Thought I’d found a Cordoba. A little looking-into told me this was the concurrent Charger SE. SE is crucial here, as the non-SE Charger had the front clip whole body from the Coronet coupe. The things you learn and keep on learning thanks to XR7Matt. Anyway, it’s not quite QOTD status, but to the best CC can tell this is a 1977 model.
Nice house. Very much of the same period as the steed.
The car is not native to our shores. Apparently Chrysler Australia brought in three Cordobas for appraisal, but not sure about whether they also looked at the Charger SE. This one’s left hand drive, which makes it more likely to be a recent(ish) import.
So I can’t figure out what year this is. I’ve seen that grille, the rear side window treatment and front fender badge ordering on various brochure shots, but not all on the same car. Over to you.
Further Reading
William Stopford sings Lou Rawls for 1977 Charger SE
William again with a 1977 Charger Daytona
77 based on the opera window “louver” design, the 75-76 ones were more slatted. The taillights would be the other dead giveaway if they were visible, 75-76 had two bars and 77-78 had three. The Coronet based Charger “base” was 1976 only, and used the full coupe body, not just the front clip.
These have grown on me, I like the grille and taillight treatment way more than the pompous Cordoba, and the color combo is real nice on this example. Cool part about the 76-78s as well as the Magnum is Dodge desperately tried to reinject some racy elements like the old Rallye wheels and RWL tires, after 1975 sales plummeted, so you get this bizarre mix with neoclassical PLC elements but with opera windows styled into aggressive louvers and big fat tires that look like they belong on a Corvette.
I always wondered if this car would have been better received if they could have done a different front style that was not such a blatant Cordoba ripoff. Of course the hood was very involved in fairing into those round lights, so there could have been a lot of cost involved there. But in fairness, when they were styling these nobody had any way of knowing how much of a home run the Cordoba would become.
I don’t think anyone ever looked at one of these without the word “Cordoba” coming to the front of the brain.
They should have done something more along the lines of the Magnum from the start, which used its own sheetmetal on many panels as well. It was way too late by 1978
I wonder if the new Fury and Coronet coupes consumed all the budget for B body coupe differentiation, leaving the Charger short changed. They only had to differentiate between two divisions prior, the satellite from the Charger.
Another thing they could’ve done is slap the Magnum front on the wagon body – instant “St. Regis wagon”! Hey, it’d have been a few extra marginal sales.
That or if the Cordoba sold as a Plymouth instead of a Chrysler could had made a difference? Then have Chrysler had let soldiered the old Fuselage C-body a bit longer to instead going for a full redesign of the intermediate line instead of the full-size line might had been less hurtful during the first oil crisis?
First answer. hehehe
Thanks Matt. I also found that opera window louvre treatment on a 76 non-SE, which threw things a bit.
…
Admittedly I have had these Chargers on my mind recently for some odd reason, so my quick and accurate response wouldn’t have been so if this came up a month ago or from now I bet 😀
I wonder if those louvers came from them? The roofline is different on the Base 76 body but perhaps the vinyl top cap sized the quarter glass down to SE opera size, and throwing them onto the 77 was a cheap way to update it
Yep, that would assume the same quarter window on both bodies. Maybe leftovers after they discontinued the base model.
I vote with Matt but for a different reason: the grille. The 77 is the only one without any vertical dividers. The segments on the 75 grille are 4 rows down and 6 across, on the 76 they are 3 rows down and 4 across. This 77 is just 3 rows down and one wide band across.
Maybe the grilles on these were kind of an indicator of “life remaining” for the model, as in old video games of that era. The 75 grille had 24 segments, the 76 had 12 segments and the 77 had just 3, which must have been just enough to make it to the end of the model year before “Game Over.” 🙂
Actually, Dodge did have a Charger SE for 1978 which looked just like the ’77. It seemed to be almost an afterthought. I suppose it was for people who couldn’t quite muster up the nerve to buy a Magnum.
Wow, I completely forgot about that one. Maybe it was also intended to draw buyers who couldn’t take the new rectangular headlights on the Cordoba. But from the sales figures, it apparently failed.
This one, though, has no louvers on the opera window so Don’s car cannot be one of these 78s.
Was the Charger SE built alongside the Magnum in 1978, or was there a short run of Chargers (less than 3,000) before production was fully switched over to the Magnum?
