(first posted 11/12/2014) Have you ever had an amazing dream? A dream that was equal parts awesomeness, fulfillment and a sensation that what you have done was the best thing ever done? Did you find out later that said dream was actually quite dumb? This “Small” Chrysler represented that for me. And I have no idea why.
Really. Every time I see this car, I think equal parts how much I would love to own one of them and at the same time how much of an idiot I am for wanting one. Why would I want one anyway? Could it be the fact that I naturally hover towards very large and impractical cars? Could it be the fact that cars from the ‘70s are not getting any more plentiful and it’s a decade of cars I haven’t driven yet? (‘80s, ‘90s, ‘00s and ‘10s are all present and correct.) Or it could just be the marketing campaign with Ricardo Montalban’s soothing voice telling me all about its soft, Corinthian leather while a Spanish guitar and horns provide the atmosphere.
“But look closely” says that tiny voice in all our heads to fill us with either common sense or fear, depending on perspective. “You know it’s based on the same platform as the Dodge Dart, only that with a decade of bloat over it. It’s not even the Correct B-Body. Wait a year or so for Chevrolet to figure that one out.”
I hate to admit it, but the voice may have a point there. The “Small Chrysler” was right around the size of the whaletastic Full-Size Chevrolets that were about to be forced into the Atkins diet. The Chrysler B-Body could trace its origin to the old 1962 Dart, an endearingly weird looking thing in itself. But between it and Cordoba it had gained no less than 500lbs and 12 inches of length, yet it lost an inch of wheelbase. The 318 LA V8 had been declawed like everything else on the market, only managing to eke out 145 HP. The big 400 was also around, providing 185 HP for those ready to have occasional flings with single-digit fuel economy. Then we get to the interior…
It’s all fine with full instrumentation and a lovely dashboard but there is something to address. The proverbial elephant in the room. Something that, when you find out, you will never be able to forget. There’s no way of putting it lightly, so I will just say it. The Corinthian leather that Chrysler so proudly presented in its blurb is a phony, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake. At no point did it even went near Corinth. It was all a ploy created by marketing, once again proving that it’s only as good as the person in charge of it. That exotic sounding material, supposedly coming from that faraway Greek land of immense beauty and eternal sunshine was actually coming from Newark, New Jersey.
Newark.
New Jersey.
Poor Ricardo would’ve certainly been disappointed if he ever found out “Whatever do you mean it is not coming from Greece?” He would ask. In an alternate Universe he could even go Francisco Scaramanga on them. Or maybe he was in on the whole thing. Notice how in that timeless ad, the soft Corinthian leather looks suspiciously like normal red Velour. It’s not like he couldn’t convince you that he was none the wiser about the whole thing.
Of course, having ranted about everything this is the part of the Document where I have to type “And Yet.” So here it goes: And yet, even as I write this article I find myself wanting one. Whenever someone asks me what would be the one car I would buy given all the money in the world I just say “X308 Jaguar XJR”, but the 1976 Cordoba always makes the Top 5 (Currently sitting at #3 between a Mercedes R63 AMG and a Fiat 500C Abarth.). The year is also oddly specific, I guess my subconscious wants to avoid being a Beta-Tester with a ’75 and I don’t care for the “Inspired by Monte-Carlo” ’78 and ’79. A smidgen of rationality in an irrational want.
1980 brought us a new Cordoba, sharing the J-Platform with the Sinatra-endorsed Imperial. It had a slant six as the base engine now. Which come to think of it may be actually an upgrade because it meant that unlike the Imperial the Cordoba had a sporting chance of starting in the morning. But now the best engine you could get was that choked down 318 V8 that had been a base engine on the last generation. Now even less capable at 120 wheezing anemic hamsters. I don’t know what to make of them. I know what to make about the original though, and I will no-doubt be driving it soon enough, just after I go to bed.
“Small” car? 115″ wheelbase??
Could easily fit a ’77 Caprice on that platform and none
would be the wiser! 😀
Love these old cars. I have a 79 Chrysler 300 that runs great. I have it for sale now because I need a truck but I sure will miss it.
Six years later and I still can’t believe this was my father’s first car!
Memories.
I was a freshman in college in 1978. A dorm-mate, physically small guy with a big personality, a foreign student from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told us repeatedly and emphatically that his highest ambition was to transport a white Chrysler Cordoba to Ethiopia to use as his personal transport.
My uncle had one & I rode in it. I recall the engine pinged a lot. Other than that, it struck me as a Chrysler copy of the Monte Carlo / Grand Prix.
I know it was the late sixties when go-go performance was still everything (and Chrysler just had a big hit with the 1968 Road Runner), but just imagine if, instead of dumping a ton of R&D into the development of the E-body, Chrysler had, instead, opted to bring out the Cordoba a few years sooner. The earlier success of the Cordoba would have given them the money to move the seventies’ models (including the Omnrizon) ahead at least a year or two and could have made all the difference in the trajectory of the company during the malaise years. I dare say that it might not even have been necessary for Iacocca to have been brought onboard.
Great piece. Haven’t seen one of these in ages. These were a good looking car, the redesign for 1980 was poorly done. They just planed off the curves and made it all straight and square. I never got a ride in one, and they were out of my price range when new, but a buddy had a ’76 or so, in Navy Blue. He always got to work early and got the premium parking spot to show off his wheels.
This may have been the last one I have seen of these, in the wild at least. Square quad headlights make me think this is a 78 or 79. This one carries a historic vehicle license plate.
Chrysler so needs a game changer like this in 2021. Even just a verification of a pulse would be newsworthy.
