe. Not so -- the "ur-Quattro" was an important ...
Advertised as "Nobody's Kid Brother," Chrysler 's compact Valiant was originally intended to be its own marque. The story of how it became a Plymouth is a complicated one, going back to the origins of the ...
... Detroit has always been afraid of smaller cars, we need look no further than Chrysler 's ill-fated 1962 Dodge and Plymouth -- Detroit's first downsizing disaster. Click to read more about the downsized ...
This most glamorous of Volkswagens is an automotive drag queen -- a rugged and humble economy-car chassis dressed up in the finest haute couture. It is also a car of many nations: engineered and built ...
It will not have escaped even the casual observer that the companies formerly known as the Big Three automakers -- GM, Ford, and Chrysler -- are in bad, bad shape. GM lost $37 billion in 2007. Ford's operating ...
In 1981, Chrysler had $1.2 billion in federally backed loans and an array of new products. Problem solved? Not exactly. In the third installment of our series on the Chrysler bailout, we examine the corporation's ...
"In the car business, product comes first." Lee Iacocca said those words in one of his 1984 Chrysler TV spots, and it remains as true now as it was then. There is a popular misconception in some sectors ...
Throughout its 85-year history, the Chrysler Corporation has often found itself engaged in a coquettish flirtation with doom. Although Chrysler sometimes led the American industry in engineering innovation, ...
In Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrator, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Doctor Gonzo, set out from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a rented red convertible they dub "The ...
Performance car enthusiasts tend to be a somewhat humorless bunch, whether you're talking about Ferraristes, old-school muscle car fans, or import tuners. If they have one thing in common, it's that they're ...
In 1981, the last time Chrysler tried to market the Imperial as its own unique brand, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca got his old buddy, Frank Sinatra, to sing a catchy little jingle for the new car, "It's ...
Successful car design is as much a matter of prognostication as engineering skill or styling acumen. Even today, with the benefits of computers, the lead time for a new model is at least three years. ...
Thanks to The Dukes of Hazzard, most Americans are familiar with the sleek, late-sixties Dodge Charger. The General Lee was actually the second generation of Dodge's sporty car; the first was the original ...
Every so often, we spot something genuinely rare. Even in Los Angeles, pre-1970 Mopars other than Darts and Valiants are relatively rare, so seeing full-sized Chrysler was a novelty. When we got closer, ...