Short run of ’78 Charger SE’s. They were phasing them out for the Magnum.
“… only 2,735 [1978] Chargers were produced”
Not sure on the car but wow – that’s one cool carport zone. I bet the rest of the house is breathtaking.
The house is what got my attention, too. It looks to me like it may have been built between the mid Fifties to early Sixties. Handsome car, too.
Yeah, this scene could pass for vintage photography. Nice find!
The ’76 ‘one year wonder’ base, plain, Chargers were replaced by the mid size ’77-’78 Monaco 2 door. ’75 was called Coronet coupe.
And, Motor Trend nominated the ’77 Monaco for COTY, even though was same car as the ’75-’76 B body. Go figure.
Should that read “Chrysler’s marketing department nominated the ’77 Monaco for COTY”?
Also odd is that none of the new B bodies were nominated by MT for 1975 COTY. MT still had imports and domestics mixed that year, and finalists were Chevy Monza, Ford Granada, a Mercedes, and VW Rabbit. Chevy won.
But, Mopar won for ’76 with F body and ’78 for L.
’76 Import COTY was introduced, probably to appease D3 advertisers?
Out of the more than 2 dozen cars I have owned, I have only had 3-4 that were this size or bigger. Saying that, after the mid 70s I became a big fan of smaller cars so something this big would not have appealed to me….when it was new.
Now? It’s a reasonably attractive car, but unfortunately it had several attractive competitors. But I agree, the very close resemblance to the Cordoba did not help. (Chrysler seems to be one of the few car companies that never sees a sales increase for the cheaper model when it has 2 or more cars that look similar.)
J P Cavanaugh:
I noticed that Ford did the same thing with the grille of the Ranger. The 92 Ranger had 24 small rectangles, the 93? 12 bigger rectangles. The 95? 6 even bigger rectangles. It would take Ford more than 10 years to “dump” the Ranger.
What’s in a name? In the case of the Cordoba-based Charger, I’d say, “A lot”. Even though there had been a brougham-a-rific Charger SE since 1969, the Charger’s forté had always been performance above all else. Slapping the Charger name on a Cordoba, well, it’s no wonder it bombed.
In fact, I wonder how the Cordoba-Charger might have done if they’d used the Mirada name that much sooner, instead. The Mirada never had the performance caché of the Charger and it could have been a much better Dodge PLC contender. If sales had been good enough, it might even have aborted the weak Magnum.
I think being a virtual badge job of the Cordoba did more damage than it would have if the same styling themes were totally unique to the Charger, in fact I also wonder if the Cordoba would have been so much more successful than the Charger had it been under the Plymouth umbrella as originally intended.
Lately I’ve been thinkining that the PLC isn’t as mutually exclusive from the supercar era predecessors as we’ve all come to believe. Without the clean air act, prohibitive insurance premiums and rising fuel costs there easily could have been 440 6-pack powered Cordobas and Chargers. We only associate the style with a decline in performance because they happened concurrently, but is this not a case of correlation implying causation? The whole style is derived from what were high performance cars from the 20s and 30s, so combining that with 60s levels of power that cars like the Charger had become so associated with would have in theory been a natural pairing with neoclassical styling, and indeed the Charger had been hinting towards that direction for the 5 prior years with the SE package.
The Cordoba got the stronger marketing, was placed in the prestige division, and therefore present as purer with the styling between the two, and because the Charger shared all of the sheetmetal with it, there was no credible way the Charger could cultivate an identity in the latest styling trend. The 73 SE was very broughamtastic, and pretty goofy looking to boot, yet it retained that individual identity, and 73 was the best selling B body Charger ever, so clearly the PLC direction it was headed wasn’t the turn off for buyers the poor sales of the 75 would imply
It’s 1974. We’ve just come through the Energy Crisis and have a desperate need to offer cars with better mileage and adhere to the latest fashion. Times are so bad, we’ve laid off a big chunk of the engineering department, but need to make good returns. Lo and behold, you have a unplanned hit on your hands… The Cordoba. This seems like the way forward, let’s PLC everything!
I imagine this was the scenario for the execs at Chrysler in that time period. There was period of time where the Cordoba was king of the hill; if you were in their shoes, wouldn’t Cordoba-ize everything? It had to be tough for Chrysler (the corporation as a whole, not the division) not to ignore the halo effect of their suddenly popular car, I feel they had to capitalize on it.