My brother had a 78 I think Cordoba he toured the US west coast in it never missed a beat but handled like a bag of shit compared to what he was used to, but from A to B via XYZ &Q it was a comfy reliable ride.
The first gen was one of the best looking cars of its time, which admittedly is a very low bar. I agree with the posters who think it’s a great candidate for an engine swap. I’d skip the manual tranny, though; a personal luxo coupe needs a slushbox for cruising, one arm resting on the sill.
I had a second generation 1980 Cordoba Crown that replaced a ruined by freak accident at home ’67 Sport Fury. The Cordoba came from a used car lot and it looked really nice and did well on the test drive. Little did I know that I was about to embark on a journey of mixed feelings about this car. People I knew who had them loved them and I knew for a fact they had trouble free experiences with their Slant Six and 318 powered Cordobas. I was not to have that experience. Between weird engine compartment wiring gremlins, the nightmare smog version of the Carter BBD and the rust my dad and I found later underneath along with figuring out all of the emission control gremlins I missed that Sport Fury even more.
That said, as a time traveller if I could have bought the car new, I would have ordered a 1980 Cordoba very carefully and also at the top of the list do a vinyl top delete. They look better as a slick top and would have spared me the rust later. Would have also double checked the panels comprising the rear wheel well and make sure there were no gaps to throw water under the back seat down into the driver side rear floor board. Imagine how I felt when I found how bad it was under the carpet.
While I had the car, I did swap in the 318 my dad and I built for my ’67. The engine came from my ’70 Fury parts car and got bored out thirty over, the crank turned and a mild cam so I still had good idle at stoplight. The pre-smog 318 with a 1967 Stromberg 2bbl doing temporary duty was like warp drive compared to the original engine. Between that, and supplementing the front sway bar with a rear one and gas shocks and better than Walmart quality tires, the Cordoba suddenly became fun to drive. That said, I could not get rid of the electrical gremlins and the rust was spreading so I traded it in for a ’89 LeBaron Coupe. During the fiasco with the floorboard, I bought my dad’s ’79 St. Regis which I have to this day. The heads from the 1980 Cordoba 318 cured a problem I was having with the St. Regis valves rattling. (the ’79 heads were under a recall as it turned out that never got corrected until my dad and I did it in 2007)
The Cordoba was gifted one of the all-time greatest television commercials in the history of autodom; 45 years later EVERYBODY remembers it, it’s hard to think of the Cordoba without recalling those adverts, and they undoubtedly did much to help sell the car in its time (when every other Chrysler was flailing). The only oddity is that they didn’t fit the car with the Soft Corinthian Leather that Mr. Montalban was extolling.
The car itself would have been good if not for the industry’s troubles with meeting the stiffening pollution, safety, and fuel economy standards. Looking back, it seems the necessary tech was there but they were reluctant to use it. In particular, why wasn’t electronic fuel injection fully adopted by 1976, at least for upscale cars like this one? Even with crude 1970s electronics, they had to be more effective than carburetors.
For American eyes a Chrysler Cordoba is a compact sized car , yet is measured as standard . For the other continents’ people around the world , a car like this means impossible sized . Althought every now and then these mobiles were offered to be ordered by special clients in Europe and elsewhere , facts said they were quite rarely seen . But when you saw one down the curb , this is because only one owner per year had ordered it : the US’ Embassy personnel , diplomatic license plate of course
I have no shame for my love for the Cordoba. The ’76, with its slim vertical bars in its grille, is my favorite model year. Impractical? Probably. I still occasionally daydream about taking a cruise in one into downtown Chicago via Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue. One day, perhaps, though it would be tricky to fit one in the parking below my building.
Stupid Chrysler was so confused by the exploding brougham market, and so NOT A PLAYER, that originally it planned to bring out the Cordoba as a PLYMOUTH? What was wrong with those fools?
Chrysler didn’t seem to want the brougham market at all. They were so late, they nearly went under. Cordoba saved them, but then, Cordoba, had it been released five years earlier, would have prevented Chrysler from ever getting into that marketing hole to begin with.
Ford’s Thunderbird and Gran Torino, Mercury’s Cougar, Lincoln’s Mark, Oldsmobile’s Cutlass, Chevrolet’s Monte Carlo, and Pontiac’s Grand Prix all precedes Cordoba by years. Yet Chrysler still attempted to sell intermediate coupes that look like they were designed for drag racing, not boulevard cruising. Chrysler easily could have sold 300,000 Cordoba in the years between 1970 and 1975 – but didn’t.
Even with the success of LTD and Caprice, Chrysler’s lame Dodge Monaco and Plymouth Fury III were half-hearted attempts at luxury. Chrysler seemed to believe that a stripper New Yorker and a stripper Newport Royale were a good idea at a time when their competition was LOADING UP THE FAUX LUXURY that sold cars and earned profits. Our 1970 Chrysler New Yorker was about as brougham as a Chevy Impala. People were willing to pay for faux luxury, but Chrysler couldn’t deliver it – amazing!
It is as though Chrysler wasn’t even trying.
So Cordoba was a hit because it was always going to be a hit. What happened by 1980? Chrysler never established itself in the brougham coupe field well enough to keep Cordoba going. Dodge still couldn’t sell a Charger SE, a Magnum, or a Mirada to save its life while Mercury couldn’t meet Cougar demands throughout those years.
Cordoba was the perfect Chrysler. Too bad Chrysler was too stupid to figure that out until practically too late. Sheesh. By 1981, that group of clowns deserved to file bankruptcy. They failed to see the NEON writings on the wall.