Back in 2003, I was somewhat involved in the construction of the new home office for the insurance company my dad worked at. As a result, quite a few photos were taken of the process. As this was only nine years ago I didn’t think there’d be all that many Curbside Classics in the background, but the shot shown here bore some 1990s fruit.
I noticed that teal Plymouth Acclaim immediately. This was a really popular color on Mopars in the early to mid ’90s, seen on everything from LeBaron convertibles to Caravans.
The second thing I noticed were the trucks. Look, they are not jacked up three feet in the air like new ones. How about that? Those 1992-96 F150s used to be EVERYWHERE around here.
But back to the Acclaim. These were cars that you didn’t even notice were gone. I hadn’t thought about them in years, but last March I spotted one in traffic and managed to get a picture. It’s hard to see in the photo, but it was a “gold package” version with whitewalls, alloy wheels and a chrome luggage rack. It was in really nice shape. When it turned into a Wonder Bread outlet store, I kept on going. I should have stopped, because I haven’t seen one since. Daily driver Plymouths are getting pretty scarce these days…
Oddly enough, in my cold-climate area (Massachusetts) I still see a few Acclaims and Spirits around, to the point where it had previously occured to me that they are easier to find than you might expect. I wouldn’t exactly say they’re common, but they’re not extremely rare, either. Most examples sport badly peeling paint, but with these cars, that’s hardly a recent development….
These restyled K cars lasted longer than the ‘cloud’ cars. These days, can hardly see any 95-99 Cirrus/Stratus/Breezes anymore, when 5 years ago they were still chugging.
Acclaim/Spirits could run 10+ years and cheap to fix. Cloud cars turned to junk quicker. since they were more expensive to repair later in life, so got scrapped.*
*This is purely an opinion and observation.
The county auctioned a ton of these back when they reached the end of their service time, they were all either white or dark blue, I think municipalities made up about 80% of the buyers, several years later it was the same auction, but with Sratuses this time.
I haven seen the Broughamified Acclaim, the Chrysler LeBaron with the 5th Avenue Style roof treatment in a while.
I guess they all moved here.
Bunch of cloud cars still to be seen here (Houston area). In fact, there’s one just outside my office window right now.
True about the Acclaims diappearing, though. I think I’ve seen one in the past two years.
My father in law had an Acclaim, 92 or 93, that he got from one of his daughters. It was relatively worn out when she gave it to him, but drove well. I used to drive it for he and his wife’s doctor’s appointments, and marveled how well it ran, even with 130K on the clock. When he died in 2002, it was given to a grandson, who only had it a short time before blowing the headgasket.
The car was towed back to “Dad’s”, and eventually sold for scrap. The grandson thought he was driving an XKE or Corvette, otherwise that car might be still on the road.
If the Cloud Cars don’t seem as common, it may be due to the fact that Chrysler didn’t sell nearly as many of them as they did Acclaims and Dodge Spirits. I don’t think they did, anyway. There was a Chrysler LeBaron badge job on these for a few years too, at the same time the J-Body LeBaron coupe/convertible we saw on CC recently was available.
Someone mentioned the ’76 Marquis being their Driver’s Ed car in that post, well these cars were what my high school used. I actually took the course elsewhere and had a Chevy Corsica, but that’s what I always think of when I see these to this day… and I do still see them occasionally. Kind of surprising because I believe most were outfitted with the terrible Mitsubishi V6 and even worse Ultradrive. I can’t recall how, when or why exactly – but I remember driving a few of them for whatever reason. It was probably the “shakedown runs” after doing routine maintenance on the Driver’s Ed cars in my auto shop class. They were pretty comfortable and seemingly put together well. Had a decent amount of get-up-and-go with the V6 (for a car like this from that era, at least), but they were total pigs once you turned the steering wheel. More like a softly-sprung old BOF Yank Tank than a fairly small, light FWD sedan. Like I said, I can’t even remember quite when or why I drove one, so they weren’t exactly memorable vehicles.
I remember when the Acclaim came out in 1989. In another comment to another thread, I mentioned that my then-girlfriend (now wife) got hail dents all over her 1 year old Accord. She was wrestling with what to do about the situation, and (as always) I was happy to go out and look at new cars.
I was quite the Mopar dude at the time, with a 66 Fury III as a daily driver. I took her to see an Acclaim. I really wanted to like the car. I really did. She took one look at it and said that it reminded her of a Crown Victoria inside (and this was not a good thing). She was right. The car looked it was designed for the same people who had bought Fury IIIs in 1969 but were now retired and looking for something smaller.
We (or she) ended up keeping the Accord and enjoyed its hail dents until the poor thing got caught in a flash flood years later. Lido really messed up on the Acclaim – All of the baby boomer car buyers were around 30-40 years old. The Acclaim looked like it had a target market of folks 20 years older. These things made Centurys and Cutlass Cieras look youthful.
Styling wise inside and out I always thought of these as baby Dynastys, so I see what you mean.
The Spirit/Acclaim/LeBaron are actually A or AA bodies (depending on model year) that is a stretched derivative of the K body. We had one of each – 1981 Aries and 1993 Spirit.
Beat me to the punch!
Even though you can tell the lineage I’ve always considered the the A/AA bodies pretty attractive and capable cars(especially in Turbo or R/T form).
It was a bit of a compromise, you could tell that ChryCo didn’t want to alienate K buyers.
Off topic..
I went on a trip to Galena, Il this weekend and passed Chrysler’s Belvedere plant off of I-90. They have a Dart on display front next to the front monument sign that made me do a double take. They really could have called Dart a Neon or Neon Mk3. I flashed back to 1998 for a second! 😀
I’ve always wanted a Spirit R/T. Contemporary reviews panned them as ill-handling, poorly constructed and crude – and the Turbo IV is supposed to be one of the biggest grenades ever built… but there’s something that’s just too effing cool about 224 ponies under the hood of a car that looks like this:
The Turbo III cars had issues because of “Bean Counting” with Steel core plugs in Aluminum heads, Turbo IV had issues because of carbon buildup in the variable vanes and a few owner caused problems. Both engines were groundbreaking.
The few that bought a Spirit R/T or early Daytona IROC surely shocked a few Mustang, Camaro and SHO owners when they could.
A friend of ours needed a second car about 10 years ago, and he picked up an old Acclaim for $900. A little work to safety it from his father in law (who’s a retired mechanic) and it was good to go. He got two years out of it as a daily driver, and he figures he got his money’s worth out of it. Not long after the Acclaim bit the dust, he inherited his dad’s ’99 Buick LeSabre…but that’s another story. The Acclaim did the job for the time he needed it with little fuss.
One of my favorite cars was a 1990 Acclaim LX I bought new. It was a very comfortable car, handled well (had the 15 inch lower profile tires), and had good power with the Mitsu V6. Regular oil and trans fluid changes avoided problems with the V6 and Ultradrive automatic, and both ran well until I sold the car eight years later with 128,000 miles. The transmission was just starting to slip a bit and I was doing a lot of driving for my job, which prompted the sale. I replaced it with a Plymouth Breeze, which was easily the worst car I have ever owned. But that’s a story for another day. Sometimes I still miss the Acclaim and every once in a while I’ll still see one on the road.