But, with the Charger variants, I think there were two disparate things happening. I’m reasonably sure that Dodge dealers were impatiently awaiting the Dodge “Cordoba” and secondly, with the hit that Chrysler took after the first Energy Crisis, there was little to no development money to come up with a completely different look. Maybe they could have pulled the Magnum’s introduction forward, but was there the staff to do so?
Introducing the Chardoba. All the visual things you like about the Cordoba, but with the pricing of the Charger. Also, see brand dilution.
But the Cordoba came out concurrently with the Chardoba, there would have been no telling how successful one or the other would have been, and even with and with the ~4 year lead times these were anything but a response to energy crisis 1, but more to get on the Monte
Carlo/Grand Prix bandwagon that were selling like hot cakes. The effect of the energy crisis moved the Cordoba project from Plymouth to Chrysler, who had no smaller cars than C-bodies previously.
Also, Chrysler had been doing an increasingly bad job of differentiating between different brands of vehicles on the same structure. They had at least committed to a separate body for the 74 Chrysler/Imperial from that planned for the 74 Fury/Monaco, but just take a look at pretty much every Mopar twin after about 1972. How many people can tell the difference between a 73 Duster and a 73 Dart Sport at 20 paces? Ditto with the downsized Small Fury and Monaco, whether coupe or sedan. It would be no different with the Volare/Aspen and Diplomat/LeBaron that would follow these.
The Cordoba and Charger were lucky to get as much differentiation as they got.
The Cordoba/Charger body change wasn’t “whipped up” in spring/summer of ’74. ChryCo had probably locked it in around mid ’72 in reaction to Monte Carlo/Grand Prix already out. And had Plymouth badges at first.
“It’s 1974. We’ve just come through the Energy Crisis …lets PLC everything!”
The Omni/Horizon was green lit during the Oil Crisis at least, but couldn’t “whip them up” overnight.
Great pictures! The modern mid-century design of the house perfectly complements the vehicle, and the color tone of the images make it even better.
My first thought on seeing the car was “Why would anyone go to the trouble of importing one of those?” Then when I read the heading and saw it was a Charger not a Cordoba, that made me wonder even more. Curious. An extra level of inscrutability.
Then I remembered seeing a ’78 Riviera in Melbourne back when it would have been a new car. Rather than being impressed (Wow – fancy Buick!), I pitied the owner for buying a malaise-mobile and not a ‘more worthy’ older Riviera, an ‘interesting’ Riviera, a ‘proper’ Riviera. In an Australian context, that was inscrutable.
This, as a recent import collector car, is merely a curious choice.
Lots of houses like that around Caulfield.
If I was going to import an old ‘Riv, I’d be tempted to get a ’74-76 one. Yup, you would have been pitying me too… 🙂
’71-’73 for me, with the interesting roof….
A Chrysler fan in AU wanted a Cordoba and the best, clean, car found was a Charger, so they got that, instead.
What a beautiful combo of car, mid-century modern carport and photo in the first shot. Nicely seen and shared.
Nice pics Don, they do look vintage. In grade school at the time, I saw the Cordoba as the pure design. And the details they put on the Charger, as cheese. Details like multiple opera windows debasing an otherwise clean design.
I still mostly equate that wire wheel style with Premier and SE versions of the Volare and Aspen, though it was widely available on Chrysler products at the time.
Nice find Don!
The left-hand drive guarantees that the car has been imported recently, ie I think they changed to the xxxxx-H format in 2011. If it had been imported ‘in period’ or even in the nineties, it would have had to be converted.
Lesser-valued classics make a great buy if you are after an American car and don’t have your heart set on Camaro/Mustang etc, they are still ‘exotic’ enough and I’m sure provide the same type of experience.
Yeah, I’m getting tired of all the 60s Mustangs around. Come on Aussies, there are so many other American brands and desirable cars to choose from…
As you’d probably know Don, I have a morbid fascination with these. But then, I tend to love orphans, underdogs and market failures. Terrific find!!
Thanks William. Have a present coming up for you in the Colonnades of Melbourne.
*crossing my fingers for a Grand Am*
hehehe
My brother had a Cordoba while he was in the US, not a chance in hell he’d take one back to Melbourne with him, but a good find especially being an unusual trim level.