1978 Plymouth Volaré

Volare, oh oh! Cantare, oh oh oh oh! - Dean Martin

I've been looking for a still-running Volaré since I started this blog. And on this surprisingly summer-like day in May, jackpot!

In the 1970s, Detroit seemed to stagger from disaster to another, and the biggest for deeply-troubled Chrysler was the long-awaited replacement for its highly-popular and durable A-body models, which included the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Valiant and Duster.

From curbsideclassic.com: "Chrysler must have known that replacing the A-team successfully would be a mission-critical task. Boy, did they ever flub it. Their compacts went from being the most durable to the most-recalled in history, up to that time; GM’s X-bodies soon stole that title. It was 1957 all over again, but worse. At least Chrysler had the foresight to call them “F-Bodies”. From an A to an F, without any intermediate stops; what a fail.

Beta-testing new cars on a mass scale is just not a good idea. Build quality was all-round crappy, at best. It went downhill from there: five mandatory recalls covering a variety of ills with suspension, ignition, fuel system, brakes, steering and body. The one that had the highest visibility (literally) was pre-mature rusting of the front fenders. All (Plymouth Volarés and Dodge Aspens) had fenders inspected, removed, replaced and/or galvanized, and repainted to the tune of $109 million. That was serious bucks to Chrysler then, especially since the whole mothership was rusting away.

Lee Iacocca had this to say: “The Dart and Valiant ran forever, and they should never have been dropped. Instead they were replaced by cars that often started to come apart after only a year or two. When these cars first came out, they were still in the development phase. Looking back over the past twenty years or so, I can’t think of any cars that caused more disappointment among customers than the Aspen and the Volaré”. Honest, but easy for him to say, since he wasn’t responsible."

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1966 Chevrolet Corvair

Like many Corvair people, the owner of this car has a whole yard full of Corvairs in various states of decay. Devotees of Chevy's air-cooled oddity are a cult-like group reluctant to allow any examples of their favorite car to go to the crusher, no matter how deteriorated they are. The owner of this coupe also had in his yard a rare Greenbrier pickup with ramp-gate on the side. This truck has the Corvair engine under the truck bed. It looks operational.

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1971 De Tomaso Pantera

It looks like a Ferrari, at half the price. That was the big selling point for Ford to import the Pantera and sell it through Lincoln-Mercury. That's a big Ford V-8 in the back. Lee Iacocca, then an executive at Ford and later CEO of Chrysler, apparently really wanted to sell Italian cars. That's how we got the Pantera and years later another notorious failed product, the "Chrysler TC by Maserati."

Unfortunately for the Pantera , Road & Track called it, ""a high-priced kit car" complaining about the assembly quality, air-conditioning, brakes, engine cooling and electrical systems. The ZF five-speed transaxle was reportedly noisier than the engine. Race shop owner Bill Stroppe was paid $2,000 per car to fix the worst faults. Still, the base price gave the Pantera an edge, IF it could be fixed."

One of the most poorly-built and rust-prone vehicles ever made, the assembly of the Pantera sounds like something out of 3 Stooges short. From Autoblog: "A lack of logistical synchronization meant that bare metal bodies were being stamped and left to sit outside the factory before final production, then rolled back in and painted over acquired surface rust."

For anyone to have bought this car at a time when a Pontiac GTO cost one-third as much seems crazy, but for some people looking cool is worth any price.

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